%%USERNAME%%    %%ACCWORDS%% %%ONOFF%% |
 |  "Clean cup! Move down!" ~~the Mad Hatter, Alice in Wonderland, Walt Disney cartoon |
|
** Images For Use By Upgraded+ Only ** Sometimes in life, you have to pick up and move down the table. A regroup, a fresh start. A clean slate. |
Response to "Invalid Entry"  .It's 35 degrees and there is snow on the ground at my house. Winter isn't coming. Winter is here. Summer was long and hot and smoky. Lots of forest fires here. Autumn came and went quickly. It happened in a matter of about three weeks. I have aspen in my yard and every year I look forward to autumn because I love watching the leaves turn. Golden coins fluttering in the cool fall winds. This year, the lack of water caused the edges of the leaves to turn black. Within one or two days they all turned from a beautiful golden to crisp brown and then in one brisk afternoon wind were scattered like confetti across my lawn. Now my trees are mostly bare. The snow is covering them creating a sodden blanket that we'll mow when it dries in the spring. But for now, it's winter. There is snow covering my green grass. It caught us out and the tractor sprinkler and hose are still stretched out across the back yard and the rainbow sprinkler and hose are stretched out in the front. We'll have to wait for it to come a warm spell and coil them or we'll lose both hoses to hard freezing later in the season. We also need to bring in our patio chairs. Winter is here. And I'm not ready for it. I have my boots and hat. I have my gloves. I got out my warm sweaters. So, it's like I got everything out for winter, but I haven't done with summer and autumn yet. I haven't finished putting things away; I haven't finished tidying up from the other seasons. Halloween is my favorite holiday and I have about fifteen or twenty Halloween shirts and sweaters. I get them all out and they are all I wear the month of October. Sometimes it snows before Halloween, sometimes it doesn't. This year it looks like we will have snow on the ground from now until spring thaw. Some years it happens like that. Because winter always comes. |
| Response to "Invalid Entry" . Dang. Philosophy. I'm not good with philosophy.  I always get confused when people start talking in terms of Buddhist koans, "What is the sound of one hand clapping?" Or the one about angels dancing on pin heads. Or trees that make sounds in the forest. ~sigh~ I have a scientific brain. I want to solve them. Like word problems. I have difficulty just....contemplating them. Take the boat example. Here's what my brain did with it: You’ve been exiled from a ship. They’ve got you on a raft that the ship (I always picture a galleon) tows around. A board on the ship needs to be replaced, so the captain has his men do it. They discard the old one and you pick it up as if floats past your raft. This happens for every board, rope, and bit of sail on the ship. By the time it’s all done, you’ve built a ship of all the discarded pieces, and you’re still following the ship that’s had every piece of it replaced. So which one is the original ship? Answer? I'm in the original ship being towed behind a replacement. But, then, Satuawany  started throwing me curve balls and explaining that the ship is dead skin cells.  WHAT? Eww, gross! So then my brain starts looking at the ship in different ways and because of the way MY brain works (and the fact that it was late at night and I get silly late at night) it morphed into a Quantum ship.So, what I had then was Heisenberg's ship: You can either know where the rebuilt ship is, or how fast it is being towed behind the other ship, but not both. No? How about the observer effect on the ship? The act of watching yourself rebuild the ship changes the outcome, ie, whether it is the original ship or the replacement. Or....Schrodinger's ship. The rebuilt ship is both being towed and it is sunk. No peeking!  That's the way my crazy brain works. |
| Response to "Invalid Entry" . As I was re-reading my last entry and then the comments section, I contemplated what scarlett_o_h said about my "yay's" and my emoticons. If left to my own devices, in my blog, I use tons of emoticons and happy interjections (and tons of curse words because I curse like a dockworker  ) in my entries. It's not because I'm a big Pollyanna, it's just that I've had much worse times in my life. Comparatively speaking, this period in my life is cake. I mean, sure, the situation with my kid is completely fucked up, but I can't really do much about that. She has to figure herself out. School is hard, but that has an end date, I just have to buckle down, work hard and make it through.I have day to day ups and downs, but overall, I'm great. We have a nice house in a decent neighborhood. We manage to put food on the table (probably too much!). We have pets we love. We have jobs. We have friends. (Granted some of them are fucked up. But hey...everybody has problems.) My point is, I've been homeless. I've been a battered wife. I've lived my life dealing with constant, sustained, intense pain. I've lived in much worse situations with much more serious worries. My most mindful thoughts are that I'm thankful everyday for my current situation and say prayers to that effect daily about how good I have it now because, man, has it been worse. So, I will sort-of apologize for all the emoticons and happy interjections and sort-of not apologize. I use them because I'm a happy kind of chick. I know a lot of times you may read my entries and think I sound like a young, mindless valley girl from the 80s. Totally!  But, I'm actually a highly educated 41 year old grown ass woman who has been through hell and I'm happy to have come out the other side intact, wiser and with a hella sense of humor. A dark and twisted sense of humor, but a sense of humor none the less.So, I will end this entry the same way I ended yesterday's. I've seen the dark underbelly of life and lived to laugh another day. Come on, tomorrow, bring it. |
