My First Guru, Ramona Santos Santos -- my mother passed away by Odilia Rivera-Santos

My first guru was my mother, and like any relationship between a guru and disciple, she was instrumental in my becoming who I am and it could get complicated and difficult at times.

My mother instructed me to live small and be small in the world.
Visibility was a kind of grandiosity, something she found repellent.
Wearing red lipstick and plunging necklines meant you were trying too hard.
Trying too hard to be attractive was unattractive.
Loud conversations or drawing attention to yourself in public was crass and showed a lack of education.
Having too much in front of something who has too little was mean.
Greed was a hideous defect.
Compliments on your beauty and offers of presents should not change your values.

Be kind.
Be humble.
Help others whenever possible.
Be generous.
Take care of those unable to care for themselves.
Use your skills to do good in the world.
Respect your body.
Say thank you and excuse me.
Focus on what you can do, not on what you can't do.
Fight with dignity.
Be honest.

Do you keep track of your time as a freelancer? by Odilia Rivera-Santos

Keeping a schedule is very free-ing unless you become too rigid
prayer, meditation, exercise, cooking, meeting with personal training and nerdwork clients, socializing with friends, and working on creative projects requires planning.

How does your day begin?

Self-Care Actions -- I learned about the importance of self-care while working with victims of domestic violence. When you have a lot to do, it becomes very easy to jump out of bed and get to work, and when your work is professionalized care-taking, this impulse to forget one's own needs is intensified.
For me, writing things down has always been more powerful than entering data into a smartphone or spreadsheet.
6am to 9 am
Prayer
Meditation
Healthy breakfast
Gym
Completing Projects List-- It is challenging to complete projects sometimes if you're dealing with difficult people or if the client is changing pay rate. But it is important to let go of the resentments and finish what you started unless there is physical, emotional or financial risk involved.
9am to  930am
Complete Projects List with details about each project -- persons to call, data to verify, etc and add date of completion next to each one. 
10 - 11
Write notes about interactions with present clients, do research on their behalf, etc. 
11 - 4
Work with clients
5 - 7
Play time. Grocery store, cook dinner, eat, relax.

7 - 8 
Marketing to new potential clients
This is the mysterious place where you offer your nerdwork for a fee and wait for an affirmative response.
Place ads
Update ads 
Respond to emails

8 -10
Networking / socializing with humans event

My time is very valuable
I will never apologize for getting angry at people who waste my time.
When you are a freelancer, there will be people who see you at your computer at a coffee shop and they assume you're online playing Farmville or whatever game is popular on Facebook.
To the outsider, the freelancer's days appear to be a vast unstructured block of time with plenty of room for conversations about nothing.
I love discussing ideas or projects, but my attention span is very short for dissecting other people's behavior -- speculation is a waste of time and a freelancer determined to make his or her freelancing life work will keep a time record.

Speculation is a waste of time and wasting time is a waste of time
In most instances, if someone else's behavior baffles you, you can just ask the person a question and accept the answer. The hours of conversation about what the person 'really' meant or 'really' felt are pointless. If other people's behavior is highly upsetting to you, go to therapy.

Responding to a question with an answer that doesn't remotely relate to the question asked is a waste of time
I have always kept track of my time because I have always worked a lot -- I was teaching full-time and in grad school and training for half marathons for a long time. But now, as a freelancer, I have become more clear on how valuable my time is to me. Responding to an email regarding an ad I place takes time and it is very annoying to find out I am responding to a spammer attempting to drum up business in a clumsy way.
If I ask 'Are you interested in Personal Training sessions?,"
the correct answer is either 'Yes, I am' or 'No, I'm not'
To respond to this question with an offer to make me a partner in a pyramid scheme is illogical, but this is what happens when you post an ad these days.

Time is very valuable and sometimes, freelancers have a lot of 'free' time -- or unpaid time, which, in essence, is not purely leisure time. There is a time for reflection in every business and time to strategize regarding how best to handle the next phase of growth.

At present, I am doing professional bilingual nerd work and personal training female clients.
I enjoy my work and get to meet very interesting vibrant people in New York City.

