Also, I ended up working at the sail loft for a few hours on Sunday, followed by babysitting, which is always good. Hannah-Bear has such a strong imagination and is so willing for everything, and this marked the first time Sam decided not to listen to me because he is 10 and isn’t listening to anyone anymore and it’s getting pretty horrible. SO he taunted me and I had to tell him he is no longer my friend, but a child that I babysit, which he said he didn’t care about but I know it’s hard for him to hear it. It won’t change his behavior at all though. Anyway, I am babysitting for them again this weekend, and a few weeks from now, so I’ll get to see them more.
This led to a mighty long day for me, and I must say I am just a little more than exhausted today. I had a cup of coffee for the first time all week, and it didn’t help. I have one of those really groggy headaches that I thought was due to dehydration but clearly isn’t and could potentially be the onset of a cold. The idea of which just hit me right now so I have to go take vitamins and drink tea.
Ok so I’m back, and vitamined up. Which brings me to my point about the detox and fitness etc. I am floundering. I cannot afford the diet I had planned on, or the lovely home-made spa ingredients (produce) that I had desired, so I am now really confused. I still feel like a cleansing is uber important, but I am also off track with running because of the ankle, and am quite frustrated with that.
New breakthrough: September is NATIONAL YOGA MONTH (you cannot imagine how happy I am with this). Here are resources for those of you who have been thinking about taking yoga (because I prod, and I claim it is the best health resource out there, and because it makes me so happy and you wonder how this works)
I have signed up for the National Yoga Challenge, 30 days of yoga (ironically, I had thought about doing this this morning, before I realized it was Yoga Month and a challenge existed): http://30dayyogachallenge.com/
The people who came up with National Yoga Month created this program where you can go to this website: http://www.yogamonth.org/ and get a week’s worth of free yoga. Now you have, seriously, NO EXCUSES. There is a wealth of yoga websites of videos you can do at home so you aren’t embarrassed (not that you would, but I know you use it as an excuse to not go to a class). Try yogatoday.com, yogadownload.com, and you’ll be set. My mom even offered to go to a class with me this week. SO THERE!
Anyway, so here are my thoughts that make these paragraphs into one thought:
I am scrapping the previous detox/fitness/spa plan. Here is the new one:
Fitness:
Yoga in the morning when I wake up (which is my favorite time because I am no longer sore when I move for the rest of the day, and it wakes you up, and its not scary like running).
Two yoga classes a week (after work, no problem)
Three runs during the week (after work, no problem, after a six mile run I will still be home and showered earlier than if I had gone to yoga ) (don’t worry the six mile runs are a long way off with this ankle!)
One long run on the weekend (I haven’t been able to do this because of my ankle, but I feel if I start doing shorter runs this week and am diligent about icing it, I can crank out a long hobble this Saturday at some point before the party).
Food:
Whatever I can afford. No joke. But limited: Vegan for the next two weeks, with one solid meal (lunch), two snacks (breakfast and afternoon) and a liquid dinner, providing enough time for a regular twelve hour detox over night. This will be high in fruits and raw vegetables, and not a real problem as I haven’t been wanting breakfast lately anyway. Example today: breakfast: banana with peanut butter, lunch: wrap of spinach tortilla with raw spinach, roasted red pepper hummus, corn, mung beans sautéed in onions and garlic, snack: raw red pepper and sunflower seeds, dinner: tomato soup I made this weekend, and the rest of the leeks I boiled in red wine on Friday.
Two confessions: when I got to babysitting after the raw food fest, I made myself a sandwich of freshly baked chicken, American cheese and yellow mustard on potato bread. I made a point to have as few nutrients as possible.
I have chicken breasts in the freezer that I am DYING to bread and bake, but I only want to bread it if I have flax and chia seeds and other weird foodie grains, and not just bread crumbs. SO I will wait until I can afford them, which will be much later.
Spa:
I will wait. I can’t do it right now, so I’ll have to do with being lazy as a relaxing agent. Stay alert for more updates on this promising new venture.
for days that seem like dreams are often the sweetest reality...
Monday, August 31, 2009
Hippy Fest, parts 1 and 2 of 2
So, this weekend was not at all like I had planned. First off, when I got home on Friday I decided, to get back at my better judgment, to go out with the roommate and friends to a pizza/bar/hipster mecca where I promptly and unwisely ate food I shouldn’t have, and had a drink that I shouldn’t have, and therefore gained calories, lost money, and was about as exhausted as if I had dug a tunnel to China. It was fun though, so whatevs.