| Response to "of course not, but maybe" . Some days you get up and kick life's ass. Some days life kicks your ass. Some days fall in between. They are just blah days. Today for me fell somewhere on the middling scale. You know, one of those days where what you lost on the swings, you sort of made up on the roundabouts. ~shrugs~ I got up late this morning for my mammogram. 'Cause yay mammogram.  But...it only took about 20 minutes and afterwards I got to go to breakfast with my fabulous sister-in-law! Yay, blueberry crepes! Then I stumbled my way through my soils class where the soils math made no sense. After that I got to take a soils lab test which turned out to be easy.  Then I got to have lunch and visit for a few hours with my sis-in-law. She's a field biologist so I can talk science with her which is nice. (Hubby listens when I talk hard science but isn't always that great to hold a conversation about it with.) She attended my afternoon class with me which is my Yellowstone class and kind of her field of interest. Unfortunately it was a guest speaker who spoke about climate change which is kind of a sore subject with me. I was going to do the weekend bonus entry about it and may still, but it will take me some time to round up sources and citations and I have a paper due Friday I should actually be writing for school instead.  After that I had a study session for a test on Thursday in the Yellowstone class which, yay, now I don't have to study on my own.  And finally, I had to go to group advising for the Spring semester. It kind of snuck up on me. I don't have any of my classes sorted out and I'm not really ready for it. I talked to my adviser and the university makes you fill out this intent to graduate form a year in advance. Which, if I want to graduate next December....I need to get on the stick. So, now I have hoops I have to jump through, paperwork to fill out and I kinda need to row up my freaking ducks. I don't even know what classes I need to take to finish school. I mean...I have a general idea. I need to do an independent study project, which I talked to both of the Geography professors about. (One prof is a co-author on the book that he uses in his Physical Geography class and needs help with research on Russia and the Middle East for the next edition. Coolio, I can research shit!) I need to fumble my way through two semesters of Spanish. I need to take, like, 9? 12? more credits of Geography. I don't know, I feel like there are some more classes that are waiting out there to bite me in the ass. I'll have to check it out between now and Halloween which is my registration date for the Spring. WTF. I hate feeling behind the eight ball on shit. I'm a planner and a goal setter. Not knowing is stressing me out. I hate when I do this to myself. But, tonight, instead of working on any of that, I half-ass worked on my paper that's due Friday and watched Big Bang Theory with Hubby and SIL. We watched random episodes and then all the Wil Wheaton episodes. So...not a good day, not a bad day. Just a day. Tomorrow will be another. Bring it. |
| Response to "The Scourge of the Earth" . The years before my grandmother died, she lived alone. I was the oldest granddaughter. When I was growing up, I was a favorite of my carpenter grandfather. He would let me sit in his workshop and play in the sawdust. We would drive to town and run errands and he would take me by the auto parts store where we would get orange push-up ice cream. To this day I can't see one of those without thinking of him. As a child I thought the world of him, even though he was gruff and didn't talk a lot. Mostly he just let me hang out with him because I was a quiet child who didn't bother him. As an adult I can see him for the real bastard he was, though. I know he loved me and I loved him. But, he was a real bastard to my grandmother. In his defense, she was just as big a bitch. They separated late in life after making each other miserable for something like forty plus years. But, back to my grandmother. Her father was a womanizing bastard when she was growing up. There are some really horrible stories about him that I didn't know until I got older. When I was a kid I always liked my great-grandfather. I was made much over because my brother, little sister and I were the only red-headed grandchildren or great-grandchildren. Out of almost 50 some odd of us, we were the only three. He would let me tend his garden with him and talk baseball with me. I guess he liked that I would just sit and listen to him talk about baseball even though I hate baseball and don't know jack-shit about it. He always rooted for the Cubs. So, the two most important men in my grandmother's life were alcoholic bastards. It kind of soured her on men and sort of on people in her late life. After my grandfather left, she sat alone in the house that he built them and let it fall down around her ears. Zero upkeep. My uncle (my mom's brother) lived in the same town as my grandmother and is a carpenter, too. After she was alone there, he was supposed to take care of things for her. Go out to the house and check on her, do upkeep on the house, etc. But, he fell off a house or something and got hurt and couldn't. Mostly she would sit around in her bathrobe and watch her shows on TV or read Sally Wetpants Harlequin Romance novels. The only time she got dressed the last two years of her life was if she was going to town for a library run for more books or a Walmart run for food. Otherwise she just sat around in her pj's and bathrobe with a fuck-off-world-you-haven't-lived-up-to-my-expectations kind of attitude. She was horribly bitter about everything. Once she and mom and I were awake at sunrise and mom and I were saying how pretty the sunrise was that she should come see it. She said, "I hate sunrises. They remind me when I was a little girl and had to wake up early all summer and pick cotton. It made my fingers bleed." Ooookkkaaay. That was seventy years ago, move on. Get therapy. Toward the end she even stopped cleaning her house. She would use every dish she had and then instead of washing them just buy new ones. Same thing with underwear. I'm not joking. She wouldn't take her trash out either. The ants, roaches and mice nearly carried her off. I begged my mom and aunt to get her help because that level of lack of self care is a sign of severe depression or early onset dementia. But...no one listened to me and she developed pneumonia and died from complications. It made me sad. It made me sad that everyone cared more for hurting her feelings and stepping on her independence and less about her well being. But what the fuck do I know about any of it. |
