What's KP Thinking?

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• Moments of Magic

  Posted at 3:29 am by kpodulka, on May 12, 2016

   I totally believe in magic. It’s all around us. How else do you explain the universe, everyday miracles, birth, near-death experiences, TIVO? It’s all magic. There are a few very specific instances of magic that have happened in my life. I recognize them by an out-of-body experience that comes over me. A dream like sense that I’m not in control of the situation–but a firm belief that what’s happening is meant to be.

  Have you noticed your magic moments? Because I promise you, they’re happening.

  WISHES = MAGIC

  My first memory of magic was when, at 12 years old, I asked the universe for special powers and it obliged. All I had to do was want something bad enough. Really, really, really, in my heart, want it bad.Starting in 7th grade if I crossed all my fingers, on both hands, including my thumbs, squeezed my eyes shut really tight, and chanted a wish in my head, it came true. Once I realized my innate power, I used it only for good. Things like wishing to pass my science exam (which I passed) and wishing my Grandma would stop by the house with doughnuts (and she did). I kept this power a secret, except for one late night slumber party where I revealed my magic to my best friend at the time. Not sure she believed me…but I believed me, and that’s all that really matters.

  MEETING MY HUSBAND

  Late one hot Tuesday night in July, in a very loud, very crowded dance club, I noticed a cute guy looking at me from across the bar. I recognized him from college, but didn’t want to give up my seat to go say hi. The night went on, and I went on drinking and dancing with my BFF. I didn’t see cute-college-guy again, until closing time. My BFF said it was time to leave, so she grabbed my hand, and led me thru the sweaty crowd of hundreds to the exit. Set on the path to leave,  something made me look left (MAGIC!). There I saw cute-college-guy out of the corner of my eye. I dragged my BFF away from the exit and over to the guy. I said “Hey, how’s your summer?” and he said, “Do I know you?” Turns out it was not the guy I thought I knew from college, it was a complete stranger. But it was, and still is, my husband of nearly 20 years. I swear to this day that angels turned my head left to find him–I was most certainly under destiny’s magic spell that night.

  MOVING AWAY FROM HOME

  I’ve had wanderlust for as long as I can remember. The world is SO BIG and there’s SO MUCH to see, that staying in once place for too long kills me. So after 23 years in Michigan, I was ready for a change. But I couldn’t quite work out how to take that first step. So the first step was taken for me. The company I was working for at the time announced it was opening 5 new offices across the country. There it was, step 1: opportunity. Step 2 was to secure one of those jobs and a relo package to make it happen. Originally management said it was only sending senior team members to the new offices, of which I was not. But that didn’t deter me from meeting one-on-one with the president of our company and convincing him to send me to the Atlanta office. At 23 years old, I have no clue if that was an act of courage or stupidity. From that point on magic took over–I walked around in a dream-like state breaking my lease, telling my family and boyfriend that I was moving, and looking for a new apartment in Atlanta. It was both exhilarating and terrifying (a feeling I’d later to come realize called living.) The most vivid memory I have, is standing in front of the fax machine, sending my new apartment least to Atlanta, thinking: This decision is changing the course of my life.

  GETTING OFF COURSE, GOT US ON COURSE

  We were on a road trip along the Pacific, North of San Francisco. We were sight-seeing and escaping in more ways than one.

  

  Mama cow and her newborn calf. Yes, that’s the placenta on the ground behind mama.

  It had been a long few years of infertility and a miscarriage and we needed to clear our heads. After so much bad news, heartbreak and disappointment we were looking for fun. Or at the very least, a reprieve. So we drove along looking at lighthouses and hiking thru redwoods. One warm afternoon, while driving back to our cabin, we got lost. Or we thought we got lost. In fact, we were in the presence of magic. We ended up on a dirt road driving past a farm. With the windows down, I heard a noise that made me  yell “stop the car”. We got out and walked over to the fence, where we saw a mama cow in the final stages of labor. It was a sight like I’ve never seen. The calf slipped out, the mama licked it clean, and we stood there with tears in our eyes witnessing the miracle of birth. The very miracle we were trying and hoping for, for ourselves. And there she was, that baby calf, delivered to us by magic. As if to say, “Trust in the cycle of life. It’s closer than you think”. And it was. My son was born 1 year later.