Then the Raw Spirit Festival. Interesting. Not as much fun as I thought, for the following reasons: a) I was alone (which was actually what I had wanted, but ended up working against me. I claim an actual presence, instead of a thought presence, of the boy would have made it better, at least for conversationalist purposes. He also eats meat.), b) I was bored (people were not as friendly as I thought they would be – not one person asked where I was from, what I did, why I was there, or even if I was 100% raw. OK I lied, a deaf man asked me that, but just him. And does it count if he isn’t actually SAYING it?), c) I was uber craving alone time (OK so this seems weird since I just said it wasn’t fun because I was alone. I guess the difference is I was alone doing something that would have been better with people, but not alone doing something that would have been done best alone, i.e. being alone). D) I was hungry. I tried to eat raw the whole time I was there, and caved on Sunday when I just ate vegan. But the one day I ate raw, it definitely had an effect.
I did not end up camping there on Saturday since I was working registration and got off an hour early and realized a few things, like I had no tent, it was going to rain, and I did not feel like being a gourmet buffet to a nation of mosquitos. So I drove home gratefully and got a few hours of sleep before going back. This is the first time I had been given the opportunity to camp and didn’t take it – I love camping. But I felt that it had the potential to be hugely rocking fun and wild, if I could make a few friends. But people didn’t care that much. And I promise I wasn’t being antisocial, or grumpy. I was very smily and open. But alas, no raw friends.
So I my camera wasn’t working, but there wasn’t all that much special to see anyway, so I culled a couple photos off the web so you can see what it was like. In no particular order you get photos of: Happy Oasis, whom I met, who is actually a pretty reasonable hippy, but I don’t think I would get along with her, musicians that were actually there, and a bunch of photos of people that I’m fairly certain I saw there. In abundance were the following: lots of hair, lots of dreads (both clean and filthy), lots of tie dye, lots of skin, lots of skipping and frolicking, lots of people you would never expect were raw vegans, lots and lots and lots of young wandering youth. I realized a few things in my 10 hour stint as a raw foodist, all of which I am grateful for now knowing. This includes: I am grateful for the East Coast. Seriously there is only so much “everyone is god, we are all love, and we are each other” conversations you can have with people, especially when they don’t care to get to know you. Sometimes you just want to talk about something real without having “healing energies” or “the universe plans all” or “beautiful aura” stuck in there somewhere. I wonder if I really could handle California. Also these people are fukken beautiful. Seriously beautiful. All toned, and bright, and confident. I definitely felt like I had to go do ten hours of yoga when I got home. Which is convenient, since September is National Yoga Month.
Then the Raw Spirit Festival. Interesting. Not as much fun as I thought, for the following reasons: a) I was alone (which was actually what I had wanted, but ended up working against me. I claim an actual presence, instead of a thought presence, of the boy would have made it better, at least for conversationalist purposes. He also eats meat.), b) I was bored (people were not as friendly as I thought they would be – not one person asked where I was from, what I did, why I was there, or even if I was 100% raw. OK I lied, a deaf man asked me that, but just him. And does it count if he isn’t actually SAYING it?), c) I was uber craving alone time (OK so this seems weird since I just said it wasn’t fun because I was alone. I guess the difference is I was alone doing something that would have been better with people, but not alone doing something that would have been done best alone, i.e. being alone). D) I was hungry. I tried to eat raw the whole time I was there, and caved on Sunday when I just ate vegan. But the one day I ate raw, it definitely had an effect.
I did not end up camping there on Saturday since I was working registration and got off an hour early and realized a few things, like I had no tent, it was going to rain, and I did not feel like being a gourmet buffet to a nation of mosquitos. So I drove home gratefully and got a few hours of sleep before going back. This is the first time I had been given the opportunity to camp and didn’t take it – I love camping. But I felt that it had the potential to be hugely rocking fun and wild, if I could make a few friends. But people didn’t care that much. And I promise I wasn’t being antisocial, or grumpy. I was very smily and open. But alas, no raw friends.