| Response to "Invalid Entry" . I only have one child. So...Imma have to get creative here and pick something else out of this lead to write about. Because there are days she is my favorite child and days she isn't. I was struck by this line. I admit, my first reaction was that this guy was a real jerk, mostly because he 'doesn't do babies'. I like babies. In fact, I prefer babies. I stop liking children once they get to be around seven. Then I don't like them again until they are....hmmm....20? I find elementary and junior high children stinky, whiny and dense. I find high school children obnoxious and overly dramatic. Give me the 0-5 year olds and I'm happy. You can watch them learn. You can see them discover the world around them. They are little scientists. Everything is an experiment. The world is their lab. How does X taste, smell, feel, sound, act? They want to know. They are interested and engaged. Sure you have your terrible two time. That frustrating time in a child's life when they want to express and demand and their mental capacity outstrips their rudimentary vocabulary. It's a time of charades and temper tantrums. And questions and queries on the parents' part. "Do you want this? This? I don't understand!" But, the learning. Oh, the learning. To literally watch from beginning to end, as a child is first introduced to a concept, then explores the concept and then grasps and understands the concept. You can see the little wheels turning in their minds as they figure things out. The ball goes in the hole at the top and comes out the bottom! Every time! When the dial stops on the cow, the toy moos! The utter delight on their faces as they learn. Sometimes I have this delight. Sometimes I have the tantrums. But I try to bring this same level of concentration and devotion to learning every day as I attend classes at college. I had it in its pure form once. We all did. |
| Response to "Dancing with Memory" . Memory is a funny thing. I find it one of the most difficult aspects of my life. I struggle with it daily. Random images with no real context surface in my mind like debris from the wreckage of my past. A smell, the way light hits something, a sound, a word, a scrap of music. I never know what will trigger a memory. In the past, I have tried talking to others about my memory pieces. People who were there. Like a true writer, apparently I have rewritten scenes from my past stitching together these scraps of memory. According to them, I don't remember them the way they happened. I used to flagellate myself about this. Tell myself what a bad person I was. Tell myself it was the bipolar. Tell myself I was a crazy person who didn't even have a past, I'd lied to myself for years about how it all happened. And then I found science. Did you know that the mind is a fascinating and tricky thing? Did you know that at the scene of crime or accident, the least reliable source of information of what actually happened is eyewitness accounts? Show ten different people the same thing and ask them later to recount it and you will get ten different stories. Not because they are lying. Not because they are making things up or because they forgot. But, because they each experienced the same event differently. The sum total of their life experience colored the event differently for each of them. So, my memories of my past ARE valid and real and true. They just happened to me through the lens of my untreated bipolar. Like a funhouse mirror. That doesn't make them wrong. The events still happened. The basics still happened. I just perceived them differently than other people. The emphasis for me was on different things. Memories of dreams are more vivid. To me they are as real as memories of real events. So....I'm not a liar. I'm not a bad person. I'm just a person. A broken person who has a memory full of holes. But my memories are just as valid as everyone else's. My story is my story. Told from my perspective. First person singular. And my crazy quilt of memories is not a lie. It's just not seamless or pretty. |
| Response to "Ignore that man behind the curtain!" . I'm feeling kind of raw after that last entry. I just don't have it in me to write about my history with abusive men. Instead I'll talk about myself and what's lurking behind my curtain. I think sometimes I put up my masks because as a bipolar with a bad personal history, I can't always deal with being what people expect of me. I sometimes feel like Robert DeNiro in Meet the Parents. People are either allowed in my Circle of Trust or they aren't. And I don't give many second chances. I feel like I'm a bad screw up with a lot of bad in my closet, so I expect the same is true of other people. My close personal friends call me the Crone. One friend jokes you never have to worry about what I'm thinking about you because I've already told you. In detail. I try not to be mean, but I'm that cranky old lady who says the shit other people are thinking but are too nice to say. I try to be tactful about it, but I'm too old to pussy foot around about the truth. Or my perception of it. I try to follow that old thing my mom used to tell us when we were kids. "If you can't say something nice...etc." Sometimes I'll say that to people instead. "I don't have anything nice to say, so I'm going to shut the hell up." My husband laughs at me because when we went to Vegas one year, I got a T-Shirt that encapsulates my attitude perfectly. It's what I wish I could wear everyday, everywhere. It's a plain gray shirt that says in bold black lettering, "FUCK YOU YOU FUCKING FUCK." I try to only wear it appropriate places and then only on my really bad days. I usually don't let people see the man behind my curtain. I just show the pieces of myself I want you to see. The pieces I need you to see to get the job done. Mostly you get a mirror. I reflect back what you are showing me. It's the most effective camouflage there is. People like seeing that. They like when you show them themselves. I just reread that last paragraph. It sounds pretty sociopathic when you read it that way. Hmmmm.  Oh well...~shrug~I know that the man behind my curtain is broken in a hundred different ways. But he copes. He sorts himself out. He makes it work with all the smoke and mirrors that keep this show that is me running day to day. Just don't peek behind the curtain. |