   

  SOUL SISTER

  And just in case I need ongoing evidence of magic in my life, I have my sister. My twin, born two years after me. The number of magic moments we’ve shared cannot begin to be captured here–it’s endless. Just to name a few: picking up the phone to call her and it’s ringing from her calling me, getting married in the same year, renovating our homes in the same year, her daughter and my son born within hours of each other, showing up in the exact same outfit, communicating without words, knowing when something is wrong with the other, marrying extremely similar guys, her sitting at ball park 3,000 miles away from me talking about a TV show at the exact moment I call her to ask about said TV show…the list goes on. Because of my sister, I will never doubt the abundance of magic in the world. May you find your magic as well.

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• Things that need to progress already.

  Posted at 9:58 pm by kpodulka, on May 4, 2016

  1. Traffic. The car has been around for over 130 years, and I can only assume traffic has been an issue from day one. As a society we must solve this. I don’t know the answer, but someone with more time and ingenuity than me needs to get on this. How do we make traffic extinct? With Trains? Jet-Packs? Work-from-Home? I mean seriously, enough already with sitting and wasting our precious time on earth in traffic.
  2. Dentistry. Going to the dentist today feels archaic. What major improvements have they made in the last 50 years?  We still use laughing gas, we still scrape shit off our teeth with metal tools, we still drill out decay, we still yank rotten teeth out by the roots. How has technology not improved on any of this??? Techies, listen up, the world doesn’t need another gaming app–it needs an over the counter laser that painlessly zaps away cavities.
  3. Radio. We need TIVO for the radio. Why can’t I pause a song on the radio? Or record it? Or rewind to play it again? Or use voice demand to change channels? Common people! This one MUST already in the works?? (And don’t tell me to play iTunes. Don’t make me plug anything in–I need this to happen right from the radio, not my phone.)
  4.  Education. We’ve all read the studies, play = learning. So why are we still schooling our kids the same way we did 100 years ago–in a classroom? Our kids are still trapped in a room all day, being lectured and taking tests, instead of experiencing the world around them. Why is recess considered a break in the learning process, when in fact it’s the opposite? Recess is where the social and emotional learning happens. You know, the real shit that life’s all about. Let’s stop teaching subjects as separate  ideas–they all flow together. Stop forcing kids to “sit still” all day. Let’s take a lesson from Finland and Denmark, and let kids ENJOY the learning process. And for the love of God, let’s pay teacher more money!!!!!!
  5. Politics. The whole bleeping system. Because Donald Trump. Need I say more?

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• How to Parent Like a Dane

  Posted at 6:19 pm by kpodulka, on April 30, 2016

  (As previously published on Time.com, September 15, 2015 http://time.com/4033896/how-to-parent-like-a-dane//)

  Want to learn how to parent like two-time winner Happiest Place on Earth, Denmark? I had the privilege of living as an American expat for two years in Aarhus, Denmark with my family, where they do things quite differently. Here’s what I learned:

  Separation Anxiety Means a Whole Different Thing
  When I moved to Denmark, I declined the full time Vuggestue (daycare) for my toddler son that came with the relocation package, because I didn’t work outside the home. This baffled my relocation agent, who insisted I would be happier left by myself to run errands. I insisted back that I could do that and look after my son at the same time. She didn’t back down. “In an emergency on an airplane, the flight crew instructs mothers to place the oxygen masks over their faces first. It’s only after the mother can breathe that she assists the children,” she said—or words to that effect. “Do you know why? Because if the mother doesn’t get a chance to breathe, the children cannot breathe, either.” The thought of having “help” to raise my child was so foreign to me, that with some effort I found I a day care center that offered a morning-only program. The half-day schedule allowed me to ease into a culture that not only doesn’t judge you for putting your kid in daycare, it actually pressures moms to do it. And the government funds it for all families. I came to love quiet mornings to myself and watching my child blossom with his Danish peers. But this was the toughest lesson I learned in Scandinavia: I must breathe so that my child can breathe, too.

  

  Forget Baby Proofing

  There’s no such thing as “baby-proofing” in Denmark. In America baby-proofing is an industry built on the fear that kids will be in danger. But in Denmark, kids are encouraged to be independent and adventurous. Every day they do things that would send most American moms running after their children yelling. Every year on Sankt Hans Aften (St. John’s Eve), the celebration of the summer solstice, families, including kids of all ages, gather together to sing traditional songs and burn a straw witch on a huge bonfire. The particular celebration my family and I attended was in a field, next to a forest. As the massive bonfire was lit, I realized there were no safety precautions: no fire trucks, extinguishers or buckets of water. There were also no ropes or cones blocking off the fire. Kids could (and did) run around the fire as close to the flames as they dared. You can also find fire pits on the playground of most Danish schools. On a regular basis the teachers would light a huge bonfire on the playground so the kids could roast bread on sticks. And inside my son’s classroom, there were lit candles in the window sills. When I pointed out that the children could reach the candles, the teachers were nonplussed: “Why would they touch fire? That would cause a burn.” The Danish people are fearless. And proud of it. They expose their kids to danger early.