So I my camera wasn’t working, but there wasn’t all that much special to see anyway, so I culled a couple photos off the web so you can see what it was like. In no particular order you get photos of: Happy Oasis, whom I met, who is actually a pretty reasonable hippy, but I don’t think I would get along with her, musicians that were actually there, and a bunch of photos of people that I’m fairly certain I saw there. In abundance were the following: lots of hair, lots of dreads (both clean and filthy), lots of tie dye, lots of skin, lots of skipping and frolicking, lots of people you would never expect were raw vegans, lots and lots and lots of young wandering youth. I realized a few things in my 10 hour stint as a raw foodist, all of which I am grateful for now knowing. This includes: I am grateful for the East Coast. Seriously there is only so much “everyone is god, we are all love, and we are each other” conversations you can have with people, especially when they don’t care to get to know you. Sometimes you just want to talk about something real without having “healing energies” or “the universe plans all” or “beautiful aura” stuck in there somewhere. I wonder if I really could handle California. Also these people are fukken beautiful. Seriously beautiful. All toned, and bright, and confident. I definitely felt like I had to go do ten hours of yoga when I got home. Which is convenient, since September is National Yoga Month.
Friday, August 28, 2009
Velvet Vinyasas
I walked out of yoga yesterday. Yup, that’s right, just picked up my mat twenty minutes into it and left. And almost cried on my way out.
It was just too fast – which is odd for me to say, because I love to power through vinyasas. Also, my ankle had swollen to perhaps three times its size and is still achy – it seems to be getting more consistently painful as the week goes on, as opposed to tender and sore. Perhaps I have been reading too much on the Ashtanga Primary Series, which I long to try in my room, taking my sweet time. I fantasize about waking up and doing the full series every morning and going throughout my day with that yoga buzz and tingle in my arms and a dull-free sacrum. So tonight I plan on going home, putting away the wardrobe I have lying on my bed that has been there all week (no joke), and going through the full primary series. And then I’ll do it again.
I just had a monetary freak out. They have happened less and less recently and no, not because I am earning more, but because I am letting go of the need to have control over EVERYTHING. Anyhoo, I applied to a bunch of tutoring jobs as well as, get this, an all-female car valet service. I checked out the website and it looks like it’s a bunch of college-age girls who do it, and that there are, true, events where you have to wear short shorts, but also a lot of regular parties that people just feel more comfortable with using young girls instead of creepy older Hispanics. http://www.velvetkeysvalet.com/ In my application I included my profile pic from facebook, and a pic of Lauren and I from a patio party a while ago where I’m wearing that little black skirt. I tried to find a decent bathing suit shot but, unfortunately, my modeling portfolio is a bit lacking at the moment. Hilarious, right? This is a bit more appropriate form of the plan from earlier of the year of cocktail waitress. Anyway, I thought getting paid and getting tips to drive around sweet cars sounds pretty great to me. I think I’m going to have to forgo a social life for a while guys, as I can’t afford groceries. Seriously.
It was just too fast – which is odd for me to say, because I love to power through vinyasas. Also, my ankle had swollen to perhaps three times its size and is still achy – it seems to be getting more consistently painful as the week goes on, as opposed to tender and sore. Perhaps I have been reading too much on the Ashtanga Primary Series, which I long to try in my room, taking my sweet time. I fantasize about waking up and doing the full series every morning and going throughout my day with that yoga buzz and tingle in my arms and a dull-free sacrum. So tonight I plan on going home, putting away the wardrobe I have lying on my bed that has been there all week (no joke), and going through the full primary series. And then I’ll do it again.
I just had a monetary freak out. They have happened less and less recently and no, not because I am earning more, but because I am letting go of the need to have control over EVERYTHING. Anyhoo, I applied to a bunch of tutoring jobs as well as, get this, an all-female car valet service. I checked out the website and it looks like it’s a bunch of college-age girls who do it, and that there are, true, events where you have to wear short shorts, but also a lot of regular parties that people just feel more comfortable with using young girls instead of creepy older Hispanics. http://www.velvetkeysvalet.com/ In my application I included my profile pic from facebook, and a pic of Lauren and I from a patio party a while ago where I’m wearing that little black skirt. I tried to find a decent bathing suit shot but, unfortunately, my modeling portfolio is a bit lacking at the moment. Hilarious, right? This is a bit more appropriate form of the plan from earlier of the year of cocktail waitress. Anyway, I thought getting paid and getting tips to drive around sweet cars sounds pretty great to me. I think I’m going to have to forgo a social life for a while guys, as I can’t afford groceries. Seriously.
Thursday, August 27, 2009
Gadgets
My lady friends
I have been doing much bemused longing and reading of food blogs lately, as you well know, and I have been convinced of the necessity of a few items:
A Champion Juicer (I found one for $60 on Craigslist the other day!)
A VitaMix (like this one I entered to win here at one of my fav blogs: http://jessiehawkins.com/?p=89)
A Spiral Veggie Peeler
A full Pantry
A dehydrator.