A real conversation 
I really appreciate any opportunity to practice the art of conversation. However, I reserve the right to leave a conversation when the points being discussed cannot be resolved with those present or if it is a boring conversation.
Celebrity gossip, celebrity sex lives and speculation about other people's behavior is not worth my time.

What do you know about AfroLatinas? by Odilia Rivera-Santos

I met a white, blond blue-eyed Puerto Rican woman in Cuba who instantly disliked me because she said I was the 'epitome of Puerto Ricanhood' and she added 'when people think Puerto Rican, they think of someone who looks like you -- brown, dark eyes and black hair.'
She appeared to hate her whiteness and worked hard at what I call the Latina Olympics -- she fought hard to prove her identity as a Puerto Rican woman and her identity as an 'other.'
I mentioned her allegiance to Latinos of color was nice but might border on paternalism and she exoticized us in the same way non-Latino whites did. And I also mentioned her race had probably helped her get the job she had gotten. Double-edged sword I said. There was silence.

Racism exists in Latino cultures, but we don't like to talk about it. If you doubt racism exists in Latino cultures, turn on Spanish-language television. Spanish-language shows demonstrate the blatant racism that exists in our countries. The news anchors are white, blond, blue eyed and there is rarely a TV personality who has curly or kinky hair or features considered less European.
The racism competes with the embarrassing sexism -- where women run around in skin-tight shirts and miniskirts making inane comments as if they were thirteen-year-olds. On Latino television, women of color wear tons of pancake makeup to lighten up.

AfroLatinas are descended from the same Africa as African-Americans and we are the same mixtures: African, European, Indigenous.

Someday, when the ignorance dies down, people will not say, "She can't be Latino; she's Black!"

Latino refers to ethnicity
Black refers to race

Donate to Negritas, a documentary on AfroLatinas: http://negritadocumentary.wordpress.com/donate/

How to be an alternative Latina by Odilia Rivera-Santos

Rice and beans, the food of my people

I love the food of my people, but with some adjustments: brown rice instead of white, olive oil instead of corn oil, and cuchifritos are saved for special occasions -- once or twice per year.
Marriage is something I tried and it worked out until it didn't work out anymore, but there were enough wonderful aspects of togetherness and loyalty to make me consider marriage again with the right fella.
I grew up taking care of kids because my brothers and sisters were a lot older, so the strong desire to procreate never kicked in. And some Latinas with kids find my disinterest in having children baffling.
A Puerto Rican woman said to me, "You'll never know what it feels like to be a mother," and I said "You'll never know what it feels like to get up at 3am to book a flight to Paris without having to confer with anyone but your boss or business clients."

Music 
I love Jazz, Bomba, Plena, Bolero, Hip Hop, show tunes and my favorite writer was Russian. I never got into Rock music and thought Punk was amusing but not something with which I connected or identified as deeply as Jazz.
I never learned to speak Spanglish but sprinkle it in my writing for fun, and my English is formal because my ESL teachers were college-educated; there was no one at home to sit down and teach me a 'broken' version of English for me to take in to class for repairs.

Being proactive and independent
Being proactive was something I learned at a young age by helping my parents who didn't speak Spanish. Information hunting and gathering was something I learned to do for survival and it became a great game to find ways to escape parts of Puerto Rican culture I didn't like.
Culture defines what we should want. But I always had a problem with the word 'should'.
Feminism came to me in this way -- feminists said it was okay for me to not have kids or be married and these were things no woman had to want regardless of culture. It was also okay to enjoy a book by myself instead of being at a huge family gathering and having my entire family discuss every aspect of my life.

Latina bombshell
The media still portrays Latinas as obliviously sexy and they provide comic relief as they enter a room in an outrageously tight revealing outfit without noticing the stir their sexuality creates. Showing the stereotypical Latina body in silence reaffirms the belief we exist to be objects of desire and not much else.
In art and sometimes in life, we see the Latina as mother, bombshell, or the abuela who is thrilled to be up to her elbows in pasteles batter. But there are many varieties of the Latina experience.

