It's the end of the weekend... and I'm hobbling. ;)
My left foot is so wrecked. It's for a good reason, though, because I got to take my new sandals on a full-route walk this weekend. I'd gone for just an hour earlier last week to start breaking them in, and all had been fine. Ah, well, it'll toughen up soon. I love that it's spring and that it will soon be summer. I love being back out there, and having my productive and creative thinking time back.
I started trying to put a photo album together today. It's hard work! I have years' worth of photos sitting in boxes in my closet. I'd started with some from about six years ago, and it's hard to believe that so much time has already passed between then and now. It's been six action-packed years, though, relocating 20 hours away, meeting new people, seeing new things, graduating from university, getting ready to go back again, and all the life lessons along the way.
Can you tell I'm introspective today? About this, about other things. When you know that something realistically, inevitably, cannot turn out well for you, how do you let go of the hope (read: delusion) that it will? That's rhetorical, by the way, so don't answer it. I'm just emptying my brain before starting a new week.
Time for some dinner -- for those who like to tease me about this, yes it's actual dinner tonight. :) I don't want the weekend to be over, because it's been a fun one!
Song of the weekend: This Love by Maroon 5. Wow, does that ever work itself into your mind and stay there...
Just got home from going to see "Raising Helen" at one of those so-rarely-frequented places (a movie theatre) tonight. Totally good movie if anyone is looking for a chick flick or "date" movie. It had the writing, had the wardrobe -- I want all of those long skirts Kate Hudson had and all of the shirts too... why don't I find things like that when I go shopping? :) -- and the soundtrack. Although, I have this feeling that "Whip It" is going to be stuck in my head for the rest of the weekend, especially seeing how we were singing it afterward in my car!
Is your love life a little lackluster? Well, this mascara ought to have you in the throes of passion...
I have found my new calling.
I want to work for cosmetic companies, writing their promotional material. It is way too funny. A friend at work just forwarded me something from Lancôme about their new mascara, and I love how this is worded: "... Lancôme invites you to discover a mascara with a texture so soft that it turns application into a most pleasurable moment."
Pleasurable moment, eh? Yes, stabbing myself in the eye with a mascara wand whilst half-asleep has always been a very sensual -- no, wait, orgasmic -- experience. Between this and those Herbal Essences commercials, I'm thinkin' that these people might just need a life more than I do...
Mmmm. :) I love it when I wake up in the best mood, just completely happy, relaxed and buoyant, ready for the day. Right now there is gorgeous morning sunshine streaming through my office window, so perfectly matching how I feel. Yay sunshine. :)
So, today I woke up feeling much brighter than the restlessness of this weekend. I had been climbing the walls, just needing to be out of here for awhile, but this seems to have dissipated... perhaps because I just booked a trip home. :)
This always makes me happy.
I must go get the new Avril CD after work today. I've been waiting for it to come out, because I really like Take Me Away.
So, I'm thinking that when I manage to dump a full cup of coffee (thankfully without sugar yet added) all over the counter, floor and me, and have some weird astrological forecasts going on (such as "minor accidents likely"), it might be my cue to not leave the apartment today.
I was going to stay in my PJs all day today, too, and now I've got to wash the kitchen mat but I think the washing machine is being used.
Welcome to Day 2 of my writing weekend. The weekend, I said, I'd actually rediscover my self-discipline and get a significant amount accomplished. So far, so good. I'm mainly focusing on the chapters that would be submitted with a query and/or proposal, to get those completed and polished. A couple of other scenes for later parts of the book have also popped out, and additions to scenes in progress. It's exciting. It's freeing.
Even when I'm sitting here, for the umpteenth hour, going over and over missing pieces or improperly worded sentences of the same chapter or two, sick of reading what's in front of me, I still love it so inexplicably much. I can't even tell you. I think of having to go back to work on Tuesday and letting my brain be numbed by the exercise in repitition that my job has become, and I wish so much I was at a point where I was getting paid to write.