How wonderful would life be with these in a kitchen next to a full garden, with a dog and a lot of time for yoga?
.. I dream
I have been doing much bemused longing and reading of food blogs lately, as you well know, and I have been convinced of the necessity of a few items:
A Champion Juicer (I found one for $60 on Craigslist the other day!)
A VitaMix (like this one I entered to win here at one of my fav blogs: http://jessiehawkins.com/?p=89)
A Spiral Veggie Peeler
A full Pantry
A dehydrator.
How wonderful would life be with these in a kitchen next to a full garden, with a dog and a lot of time for yoga?
.. I dream
Blogging as a hobby
The number of blogs I follow has officially hit 101 today folks.
TAKE THAT INTERWUBS!
TAKE THAT INTERWUBS!
and he's off!
All I want to do is cry and sit and listen to angsty post-electric Dylan and eat my sunflower seeds and watch rocky movies because it makes me feel like at least someone is getting their anger/stress out by punching other people, when really I just feel like I was punched repeatedly and left to wilt.
Countdown: 21 days. Then it’s over, folks, then it’s over.
Countdown: 21 days. Then it’s over, folks, then it’s over.
Wednesday, August 26, 2009
White Castle= Vitamins
Yesterday was a fat day. And I mean that in a good way.
There are fat days where you want to cry and stop eating and lay around wrapped in a mumu or a giant sweater all day because you are seriously too big to fit into any of your clothes well or fit on the metro to go anywhere. That was not yesterday (it was weeks ago when I came back from the beach).
Yesterday was a day where I caught myself in the windows on my way to work, went to the CVS and bought (and then ate) a box of white castle microwave hamburgers and mini ravioli’s, and realized that if I keep eating this way (even if I was hungover) and finding excuses not to run or go to yoga (I know I know my ankle will heal eventually), I will gain weight.
And it was an okay feeling. I realized that I didn’t care. If I wanted to eat white castle hamburgers I would. And then, when I went home, instead of freaking out about it all, I looked at myself in the mirror and said “don’t be silly, Annelies, you’re nowhere near fat”.
So today is a good day and I feel better. I am having an internal fight over this running-in-the-morning thing. I am very good about getting up in the morning, but not so good at doing anything once I do. I love the slow cold mornings and feel like running through it breaks its holiness, and I am also very very stiff so moving is pretty painful in general. Also if I am tired at all, I will not run. I am that lazy. I would not have tripped over that bottle, or sprained my ankle, if it was the end of my run or at any other time of day (I take this to be a sign). But I can’t always run in the evening because I have yoga. And There is no other time for me to go to yoga because they do not offer later classes and I have already paid for all of it.
So, here are options for me:
1) kick myself out of bed in the mornings and run anyway
2) run in the evenings either after yoga or on days when I am not at yoga (which allows me to still hit the 2-yoga-a-week/necessary yoga between runs goals)
The boy leaves tomorrow. I am kind of scared. Also kind of looking forward to it. I have a constant war in my head – I wouldn’t trade him for anything at all (even winning the lottery) (even paying off all my debts and my parent’s debts) (even a lifetime supply of chocolate) BUT I keep thinking that there was so much about being single that I loved. Really loved. And so much that I wish I had now. For example: my own schedule. Planning a weekend around waking up and running and doing yoga and going to the store and cooking and reading and solo-hiking and weird festivals is so much more pleasant than planning a weekend around 40-minute drives and who gets out of work when, or waiting until the other one is awake to go get coffee (this is not a complaint, mind you, about the drive or sleeping in at all. It is just truth).
So I am taking advantage of the next three weeks. Here is what I plan, considering it takes 21 days to make a habit:
- wake up at 6 every day no exceptions and get out of bed. I don’t have to run, but if I don’t run I must do yoga.
- Detox diet: which subsists of raw fruit and veggies, nuts and cooked beans or lentils and herbal tea and at least three days of fasting on a lemonade concoction (I know giles was crazy and I don’t even know if I agree with the whole needing to detox phenomenon especially considering I eat healthy anyway – except for the white castle hamburgers – but I figured I want to know what it’s like. Can’t knock it till you’ve tried it, right?)
- This weekend I am volunteering for the Raw Spirit Festival which will entail a lot of raw food, yoga, and meeting cool hippies. Expect lots of photos. Also I will try to camp there with them on Saturday evening since my shifts end at 10 pm on Sat and start at 8 on Sunday and it’s at the Patuxent 4-H center over by Davidsonville.