Utilitarian Latina
I am still hunting and gathering experience and knowledge, seeing life as an adventure.
I love brilliant conversations and if that's not possible, silence is just as good and silence with great live music and dancing is also good. I've always been independent, not one to do all things in tandem; I've been known to slip into a party at the last moment and slip out without saying a word but my head full of details.
I have wonderful friends -- most of them artists -- and enjoy the heat hiss of the radiator, the snowplow scrape on the sidewalk when it snows, the Godzilla sound of garbage trucks in the morning and being alone. I own a TV but haven't turned it on in three years.

I am happy right now to be no one's mother, no one's wife and no one's caretaker, which leaves me in the state of 'alternative Latina-ness.'


New challenges are exciting and something to be savored, plotted, lived, observed and annotated.

Artists and New Frontiers by Odilia Rivera-Santos

I am first and foremost a musician who loves to make music with words.
My first love in the arts was Spanish-language music since we were in Puerto Rico and not connected to the English language or anything outside. My mother had a beautiful singing voice and she loved to dance -- playing music in the morning was normal as she made breakfast for us. We were a family of nine children and two very exhausted parents. There was a lot of creativity in the household because people with few material resources become very resourceful.
Being creative was in our DNA and in our training, so it was not something deemed special to be used in a creative writing class at an elite college. Creativity was about surviving on our way to thriving.
Seeing creativity as pure pragmatism has made it possible for me to continue writing regardless of life's challenges.

Prisons we make for ourselves and prisons to which we are led
There are prisons we create for ourselves and prisons to which we are led during a vulnerable moment.
I was thinking about a very sweet woman I met in an environmental justice class; she had become involved in a program to help prisoners and fallen in love with a man serving life for murder or manslaughter. She married the man and decided to become a lawyer, so she was going to college to help her husband. Her life was tethered to his as his life was tethered to a very long prison sentence. I wanted to tell her to leave him, but thought it might be her way out of her prison. She was very intelligent, had married very young and had children without the opportunity to explore what she could've done with her abilities. Now, she was on a mission to 'save' her husband and while traveling on this road, she became a highly-motivated straight A student with a gift for critical analysis of data and a love of intellectual debate. She told me she respected that I had always been a reader and asked me questions about books -- her world had been opened up and she freed herself first. Visiting a prison helped her get out of her own.

The Psychology of characters and people
As a child, I always gravitated toward psychological novels. An understanding of human motivation, human potential and how people interact with others is pivotal to creating believable characters. In the fifth grade, I loved The Good Earth and seeing the limitations set on women in China and how they paralleled those set on women in traditional Puerto Rican culture. In the fourth grade, my teacher said I should be a psychologist, but this never interested me. My interest in how people 'work' in life and love has always been related to writing.

Compassionate souls cross the invisible line and date a client.
When there is lack of parity in a relationship,  it strikes me as a way to maintain control. A person dating someone in prison always knows the person's whereabouts and the power of denying a prisoner a visit.
However, it is often the case that the relationship becomes a con on both sides.
The one who believes him or herself to hold more power is in the relationship because of his or her predominance in the area of intelligence, socioeconomic status or beauty, really wants to be safe and detached. Detachment is a means to no real romantic ends, but protects the solar plexus.
Meanwhile, the 'lesser' partner in the equation is lunging greedily at those things -- to be taught (dating a highly-educated person), to get his or her materials needs met (dating a wealthy generous partner), or to feed a fragile ego (dating a person considered beautiful).
Our life experiences either make us stronger or more fearful and if a person becomes fearful, he or she chooses simplicity. Nothing is more simple and meaningless than trying to have control in relationships -- this applies to teaching large groups, managing a staff or in a romantic relationship.

Artists in prison
I think about how some of my favorite writers, Dostoevsky, Boethius and Cervantes, wrote in prison and they wrote to liberate some part of themselves from the mundane life of a prisoner limited by external forces. Slyvia Plath was in a prison as well limited by both internal and external forces-- my guess is her prison was one made of a combination of domesticity and mental illness.

Artists and New Frontiers
The greatest thing is to play with the pliability of creativity and to transfer skills to another arena, to be the visual artist who begins to write or the writer who studies human behavior or the poet who becomes a filmmaker.
I just listened to a Fresh Air interview with Steven Sodenberg; he said he's done making films and will direct plays and paint. And it is this artistic meandering I have always loved and accepted as part of the creative process.