| Response to "Invalid Entry" . My daughter. ~sigh~ This is a hard entry. I promised Hubby I wouldn't write stuff about her without her permission. But I can write stuff about me. That's ok. A bare bones background is ok, I guess. No finger pointing or blame or personal stuff about her, though. In December of 2010, Hubby and I sent Monilad to Texas to live with my mom so she could graduate from high school because for various reasons she was on track to not graduate here in Montana. She did. Graduate that is. In June of 2011. We flew down to see her graduate. Although I talk to her all the time (at least once or twice a week) I've only seen her one time since then. She is basically couch surfing with relatives in Texas now. I think she's staying with my mom until the end of the month and then she is headed out to New Mexico to live semi-permanently with my sister. My sister who I no longer speak with because she told me I dumped my daughter and didn't love her. Where to start. First, I love my daughter. My funny, quirky, crazy daughter. Once, she and I had a really close relationship. I mean really close. Her uncle asked her about it last month and she told him I was her best friend. Which is true. Still. Even after everything. Even after all the fighting and heartache. Hubby isn't Monilad's biological father. She was three and the flower girl at our wedding. He officially adopted her when she was five. Her biological father was a man/boy/douche bag I dated in high school and college. We dated off and on again for five years because even though he was so, so bad for me and so horrible to me, I didn't understand that. I just saw the times he was nice. Which he was sometimes. Because he's charming when he wants to be. When he wants something from you. She spent about 7 or 8 months of the last year living with him. It broke something in me that she would want to know him even knowing he beat me and helped gang rape me. Even knowing that after I was pregnant with her he turned his back on me and said he wanted nothing to do with her. He never gave one red cent to help raise her. Not one. That was a rough period for her and I. It burned my soul like acid knowing she would want anything to do with him. But, I sat back and did nothing; said nothing. Until the end. Until the day his girlfriend took her aside and asked her if Hubby had molested her as a child. I lost my shit then and shouted a lot at her. I shouted and screamed my frustration and pain at her. I said harsh things. How could she stay with people who would accuse the man who took us in and cared for us all these years, a man who literally would chop off his own hand rather than touch a child like that. It sickened me that she would choose to stay there when she had other options. Why would she stay with a man who just got out of prison for manufacturing and distributing meth? (He didn't do that when I knew him. Only after.) She moved back in with my Mom within the week. After our fight about that, she didn't want to tell me she was moving in with my sister. I told her I didn't care, it's her life. Hubby is not so sanguine about it. He is so hurt. So incredibly hurt by the accusation and other things. He can't stand my sister. A lot of bad blood there over the years on both sides. Monilad knows this. He has stopped talking to Monilad. It's all broken. Completely broken. So Hubby and I sit in our empty house by ourselves. No Monilad. No visits from Monilad. We won't go visit Texas anymore because we are on the outs with all the relatives in Texas about Monilad. And as a mother, I don't know what to do to fix any of it. I feel like a shell that has washed up onto the beach. Empty and hollow. Kind of echo-y. I text her when she texts me. I call her. She calls me. We talk about stupid things like the caterpillar she saw on Granny's sun porch. We talk about Sofie, who was/is? her dog, and now mine. We talk about how school is going for me. We never talk about Hubby. Sometimes I think the weight of all the unsaid things and taboo topics will crush me. But, still I text her and call her. Because I can't lose the tiny thread I have that ties her to me. I love her so much. I miss her. Because she was right. She was my best friend. And most days it seems all I have left of her is mountains of heartache and misunderstanding and a silly little dachshund who barks at the leaves in the yard. |
Today’s prompt will be in the nature of a shotgun entry. What, you may be asking, is a shotgun entry? That is a blogging term used by partyof5  to denote those entries where you don’t have anything earth shattering to say, but just little bits about several things. Following the edicts of the Queen, scarlett_o_h, I shall make mine an entry of five—your mileage may vary.   Days are shorter and we are closing in on the end of daylight savings time here in the States. I both look forward to that and don’t because here in Montana this time of year means late sunrises and early sunsets. We are entering the dark time of the year. I mean sure, you get the Pumpkin Latte, but you trade it out for late rising. It gets so hard to get up when there is no sun to greet you. This is the time of the year I dust off my light box and begin having fake sun rises.  