If I can be honest for a moment, here, I think I am sick to death of web design (or at least the non-creative, stripping code and reformatting to a pre-determined template form of it) and of feeling like I'm doing something only for it to have to be re-done in the near future, for the zillionth time since 2001. It all seems so pointless. I need a challenge. I need to use my brain and my creativity. I need to feel like I'm actually doing something.
I need to password my weblog, because too many people from work read it. :P Hey guys, I'm not saying I don't like my job and/or employment in general, I'm saying that Project Codename Impending Doom and the Unnamed and Totally Random Content Management System, with what it has done to my job, are making me feel so intellectually and creatively underused and unfulfilled. That's all. This is nothing new -- I've seen it documented as a problem many have found with the whole thing.
Such is life when you're 24, though. Be grateful for what you've got; work hard towards what you want. I think these will have to become my words to live by.
So, back to it. I think a trip to Chapters for a reference book I've been looking at and a trip to a shoe store to get some good walking sandals will also be on the agenda for today. For a weekend where it was supposed to rain, it sure is sunny. :) I think I can start my 8K walks again, yay! I'll have to bring my camera with me to see if I can get any pictures of the rabbits and groundhogs... yes, I need a trip to the zoo soon!
I swear that the kids' book "The Borrowers" is honest-to-goodness truth. Little creatures who live under the floorboards that borrow things from time to time. Right now they've got my mp3 player... or I put it somewhere up in the cupboard above my closet when moving things around and I need the taller stool that is basement to get at it. Oh, the trials of being 5'2. ;)
So, the laptop is substituting as my CD/mp3 player as I try to lull myself to sleep with music. Not sleepy! Good, rejuvenating yoga set tonight. And seeing how that's what the kriya was for, that's a good thing!
The power of the mind is quite something. It is amazing, sometimes, how detached from my own life I can make myself be if I really need to. When I'm writing, I do. I need to block everything else out, channel my energy into what I'm doing, and just be there, that space and universe where my characters' lives play out. A vivid imagination and the ability to focus almost obsessively on things helps here. It has to be perhaps the one positive thing about these personal charactertics that I have found. With that part of me comes both the good and the bad, but when I can harness it all to use for this, it's wonderful.
No, my problem now is self-discipline when it comes to writing. It's like it all crumbled the moment I graduated. I know what this entails. It means forcibly isolating myself for periods of time from everything else -- people, phones, distractions, sleep -- and just doing it. Once I'm there, I'm entirely useless to talk to. It's like waking someone from hypnosis -- it takes awhile for me to be pulled back into reality. Once I get there, what comes out of me and how quickly it does sometimes astounds even me.
I used to write novel-length fiction when I was 16. I used to write article upon article, paper upon paper, on a weekly basis for four years. It's not like I haven't done this before. Yes, I may work full-time, so much of my day is filled with that, and I may have an outside life of friends and interests, and appointments and errands, but really? I just procrastinate. And that's got to stop.
Got. To. Stop.
I think now I'll be using this time I don't have to think while cleaning files and putting them in the Unnamed and Totally Random Content Management System to get my head into my writing space. So much more beneficial for me to do.
And now that I've entirely bored or confused you all, time to work... wishes for a good Monday, let's see if they're shipping us off to The Peg here at work, and if so, can they wait til I'm done grad school?
103.5 hours left until Friday at 4:30 p.m. (long weekend time). Can she do it?
Dear Self: Seriously consider investing in some duct tape for your mouth, for when you're half asleep and the filter between your mind and voice isn't quite functioning. Then maybe you could keep your thoughts in your head where they belong.
Update about all that noise... right after posting I gave up and decided to go out, just to get away from it! It wasn't even the fact that it woke me up, it was how annoying the sound was. Do you remember in Dumb and Dumber, "the most annoying sound in the world"? Well, this beat that, hands down! I drove by Lansdowne to see what it was, and it was the Chrysler, Dodge, Jeep Gold Medal event. Remind me that I'm never buying one of those makes of vehicles ever when I get a new car, just on principle.
Back home now, though, things seem to have quieted down. I hope. I looked up the noise by-law for the city and it seems the new one they want to implement has something about no motorsports before 10 a.m. I am all for that!