  Keep Lunch Lackluster
  In America we believe in choice. In Denmark, too much choice is seen as confusing or unnecessary. Take lunch, for example. Not only did I pack the same lunch for my kids every day, but every kid had the same lunch. My kids could have swapped lunches with any kid at school and still had “Leverpostej og Rugbrød” (the Dane’s favorite liver spread on Rye bread), carrots and apples. Not perfectly shaped, bright orange, individually bagged baby carrots, but misshapen things recently pulled from the ground, unpeeled, with greens still attached. (Also delicious.) And the apples were similar—bruised, misshapen, brown, unpeeled and whole. There was no worry about the food being “kid-friendly.” The kids devoured them.

  Get Hygge With It
  In America we feel that leaving work at 5:00 pm is “sneaking out.” Not in Denmark. At 4:00pm on the dot, the offices clear out. It’s like the opening song of the Flintstones. Everybody leaves to pick up kids and head home for dinner, which is cooked with the family. The Danes have a word with no direct translation in the English language—Hygge. It means creating a warm atmosphere and enjoying the good things in life with good people. The warm glow of candlelight is hygge. Friends and family are hygge. There’s nothing more hygge than sitting round a table, discussing the big and small things in life. The Danish families create this coziness with mealtime almost every night. But it doesn’t just happen; they prioritize it. In the U.S., just hanging out together can feel like time wasted. In Denmark, it was the best time of the day.

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• Beyond the Double Standard

  Posted at 5:09 pm by kpodulka, on April 29, 2016

  It started with a simple question from my 8-year-old son. He was watching me get ready for work. As I was dutifully applying my third coat of lash-lengthening mascara, he looked up and asked, “Mommy, why do girls wear makeup but boys don’t?” I was about to automatically answer what I’ve been brainwashed to believe “because it makes me feel pretty” when I paused mid mascara stroke and took a moment to think. Really think. I looked at my son and gave him my honest answer “I don’t know”.

  My son’s question has been sitting in my brain for months. And what I’ve concluded is that it’s bigger than makeup. Makeup is the tip of the double-standard iceberg. We’re all aware of the double standards between men and women. Things like, a man gets paid more for doing the exact same job as a woman. A man is bossy and he’s a leader, a woman is outspoken and she’s a bitch. We see every inch of a naked woman splayed across the movie screen, but only a 1 second glimpse of a penis. A man goes gray and he’s distinguished, and woman goes gray and she’s “given up” on her looks. The list goes on…

  But I also believe the list goes deeper. It goes beyond the double standards and into the realm of “damned-if-we-do-damned-if-we-don’t”. It’s this no-win situation that women navigate daily.  It involves heightened insecurities, second guessing ourselves, and a whole heap of extra effort. I’ll explain.

  Women shave their legs (men don’t = double standard). But take this one step further…women shave their legs, which leads to longer showers, which leads to taking longer to get ready, which leads to men joking, complaining, belittling women to “hurry up in there already”. Men, listen to me closely, you cannot have it both ways. Smooth legs take time. So shut the fuck up and wait for us to be ready as society expects. Or, women, join me in the “Stop Shaving” revolution. Let our bodies be free and gain equality on this issue one hairy leg, hairy armpit, and hairy god given hoo-ha at a time.

  Women wear makeup (men don’t = double standard). But take this one step further…women wear makeup, so they buy makeup, which costs money, which leads men to tease and/or scold women for spending too much money on “useless stuff”. So which is it men? Is makeup useless or worth every penny? Personally, I’m over it. I’m over the latest trend in lip gloss, the latest craze in eyeliner, the latest “must-have” bronzer. The entire cosmetic industry profits from women’s insecurities. I’d like to propose a National No-Makeup Day/Week/Month/Year. And I mean NO makeup on anybody…bare faces on movie stars, clean-skinned talk show hosts, all natural VP’s leading meetings at work, fresh-faced teenagers walking the school halls, every woman, everywhere with no makeup on. How cool would it be to actually SEE the real faces of women in our lives? You know, like we see men every day.