Since we are at that time of year, we are also closing in on my favorite holiday. Halloween! Yay! A holiday where you don’t have to have a meal with family, you get to dress up any way you want, you go around and extort candy from strangers, no excess is too excessive. It is a day of license for frivolity and fun, from small children to old adults. And what other holiday beats that? I went and had my yearly with my gynecologist last week. (Aren’t those the best? ) Anyhoo, two tidbits from that. Now that I’m over the hill, they recommend a yearly mammogram. And who doesn’t love a good mammogram. (<--Fake delight) I once heard a joke about preparing for your mammo by going and lying down naked on your cold concrete garage floor and then having someone slowly back a car over your breast. Then turn over and have them do the other. Yeah. It’s a bit like that.  The other tidbit from that is that I have to get more exercise. My yearly is also my yearly basic medical checkup. The one good thing I have is blood pressure, the rest? A mess. The upshot? I need to exercise more. Happily, the smoke in the valley is gone now, but it’s cooler and as I mentioned the days are shorter. I do, however, have a PS3 with a Move and the Sports Champion game. I’m quite a hand at Bocce and Folf, but I’m a little scary at Archery, Ping Pong and Volleyball. What’s really scary is me huffing and puffing through Combat. It’s a little yikes and Hubby thinks I need to be careful and not overdo it. I’ve spent the weekend having a Dr. Who marathon. Yay Netflix! I think I preferred Eccleston to Tennant. Tennant is not my cuppa. Although I’m not that far—only end of Season 2, apparently there is another Doctor now. If any of you are looking for that special something to get me for my birthday, a sonic screwdriver wouldn’t go amiss. If I could go anywhere in time and space, I have a long list of places I’d ask the Doctor to take me. Ancient Rome (don’t drink the wine!), the height of the Egyptian empire (watch for Crocodiles!), or even the Globe for a first run Shakespearean play (Men have died and worms have eaten them, but not for love.).So you are probably wondering, why the random bits of my week that could appear in any entry, but there is a method to my madness. We can spend these three weeks talking deep philosophy and continue to prop up the masks that we show one another, continue to posture and preen and wonder who can sound the most educated. Instead, today’s entry is about what you do in your day to day life. Normal things. Pull off the masks and let’s be real, people. Pumpkin lattes, Halloween, mammograms, the Doctor and me killing myself with the Playstation. It doesn’t get any realer (or more random) than that. |
| I don't like a lot of classic literature. I find it tedious at best and boring at worst. It's true. The Bronte sisters? I find Wuthering Heights asinine. The simpering drives me bonkers. I've never bothered with Jane Eyre. Yet, I know people who read it yearly. ~shudder~ I have a scant handful of classics I like, but even then once and done is fine for me. I can't revisit them over and over like old friends. I recognize they are important in the evolution of the written word vis a vis where we came from and the detailing of day to day life, but mostly? Boooooring. Ditto Charles Dickens. I do enjoy Jules Verne, though. Also, some Fitzgerald. But, Waugh, Camus? Snoozefest. Huxley? Orwell? I get where they are going, but I just don't find them exciting. Perhaps the reason I find some of it boring is that so many people have scavenged off of them. Other, lesser writers have stolen their ideas and their plotlines, stolen their characters. So, when I read a classic, it is like some weird derivation of itself. It is like I have seen it, experienced parodies of it before and am not interested in it in its pure state. But hey. Probably, it's just me. ~shrug~ |
| Response to "Invalid Entry" : "Write a shitty first draft. Spelling and grammar don't matter, just get it down on paper." I hate that advice. I always have. I had a professor once tell me, "There isn't any significant difference between your first draft and your final draft. How many pre-first drafts did you do?" Um....none. I just write that way. If I can't write it the way I want the first time, I'm not interested in writing it. NaNo was torture for me when I did it. I hate writing to a timer. I like writing to a schedule (i.e., I'll have this many chapters done by this date.), but I hate writing to a timer or with a specific word count in mind. I start worrying about the word count and stop worrying about the word choices and the content. I have books that tell you to do stream of consciousness exercises, too. I know they are supposed to help prime the pump or whatever, but I hate those, too. And the ones where you are supposed to do stream of consciousness with the screen turned off or not looking at what you are typing. ~shudder~ That freaks me out. You could be typing any string of what the hell. I need my backspace key and my delete key. I need to copy and paste. I need to correct as I go. I need to agonize over word choice and sentence placement. I need to reread each word and see if I've used too many adverbs or if my run-on sentences are too run-on or just run-on enough. But, I suppose everyone is different. That's what diversity in writing, and indeed the world, is all about. |
| Response to "Invalid Entry" : Nikola has been sick all week, so she is having crazy dreams. Apparently, having strange dreams while you are fevered is a normal thing. Hah! I see their normal and raise them my every night dreams. I am a very vivid dreamer. I have full Technicolor detailed dreams every night, a long succession of them. Each morning I remember about half of them. When I'm sick, my dreams get even more vivid. Crazy things...flights of fancy, indeed. I have been sick since Wednesday and my dreams have been riots of color and funhouse wierdness. I find that my cast of characters changes little, but the setting changes in the most fantastic ways. Last night I was in a hotel on the beach shaped like a horseshoe with fincredible treehouse features. My cast of characters was the same as ever, they are rather mythic and archetypal. I can sit outside the dream as I dream it and name them, "This person is X, this person is Y." But in each dream, they are different people. It's is all very Joseph Campbell. Some of the themes from the dreams are drawn from what happens during my day, but not all of it. While I've been sick, I've been watching movies on Netflix. Fahrenheit 451, Atlas Shrugged I , Man of La Mancha.....elements of all of them have been creeping in to my dreams. One nice thing, I very seldom have nightmares. I am meditate avidly, and that has taught me directed dreaming. If I ever begin to have a nightmare, I can step out of it and direct the dream the way I want. When I was young I had nightmares constantly. Now, I might only have one a year. Although when I have one, it usually scares the bejeebies out of Hubby because they are the kind of nightmare that has me cry out and sit up in bed. |