- The following weekend is the roommate’s birthday party, and a trip to Philadelphia to see Brendan and my old friend Marissa. I will make sure to eat enough food that I do not pass out while driving.
- The weekend after that is still up in the air, but will include a long run, lots of yoga, and tea.
- After that, Lauren comes in (yay!) and the boy comes back (yay) and Severn Riverkeeper has their benefit that I am volunteering for (yay!) and I should be totally up and awake every morning and cleaned out (so I can go back to the hot dogs, right guys?)
Sound good? Thought so.
I had a great realization this past week that can be summed up to: It’s My Life.
As in, it’s MINE. If I don’t want to wake up every morning and run, I don’t have to. I may face the consequences later, but I don’t have to do it. If I don’t feel like being a dutiful yogi who practices every day and preaches peace to every ant I refuse to step on, I don’t have to. I can do it just to help my back. I am allowed to do it only when I want to. There are no SHOULD’s that I am obliged to pay attention to. I am who I create myself to be. I wish I could communicate the profundity of this realization, since writing it out it seems so simple. But it is a deep and traveling acceptance of self. Perhaps this is why I didn’t cry when I felt fat yesterday.
In other news, Here is a picture I took of myself this morning with my new haircut. Please me lenient, as my hair is not dry yet and I am tired, cranky, in pain, hungry, and cranky (yes, that cranky, twice!).
Also in other news, I have officially begun to advertise for my Study Skills course, called Learning Coach, which will begin in the next few weeks. 8 weekends of 3 hours on saturday morning, telling girls how to take notes. I am uber excited, actually, and think it will be fun and a great test of my tutoring/teaching skills, as well as my course preparation abilities. I am really enjoying preparing for it. I e-mailed all of the administrators at my old high school with an intro letter, a flier, and my resume, and will go post the flier there this weekend. 12 student limit, $750 a course. Perhaps I can buy groceries next month after all!!
There are fat days where you want to cry and stop eating and lay around wrapped in a mumu or a giant sweater all day because you are seriously too big to fit into any of your clothes well or fit on the metro to go anywhere. That was not yesterday (it was weeks ago when I came back from the beach).
Yesterday was a day where I caught myself in the windows on my way to work, went to the CVS and bought (and then ate) a box of white castle microwave hamburgers and mini ravioli’s, and realized that if I keep eating this way (even if I was hungover) and finding excuses not to run or go to yoga (I know I know my ankle will heal eventually), I will gain weight.
And it was an okay feeling. I realized that I didn’t care. If I wanted to eat white castle hamburgers I would. And then, when I went home, instead of freaking out about it all, I looked at myself in the mirror and said “don’t be silly, Annelies, you’re nowhere near fat”.
So today is a good day and I feel better. I am having an internal fight over this running-in-the-morning thing. I am very good about getting up in the morning, but not so good at doing anything once I do. I love the slow cold mornings and feel like running through it breaks its holiness, and I am also very very stiff so moving is pretty painful in general. Also if I am tired at all, I will not run. I am that lazy. I would not have tripped over that bottle, or sprained my ankle, if it was the end of my run or at any other time of day (I take this to be a sign). But I can’t always run in the evening because I have yoga. And There is no other time for me to go to yoga because they do not offer later classes and I have already paid for all of it.
So, here are options for me:
1) kick myself out of bed in the mornings and run anyway
2) run in the evenings either after yoga or on days when I am not at yoga (which allows me to still hit the 2-yoga-a-week/necessary yoga between runs goals)
The boy leaves tomorrow. I am kind of scared. Also kind of looking forward to it. I have a constant war in my head – I wouldn’t trade him for anything at all (even winning the lottery) (even paying off all my debts and my parent’s debts) (even a lifetime supply of chocolate) BUT I keep thinking that there was so much about being single that I loved. Really loved. And so much that I wish I had now. For example: my own schedule. Planning a weekend around waking up and running and doing yoga and going to the store and cooking and reading and solo-hiking and weird festivals is so much more pleasant than planning a weekend around 40-minute drives and who gets out of work when, or waiting until the other one is awake to go get coffee (this is not a complaint, mind you, about the drive or sleeping in at all. It is just truth).
So I am taking advantage of the next three weeks. Here is what I plan, considering it takes 21 days to make a habit:
- wake up at 6 every day no exceptions and get out of bed. I don’t have to run, but if I don’t run I must do yoga.
- Detox diet: which subsists of raw fruit and veggies, nuts and cooked beans or lentils and herbal tea and at least three days of fasting on a lemonade concoction (I know giles was crazy and I don’t even know if I agree with the whole needing to detox phenomenon especially considering I eat healthy anyway – except for the white castle hamburgers – but I figured I want to know what it’s like. Can’t knock it till you’ve tried it, right?)