  Women get plastic surgery (more than men = double standard). But take this one step further. Women get publicly and privately mocked for having “work done”. So they spend all that money, all that recovery time, all that emotion (nevermind the life-threatening surgical risks) thinking they’re doing what society expects them to do to stay younger looking. All for what? For shit-talkers to mock their audacity at altering their looks cosmetically. Yet if a woman doesn’t get Botox, and heaven forbid shows a wrinkle, she’s “washed up” and society kinda understands (forgives??) when their man  leaves them for a younger woman.

  Women wear shapewear, Spanx, stomach flattening undies (men don’t = double standard). But take this one step further…women wear these torture devices to flatten their tummies, to look thinner, to look “better” in clothes, to hide their “muffin tops”. But, they must never admit to wearing such articles of clothing. Heaven forbid a man discovers her “granny panties” or tries to get into her panties and can’t (Lycra is like cement ya’ll). Remember the scene in Bridget Jones’s Diary when Hugh Grant and Rene Zellweger are making out and he discovers her girdle? He is appalled and she is embarrassed. Again I ask, which way do you want it, because you can’t have both. Do you want to see our “imperfect” figures, or do you want our bits tucked and stuffed into “miracle wear”?

  I realize none of these issues are new. In fact, I’m pretty sure it goes back to Adam and Eve. But where does it end? When does it end? When can I look my son in the eye and give him an answer that I’m proud of?

   

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• Currently Obsessed With…

  Posted at 5:08 pm by kpodulka, on April 23, 2016

  1.Feminism. More specifically the uprise of attention on women’s issues. The double standards. The inconsistencies. The things that need to be fixed. Besides me being a woman, I’m raising a daughter. My hope is that we (the collective societal we) have this all ironed out by the time she’s 40. Fingers crossed.

  2. Positive Body Image. I have so much to say on this topic. SO MUCH. I’ve been a size 6 to a size 18, been pregnant 4 times, birthed two healthy babies, survived a handful of anorexic years, and been on every diet ever invented (This is not an exaggeration. After I ran out of US diets, I moved on to the latest fads in the UK and Australia.). I’m currently sitting here the biggest I’ve ever been. And it’s so freeing!!! (But that anorexic voice still lingers in my brain…) SO MUCH TO SAY.

  3. Swearing. I swear a lot. Like, a lot, a lot. I will not be bleeping myself here, so buckle up and enjoy the ride motha fuckers!!!!!!!

  4. Meditating. I’ve recently started meditating. It’s changing my life in 30 minute increments. My hunch is that when I’m 80, I’ll look back on my life, and see a dividing line between “before meditating” and “after meditating”. I’m learning to look inwards for truth, validation, and love. Turns out I’ve been looking outwards for all of that until this point in my life. I know, right?!?!

  5. Acceptance. Accepting my parents for who they are. Accepting my childhood for what it was. Accepting people for doing the best they can do and respecting their individual journeys. Accepting the fact that friendships change–some for better and some for worse. Accepting to let go of those “for worse” friendships. Accepting my true feelings and learning to express them. Accepting that I have a right to be here and to speak my truth. Accepting my role as a wife and mother, within the balance of my self. And finally, learning to accept a goddamn compliment. Why is that so fucking hard to do?

  6. Healing. My fucking ankle is still recovering ya’ll. 

  7. Misc. (In no particular order.) The ocean. Sunshine. My phone. My couch. Online shopping. A hot lavender bath. Melissa McCarthy. Amy Poehler. Tina Fey. Amy Schumer. Jimmy Fallon. Justin Timberlake. President Obama. Hillary Clinton. Taylor Swift. Mindy Kaling. My kids. My sister. My husband. My closest friends. Babies. Kittens. The Honest Company. Chemical-Free everything. Organic everything. BeautyCounter. Eggs Benedict. An ice-cold beer on tap. Manners. Coffee. Coffee. Coffee. Coffee. Coffee. Coffee. Neuhaus Chocolates from Belgium. Paris. Inspirational quotes. Funny quotes. Cards Against Humanity at 2 AM in a room at the Ritz Carlton Half Moon Bay. Smoking pot in a British double-decker bus.Wine tasting. The color blue. Reading. Sleeping. Watching TV. Two hour phone calls with my sister. Fridays at the neighborhood pool. Signs from the universe. Hummingbirds. Coincidences. Chips & guac.

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• First blog post

  Posted at 8:17 pm by kpodulka, on April 22, 2016

  

  

  

  

  Watch this space. Big things are coming people. BIG THINGS.

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