| Response to "why i'm voting for barack obama" : Just couldn't make myself actually type that as my title. ~shudder~ It was a joke title, BTW. mood indigo was messing with us. The entry was about coworkers. I work in an office full of women. I have alternately worked with all men, all women and in an office all alone over the years. Working with all women requires a certain understanding of the situation and a mental toughness. The first thing you need to understand is that there will always be a wounded wildebeest. Like a pack of lions, the women in the office will circle the other women and gang up on one of the others and nip at her in order to separate her from the herd. You never want to be the wounded wildebeest. But.....never be one of the lions if you can help it. That shit comes back on you. That's how you become a wildebeest. By being too eager a lion. Next, never bring your personal shit to the office if you can help it. There is a corollary to this: find one personal thing you don't mind people knowing about and make it your "thing." Let it be the only personal thing you talk about. Like a decoy. My life is like an open book. I don't care what you know about me. Up to a point. I have layers to me. There is the open book layer that I don't mind people seeing and then there is the deeply personal shit that nobody gets to see. The key is to only show them what you don't mind them knowing about in the long run. My husband has a saying about the workplace, "I'm here to make money, not friends." Our coworkers laugh when he says it because they think he's joking. He's dead serious. The trick is to have that attitude and not let anyone know it. Be personable without being personal. But, you also have to be aloof in an office full of women. I've set myself up as the fun one in the office. I come in, make jokes, do my work, and go away. My office manager is a younger woman (about 12 years younger than me), she takes everything personally and hates confrontation. She leaves me notes about things to do on my desk. I'm pretty sure most of them are passive aggressive swipes about one thing or another, but I don't take them that way. I just do my work and move on with my life. Floating above it all. I sing along to whatever crazy ass music she puts on the radio. (It's just one big open office, no cubes, nothing.) We listen to bluegrass (which I hate), we listen to opera (which puts me to sleep), we listen to early country (which is depressing), and when I'm lucky we listen to 80s rock. The HR/Payroll woman is a little older than me and she is alternately the lead lion and wildebeest. She is socially awkward and I vacillate between intensely disliking her and feeling sorry for her. I envy her, though--she gets to sit in an office by herself and listen to whatever she wants. I prefer working with men. You can make rude jokes and swear and it's ok. You can jump someone out and they don't get all butthurt. Men, as a rule, take an ass eating better than women do. Women take it all personally. |
| Response to "Invalid Entry" : My husband is a bottom line, hard numbers, get to the action kind of guy. In all the time I have known him (almost 20 years) he has only read maybe two fiction books. He has also listened to one or two fiction books on tape while he's doing something else or if I'm listening to one and he happens to be in the car with me, but that's it. You can probably count them all on one hand. He just isn't interested. Fiction movies he'll watch all day long, but he isn't a reader. But even movies he picks apart. He dissects them like he dissects football plays. He can't just enter into the alternate reality on offer and immerse himself in the experience. For Hubby, there is only one reality. The REAL reality. Living or operating your life out of any other reality is foolish in his opinion. He doesn't see the point in playing online role playing games, either. Why pretend to be someone/something else? Are you that unhappy with your own reality? In that case, you should get therapy not waste your time online living in an imaginary world. Me? I love to fall down the rabbit hole into alternate realities. When I read a book, I have difficulty sometimes returning to the "real" world. I especially experience this when reading series. I read so quickly that I love to read a large series (10-20 books) and just completely immerse myself in the writer's world. I imagine conversations with the characters and I imagine how each of them would react in given situations that might be happening in my real life just as if they were real friends I have. When I watch a movie I try hard to be fooled and to not look behind the curtain. I want to live in that world even if just for an hour and a half or two hours. Not because I'm unhappy in my real life, but because it's like a trick. A magic trick that transports me into that world. I recently finished Felix J. Palma's Map of Time. I liked it as a story, but something that annoyed me was that the author kept talking to me. I get that it was a literary device, but it kept pulling me out of the story. It kept focusing my attention on the physical page in front of me and out of the little movie screen of pictures in my head that the story creates for me. In the same way, I don't like disconnects in a movie that put me back in the theater or back in my living room. I want to be living the story completely for the entire time. Avatar was fantastic in that I was there on the planet leaping out of trees and flying on strange birds. The cinematography was excellent. When