by Melanie Feliciano

A couple of members of the Miami Writers Association, Lee and Paul Reyes-Fournier, recently published a book that clueless me didn’t get upon first reading.

“I will suppress laughter at all times.”

“I am chlorine in the aquarium of love.“

“I will live my life untethered to humanity.“

What?? Aack! A whole book full of these negative phrases? Why would I want this? I’ve been living my entire life according to phrases like these and this is the first time I’ve become aware of it – no way, now how would I EVER put a book like this onto the same shelf as my precious copy of “Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman’s Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia” by Elizabeth Gilbert.

Then I attended Lee’s and Paul’s book reading and signing at Books & Books in Coral Gables.

I sat next to my fellow introspective and soul bro writer, Angello Pizarro, and we talked about how difficult it is for us to think positive on a regular basis. He’s naturally cynical after serving 10 years in the military in Afghanistan and Iraq. I’m naturally cynical after watching “Stephen King’s The Shining” at 8 years old and engaging in other dark activities at ages much earlier than appropriate.

I guess you can say we are both just now seeing the light. And both of us are uber sensitive to the messages we are allowing into our respective auric fields (is auric fields even correct? Hmmm).

That means I stopped watching television. I avoid night clubs if I can. And I’ve even stopped talking to certain people who had traditionally served as sources of negative energy feeding the crappy negative fire in my belly.

This has been good therapy, however, it can be tricky when you live in Vice city Miami, but more importantly, when you stop getting irony and jokes, including “Dysaffirmations,” this book by Lee and Paul, who coined this term, “Dysaffirmation,” and define it as such:

“A dysaffirmation is a dysfunctional affirmation.  As you know, an affirmation is a phrase, statement or suggestion that is repeated with the intention of making it a reality.  Most people believe affirmations are some new age hocus pocus that is as useful as sea monkeys.  The truth is that there is some serious science behind affirmations and they actually work.”

The “duh” light dinged in my newly re-configured brain: “I’m supposed to laugh! I’m supposed to realize that these one-liners are supposed to make me realize how dysaffirmational I’ve been all my life! Duh, duh, duh.”

Oops. There goes a dysaffirmation right there – me telling myself I am not smart, too slow…you get the idea.

This book is guaranteed to bring even more ridiculous amounts of traffic to Lee’s and Paul’s brilliantly written blog, www.CoupleDumb.com. Let’s excerpt today’s blog post just to show how bloggers need to find their own unique voices in order to garner a following (they’ve got like half a million visitors to their site, people, so pay attention!):

“At this point, we should wish you a happy Thursday and some crap like that but what if we don’t want to? What if we think that today we’re going to imply the wish and not be ‘shoulded’ into something, even if it is generally a good idea? Is the world going to end? We don’t think so.”

I think what I love the most about Lee’s style of writing is her ability to make up wordz like “shoulded” and “dysaffirmation.” The blog is full of Lee vernacular, and readers find this refreshing in a world full of hack writers making believe they have something unique or smart to say. Both Lee and Paul also possess a quality every writer should (hey, there goes that word “should”) harness:

The ability to make fun of oneself…the ability to NOT take him/herself too seriously. Just take a look at her bio:

“I’m a 43 year old chunky woman who’s been married for 20 years to the bestiest man and have 3 of the most fantasannoying children in the world.  I am a professional psychotherapist with a specialty in addiction and marriage and family.  Being of Cuban-American decent, I have the wicked power of telling people off in two languages.  One of my biggest issues is that I was born 6 days before Christmas.  Unless you have a Christmas birthday, you can’t appreciate how that fucks up a kid.”

She’s a psychologist, so she better be able to psychoanalyze herself, and this makes for some great comedy. I have this theory that the greatest comedians out there create characters out of their former selves who used to take themselves too seriously (ugh…clunky sentence…sorry, folks). Just think of all the asshole characters Adam Sandler has created…you can’t do that so expertly unless that asshole was once YOU.

But anyways, ever the Devil’s Advocate, which is me, the ASSHOLE, I raised my hand during Lee’s and Paul’s very civilized book reading and said something to the effect of, “I don’t get it. Like, what are you gonna do when people pick up this book and they take it out of context like I did?”

Lee reassured me that not everyone is as idiotic as I am and that they WOULD get it, and if not, they can check out their web site and see for themselves.

It’s all about not knee-jerking to quick conclusions at the end of the day, isn’t it? There is always context for everything, and if we just take a few minutes (or hours in my case), then perhaps…the world would be a better place?

Wow, sounds so positive of me. ;-D