If this ever happens again, someone may have to die.
WTF? Oooh, I am cranky right now. Woke up before 8 this morning to tons of repetitive, loud, squealing tires and revving engines and it hasn't stopped yet. I don't even know where it's coming from, Lansdowne? There's racing (like the Indy 500 or something) going on somewhere and I don't know where, but it's irritating as all hell. And now my downstairs neighbour, love her though I do, just started with the music, loud enough that it's drifting up here. (Guess she figured we were all up, anyway.) So much for my plans of going back to sleep...
Funny. I didn't realize those orange pylons were going to be a permanent fixture of the neighbourhood...
Just when you thought it was safe to drive on Bank Street again -- after last spring/summer/fall's construction (hereinafter known as "Slalom Steering, Round One: Offroading on Bank Street") that saw city workers replace the sewers and totally tear up the road, leaving no exits from side streets that didn't cause you to drive over enormous craters and totally washboarded road -- they've devised a new method of wrecking the underside of everyone's cars.
Ladies and gentlemen, I welcome you to Slalom Steering, Round Two: Dodge the Raised Manhole Covers and Random Chunks Sliced Out of the Road.
You wouldn't think there could be five manhole covers in less than a block, scattered like pylons on some kind of vehicle testing course... but there are. For each block. With pylons in odd places on the road. The hell? That was freshly paved road. When did the city workers and planners from Thunder Bay secretly take over the road construction plans demise of the nation's capital? Why can't you leave our poor vehicles alone, already??????? Or, you know, fix Wellington. Wait, no, don't fix Wellington. You've already got Holland torn up for the rest of the summer, I don't need a detour from my detour.
Friday at last. :) Sitting here with my toasted English muffin (with apple-strawberry jam, baby) and my yummy steaming mug of coffee, sunshine streaming in the window and birds chirping outside... there is something decidedly peaceful about a Friday morning. Especially today. Coming up is the first weekend since Easter that will be a weekend. I cannot wait. Sleeping in and staying in PJs, savouring coffee and a really good book or a movie (cos we know nothing will be on TV at that time of day!) until I'm ready to get up and go out.
So I said I wouldn't think today. And this is the only introspection I'm going to do.
"It never happened. It never will. It's not a memory, there's no way to prove this isn't real. Never happened. Never..." (Moist, Break Her Down)
The best and worst thing about me is that I feel things too deeply and care about people too much. In many ways, I wouldn't change this about me for the world. In other ways, it would be so much easier if I could just force myself not to feel, not to care.
But then I wouldn't be me. What a catch-22 that is.
I just want to quote song lyrics all day. It's fun! Dan, where are you? We need a song-lyric-fest. You'll quote Billy Joel, and I'll quote squillions of Canadian musicians, and then we'll just go throw limes at things. Okay?
It's over. Thank goodness. :) I just really have some mixed feelings about that day! Now maybe I can go back to feeling like myself, because that's been a bit lacking the last while. Happy, non-emotionally-weird, calmer, peaceful and just generally plain weird sometimes me. :)
Thank you to everyone who sent hellos and wishes. Lots of hugs to you all, you're amazing!
Let the rain fall down and wake my dreams, let it wash away my sanity...
Upon some serious consideration, I am turning my mind off for awhile. My problem is that while at work, with the Unnamed and Totally Random Content Management System, I often do not really need to think. And it's repetitive. So I lose myself in my head. Which, when you're me, is a bad thing to do. Why, you ask? Because I think too much, I overanalyse, it gets me moody so I get in a mood, and then I make everyone else nuts.
So. Brain shut off. And now for the rest of my birthday -- dinner out and CAKE!
Oh dudes. Last night I attempted to go shopping for spring clothes. Hah. I thought if I waited a few weeks it might all get better, but it has apparently gotten worse. I was in Le Chateau and saw these dresses and tank tops -- crocheted, beads, sparkly, and the style of them, well, the first thing that ran through my mind was "Didn't Blanche wear that on The Golden Girls?" That almost came blurting out of my mouth to the sales girl, but I stopped myself just in time, figuring I might get an evil look. Also, I doubt she could have done anything about it.