television shows or movies have the shaky, abrupt movement, home movie quality editing and filming, I don't like it. I see it as amateur quality. I don't want to be outside the film. I want to be transported. At night, I lie awake and tell myself stories. So many, many stories over the last forty-one years. Some are serial stories. Some are proto-novels. I'm working on one now that I've been working on since May. With complete, fully fleshed out characters; a complex plotline; in-depth world development; you name it, this story has it. Not a word has been written down. It exists in my mind. I used to worry about not writing my stories down because I eventually forget them. Usually when I finish one, I almost immediately forget it. It is the fleshing out, the development stage, that interests me. I kind of don't care that they birth themselves out into the cosmos never to see the light of day. To know that I am the only person to have ever witnessed that particular unique story is kind of cool to me. Some recycle into bits and pieces of new stories, others just fade away. And I guess that is a kind of reality in itself. My husband's reality is the one he creates for himself in his day to day life. It's what he tells himself it is. How is that different from the stories I tell myself at night? We are all living in a cooperative delusion. Reality is what we all agree upon. I guess we are both right. |
| Following the prompt from "wordsworth" : My daughter is nineteen. I have limited photographic evidence of her childhood. I'm not sure why but I hate photographs with people in them. I always have. I like panoramas and vistas and most of our vacation photos consist of two or three obligatory shots of clumsily posed group family photos and then literally hundreds of photos of....things. I have no idea why I'm so weird about this. I don't know if it's a bi-polar thing or just a weird me thing. In the event of a fire or earthquake, though, pretty much the only thing I would grab would be my photographs of my dead father and my wedding photos. My wedding photos which were cobbled together through the goodwill and kindness of friends and family because my father in law accidentally threw out my official wedding photos. I cried and cried about it. Isn't that stupid? I hate photos of myself. I hate photos of myself to the point that I am always the person behind the camera and am like some wild woodland creature startling and staring if you happen to catch me unawares before I can dodge your Kodak moment. I think my daughter resents the fact that I have limited photographic evidence of her childhood. I was never a helicopter mom with the camera at the ready wanting to capture her every move. In fact, I was probably the other end of the spectrum. Indifferent and bizarre about mapping the milestones. I'm an egocentric. I'm a stranger in a strange land who doesn't always understand modern customs and cultural norms. Instead I make up my own as I go, hoping people are either too polite to say anything or like me too indifferent to notice. I am a celebrator of un-birthdays and random Tuesdays. I almost always wind up having a migraine on the special day. I certainly don't want to sit around taking pictures of it. I absolutely don't want to be in any of them. Until it's too late. Until it's all gone. Then I cry and gnash my teeth in anguish. Why? Why did I let it all slip away undocumented, unphotographed? Where are all the photos of the original Halloween costumes? Where are all the pictures of the laughter and the silliness? Now I'm left to wonder where it all went wrong. I only have a handful of photos of Hubby and I together. The last posed photos were our engagement photos taken seventeen years ago. I tell myself we'll do that again. That was the only time we ever did a formal family photo, too. Now Monilad is gone from our house. A thousand miles away with a chasm of misunderstanding gaping across that distance. I tell myself the memories I have of the good times and laughter is enough. But, I know from experience that it isn't always. Although I suppose you can't dwell in the past. And what are photographs but the past captured in amber sepia? |
| I have a book inside me that wants to come out. I know several key pieces to it and write scenes in my head at night in bed before I go to sleep. I have come up against a wall, if you will, and have spent some time (since May) off and on trying to figure out a way over, under or around the plot wall. I think the reason I can't sort it out is because I haven't written one word of this novel down. The book exists solely in my head. Solely. I haven't even committed the main character's name to paper anywhere. Not one written word. In fact....this is the first I have acknowledged the novel exists outside of the confines of my head. I think this....blockage...may be the reason why I can't write anything else. The novel is crowding everything else out of my head. It wants to be put on the short list. It wants the hell out of my head. These characters want a voice. It's not an earth shattering novel, either. It's a rather trite genre novel, if what I have so far in my head is any indication. I think that's why I haven't put it down on paper. It isn't super original or mind altering. It's kind of just a rehash of things other people have said/done. But....it's mine and it wants out. Perhaps if I will give it a voice, it will alter into something better. Perhaps it will turn into something earth shattering. ~shrug~ Who knows? Whatever the case. I don't have time to devote to writing novels in November. I have school and schedules to keep and such things as that. I am not one of the stable people of the world who can toss schedules out the window and do what I want for a month. As a bipolar, I have to keep my schedules carefully and deviate at sanity's peril. What I can do, though, is treat it like a school project and map out deadlines and head forward with a carefully constructed writing schedule. Plan for when to have an outline ready; plan for when to have character sketches done. Plan for when I can fit writing into my carefully constructed scheduled life. That's how I will breathe life into these characters and give them their voice. Slowly and carefully. Like I do with all my projects. I've done NaNo before. It was a crazy experience for both me and my family. I can't fall down that rabbit hole again, although my hat is off to those who can. I think I'll try it my way this time and see if it turns out better. |