Coming out of the Closet and increasing visibility. . . as an artist by Odilia Rivera-Santos

Social media is a place in which we can be as free as we want to be with our opinions, goals and dreams; however, depending on the kind of work you do, your strong opinions, political affiliations and general goofiness might get you in trouble.

Being an 'artist' is the new Gay
Many artists are secretive and lead double lives. I knew an adult education teacher who played the part of a dominatrix on a cable show -- no pun intended. The 'adult education' was reading comprehension and GED prep. She whispered to me one day that one of her students had seen the show and mentioned it in class; her face was pretty red as she told me. Some creative types have lost their jobs over being too provocative or opinionated about something or other, and this made me think being an artist and using social media is akin to being a gay person in the 1970s.
Many companies scoff at our life of giggery -- doing short-term assignments in civil life in between performances and creative fellowships in which we were paid to sit in the sun in an exotic locale to manipulate syntax and talk shit with fellow writers as peacocks glided by not caring we were from New York.
A friend of mine, an African American actor and singer, recently went undercover as a civilian -- she now wears a suit and speaks calmly in complete sentences, like someone who studied accounting, not movement and motivation and enunciating like a Shakespearean. Her demeanor is staid and controlled as is her hair as are her clothes and I am reminded of Anthony Perkins in Psycho. In the civilian world, we artsy types dampen the vibrancy that helps us reshape reality as if creating animals from balloons.

I love being a personal trainer and a dance instructor and navigating my way through social media and there isn't a competitive bone in my body. Competition implies there is scarcity in the world and we know some people have gold-plated toilets, so the world is rich and full of opportunity. We don't need to compete on any front.

I accept myself as I am -- quirks, mistakes, and miscalculations are part of my life and every human life.

Increasing visibility is as important for an artist as it is for a gay person. The world needs tough sensitive people who continue to strive and face adversity with an occasional break from the tedium of rejection. But the tedium is part of the meditative practice of being who one is, deepening one's acceptance of one's own character and knowing the right audience is right around the corner  -- it's just that there are so many corners.

Pursuing the Ultimate Dream by Odilia Rivera-Santos

Seven years ago, I asked my sister if she'd like to start a catering business. As traditional Puerto Rican women, we were taught to cook, sew, keep house, etc, and I pondered whether to professionalize our cooking. My sister wasn't interested and I allowed the idea to rattle around my brain while reading articles here and there regarding the food business. I have two streams of income at present: personal training and Nerd Services: writing, editing, social media consulting, translating and overusing the gerund when asked.

Writers listen intently to words, love to learn something new and it is this curiosity which connects us to each other and our readers. While speaking to my business mentors and reading The Freelancer's Bible by Sara Horowitz, the founder of The Freelancer's Union, I began to make lists of work I'd enjoy.
There's no harm in accepting a job requiring me to go to an office and sit in a cubicle but it isn't something I'd want to do full-time. Cubicles never inspired me. Working remotely is more appealing because I have a thing for French cafés.

Additional Dream Jobs
While taking Rick Jarow's Creating the Work You Love workshop, he kept speaking about creating multiple streams of income. I prefer to think of it as multiple streams of happiness. Doing work that makes you happy is good for you.
The additional gigs I'd like to do writing for television or film, writing lyrics for musicals, creating content for wellness, nutrition and fitness Websites, blogging about writing, writing about blogging, writing novels that sell a la Rowling, singing at Carnegie Hall while wearing a purple Valentino gown, and running an organic food delivery business where clients would pay a fee for three daily meals and two snacks.

Someone told me I do a lot of things. To me, what I do is not a lot. Nutrition and fitness is the foundation of life and I'm very knowledgeable in this area and my strong liberal arts background required study, research, analysis, writing, and being able to digest information in order to glean its relevance and apply the new knowledge to my life.

I've been a hard-worker all my life and enjoy challenges. My last two years of earning the majority of my income as a freelancer have been tremendously interesting and I feel a great sense of accomplishment.

The ultimate dream is to be immersed in work I love, but like is okay too.