Instead? Stopped by the Aveda store. It is entirely possible that my hair product fixation is beyond all reasonable control. All I use is shampoo, conditioner, and phomollient, but all of these are Aveda products which means $$$. But I'm hooked! I can't help it! Anything else in my hair feels so bleh. Last night I got the chamomile shampoo to try (I usually use the rosemary mint, and sometimes switch off with Got2Be Moisture Freak as it's quite moisturizing and purple, so keeps the brassiness out of my hair), but man. So completely out of control.
Yes, I like astrology. If you think I'm nuts, that's fine.
Happy Lunar Eclipse Day! It's set to begin at 7:48 GMT (or early afternoon here) and we won't be able to see it from North America, but it's cool to know it's happening, all the same. I actually prefer when lunar eclipses occur and I can't see them, sometimes they really freak me out. More than used band-aids stuck to bathtubs, showers or pools do. That is just make-my-skin-crawl, fingernails-on-a-chalkboard, shudder and be entirely grossed out kind of freak out; lunar eclipses that I can see often creep me out more than I could possibly put into words, and often leave me with a feeling of unease. Strangely enough, the one in November that took place along with the Harmonic Concordance -- and in my sign -- did not.
The cool thing is how this is the second eclipse in a couple of weeks. There was a solar eclipse on April 19, and until April 30 Mercury was retrogade, and soon Jupiter is going to stop being retrogade (it has been for awhile), and there's just all this astrological stuff going on right now. It's crazy! And I think it's been making people kind of crazy as well. While I was out and about on the weekend, people had the strangest attitudes. Not good ones, either. I heard this one older man totally belittling and making fun of what I assume were either his children or perhaps grandchildren, just totally mean and psychologically bad. It was kind of shocking and really disturbed me. And then there was also a couple walking around, the woman deciding between two shirts and asking an opinion, and the guy just snapped at her, "You're wearing it," and continued walking.
And just because I'm talking about all of this, a shoutout, wave and smile to Mike. :)
So, it's birthday-week. I get kind of weird around my birthday sometimes. Mopey? Maybe. Yes and no. It might sound entirely strange but sometimes I really miss my parents around my birthday, and just don't like being so far away from a lot of people who mean the world to me. I remember a particularly bad case of homesickness when I turned 22. I hadn't seen them since Christmas at that time (and didn't until September that year). Again, it's been since Christmas, and I'm a little blahhhh. I do have plans to just book a flight for some weekend soon, though.
Last year I had been home only about three or four weeks before, and then my b-day was rockin' fun. Friends, wine and other such things that will be categorized as "not water", cake with icing that could send you into a diabetic coma, and then downtown, at one point harassing the speed dating sign-up dude that was trying to harass us.
It's just a weird time. Not sure why. I definitely do not crave attention around it, I try to avoid singing waiters like the plague (hmm, might be in poor taste but I wonder if we can change that saying to "avoid ... like SARS"?), it's just more about being with people that I care about and who I'm close to, which is why I think I get a little homesick around this time every year. Does that make sense?
I am totally rambling on to the universe, here. Maybe I should get some work done... and put my geek-girl glasses on! (Kidding, I like 'em actually.)
This takes spring cleaning to the level of being an eXtreme sport
Everyone sing along with me:
I own too much stu-u-u-f-f...
I had been singing that as "I own too much cr-a-a-a-p..." but it's not crap, and therein lies the problem. It is actually rather difficult to own crap when you moved seven gazillion times within 6 years and have cleaned out over and over again. I'm sure that somewhere there is a landfill site dedicated in my honour.
Seriously, when I own a house, there is going to be no problem filling it with all the decorative stuff -- pictures, ceramics (Bubble I just had to put away an entire box of them!), candles, books... don't get me started on the books. I already know that somewhere in my basement there are three large garbage bags filled with books (scholarly-type literature ones, too), my shelves up here are filled and now I'm putting away a bunch more. I think when I own a house I'll just make one room into a library!
That said, I am standing in the middle of the biggest mess you have ever seen in my apartment... gotta keep going!