| I have been slackerific about blogging and writing in general, so I have joined the new "Follow the Leader" round. I thought that would give me some nice impetus to at least write something. It begins next Monday and will run for three weeks, so all the entries I will be making will be in response to prompts from it. This entry is more in the way of a public service announcement. We now return you to your regularly scheduled day.  |
| So the park yesterday was really nice! But smoky as hell. I had two asthma attacks. One right as we got into the park. Happily I had the ole' inhaler at the ready. My professor's solution to me not hiking? He sent me an email Friday and asked me to take an online test and get certified to drive the MSU vehicles. (We took four Expeditions) So, while they were hiking, I got to go off into the park and explore on my own. It was fun! I've never been in the park totally alone. I had two and 1/2 hours to just drive around and see what I wanted. I took pics and notes on what I saw--the geology, the biology, etc. It's a good thing I didn't attempt the hike. The Prof lied to us about both the length and elevation of the hike. It was actually a 3.5 mile hike with 1600 ft of climb. I'd have never made that. I talked to some classmates who did make the hike and they all said that the up-close rock-looking was good, but the vistas were pretty much as I described them--smoke filled valleys where you couldn't see much of the underlying geology.As a bonus, I am now certified to drive university vehicles. So, for upcoming field trips I may be tagged to be a driver. This time, the Prof had to borrow a guy from the ecology lab to drive. This could be cool because then I'd be allowed to go on all three trips not just two. |
| You may recall my backpack math last spring wherein I calculated that some of my textbooks weigh over ten pounds each. In a continuation of the reduction of strain on my spine, I began leaving my laptop at home as well as the university kindly offers free computer terminals all over campus. In a new twist on that.... The campus library offers something like 40+ computer terminals scattered in random groupings around the library that are free to use on a first-come, as long as you need basis. You simply walk up to an open terminal, sit down and get to getting until you are done. No muss, no fuss, no signing up, no nuthin, It's a bit of a sport, like parking on campus. To the stealthy and fittest go the spoils. There are open seating areas interspersed among the computer areas, so people sit and circle like vultures waiting for folks to finish on the computers. Finding an open one is kind of exhilarating. However, sometimes, I have a need for speed and lack of ability to wait. Luckily for me, I'm literate and I read all the nifty emails, posters and flyers the school sends out and posts all over campus. Starting this semester, the library has available for four hour loans brand new fully loaded Dell laptops. All you do is go to the Circulation desk show them your student ID and Bob's your uncle, you are in business with a laptop you can use from anywhere in the library that will PRINT to any printer in the library! Woot!! This blog entry is coming to you live from Library laptop #5. Before I started playing blog, though, I finished writing and printed (from the nifty Library laptop) two soil reports due next week. That's right. I had to come up with two papers full of fun and fabulous things to say about dirt this week. Uggghhh.I shouldn't complain, though. This week's lab was a really pretty one. My lab is Tuesday afternoon at 1pm. This week we drove up Hyalite Canyon to one of the campgrounds and hiked a little way up a hillside to look at dirt. Meadow dirt vs forest dirt. Aside from the riveting dirt looking, the drive and views were spectacular. Hyalite Canyon is in the National Forest and the fall colors are just beginning to show up there. For most of the drive you follow Hyalite Creek as it winds through the canyon. It was about 75 degrees and sunny. Just a gorgeous day. You know....aside from the dirt looking. On Saturday we go to Yellowstone for my Yellowstone class. I'm excited and looking forward to it, except I'm going to have to talk to my professor today. Apparently a key component to this trip is a 2 mile hike up Purple Mountain. We are supposed to hike up there and have lunch and a lecture. Ummmm.....it's smoky as hell here and in the park. There's no way this asthmatic is hiking 2 miles up a mountain in the allotted 20 minutes. I think they are going to have to leave me in the parking lot and hike without me. I can walk around Grand Prismatic Spring on the boardwalk, but when you start throwing in elevation? No. Just no. Not with me not being able to do any exercise at all this summer between the smoke and gall bladder surgery. Hell, I struggle to walk around campus on bad smoke days without dying from asthma. Hubby says not to get all stressed about it. He says that legally they can't make me hiking up a mountain a component of my grade because that would be a violation of my civil rights under the disabilities act since I am physically incapable of doing it. I told him that's fine for him to say, but he's never been the fat, out of shape, asthmatic old lady in a class. People judge you for that shit. They just do. Oh, well. Nothing to be done before Saturday. I can't control the wildfires. |
View Portfolio
Visit Notebook
Send Gift Points
Awards
Badges
Send Email
Community Newsfeed
General Discussion
Sponsored Items
Book of Trinkets
Static Items
Books
Groups
Interactive Stories
Audio
Campfire Creatives
Community Notes
Crossword Puzzles
Documents
Folders
Images
In & Outs
Madlibs
Photo Albums
Polls
Product Reviews
Quizzes
Survey Forms
Web Pages
Word Searches