- This weekend I am volunteering for the Raw Spirit Festival which will entail a lot of raw food, yoga, and meeting cool hippies. Expect lots of photos. Also I will try to camp there with them on Saturday evening since my shifts end at 10 pm on Sat and start at 8 on Sunday and it’s at the Patuxent 4-H center over by Davidsonville.
- The following weekend is the roommate’s birthday party, and a trip to Philadelphia to see Brendan and my old friend Marissa. I will make sure to eat enough food that I do not pass out while driving.
- The weekend after that is still up in the air, but will include a long run, lots of yoga, and tea.
- After that, Lauren comes in (yay!) and the boy comes back (yay) and Severn Riverkeeper has their benefit that I am volunteering for (yay!) and I should be totally up and awake every morning and cleaned out (so I can go back to the hot dogs, right guys?)
Sound good? Thought so.
I had a great realization this past week that can be summed up to: It’s My Life.
As in, it’s MINE. If I don’t want to wake up every morning and run, I don’t have to. I may face the consequences later, but I don’t have to do it. If I don’t feel like being a dutiful yogi who practices every day and preaches peace to every ant I refuse to step on, I don’t have to. I can do it just to help my back. I am allowed to do it only when I want to. There are no SHOULD’s that I am obliged to pay attention to. I am who I create myself to be. I wish I could communicate the profundity of this realization, since writing it out it seems so simple. But it is a deep and traveling acceptance of self. Perhaps this is why I didn’t cry when I felt fat yesterday.
In other news, Here is a picture I took of myself this morning with my new haircut. Please me lenient, as my hair is not dry yet and I am tired, cranky, in pain, hungry, and cranky (yes, that cranky, twice!).
Also in other news, I have officially begun to advertise for my Study Skills course, called Learning Coach, which will begin in the next few weeks. 8 weekends of 3 hours on saturday morning, telling girls how to take notes. I am uber excited, actually, and think it will be fun and a great test of my tutoring/teaching skills, as well as my course preparation abilities. I am really enjoying preparing for it. I e-mailed all of the administrators at my old high school with an intro letter, a flier, and my resume, and will go post the flier there this weekend. 12 student limit, $750 a course. Perhaps I can buy groceries next month after all!!
Tuesday, August 25, 2009
Raw Spirit
I have been a delinquent blogger.
I apologize.
I am staying home tonight to fix this.
Also I am uber excited - along with my self-designed home-spa weekend, I am volunteering at this: http://www.rawspirit.com/
the Raw Spirit Festival, where I get to spend lots of time with fellow hippies and learn about raw food and yoga and probably get hugged a whole lot.
I apologize.
I am staying home tonight to fix this.
Also I am uber excited - along with my self-designed home-spa weekend, I am volunteering at this: http://www.rawspirit.com/
the Raw Spirit Festival, where I get to spend lots of time with fellow hippies and learn about raw food and yoga and probably get hugged a whole lot.
Friday, August 21, 2009
music
also
if I hear any more beyonce coming out of people's headphones on the metro from half a car away, I swear I will stare them down until the sound of my frustration will be louder than their two bit music. and man, I can stare one down if I want to.
That is all.
if I hear any more beyonce coming out of people's headphones on the metro from half a car away, I swear I will stare them down until the sound of my frustration will be louder than their two bit music. and man, I can stare one down if I want to.
That is all.
Another one Bites the Dust... literally
Here is what happens when the world is trying to tell me to chill out and slow down, a story of my life beginning at Noon of Thursday, August 20, 2009:
My boss leaves to go have tea with Royalty, bringing his wife and daughter along. I am left with nothing to do, so for three hours I watch television via hulu on my computer. I am bored. My mind goes back and forth over whether or not to cut my hair short – an agonizing decision.
It is time to leave, finally, so I do and metro home. On the walk home I talk to the boy who is supportive of the haircut and I come up with a fabulous schedule for our fabulous weekend. I get ready to go to yoga, walk to the car, and it is covered in ants. I mean the interior is crawling with them. Now, I have a personal war against the armies of Ants-Where-They-Should-Not-Be. I have no problem with; even encourage the presence of, ants out of doors. Even in picnics. But two places they do not belong is IN MY KITCHEN and INSIDE MY CAR. So I run and get the ant spray, which has been such an effective nuclear bomb against them in my apartment, and re-enact Vietnam in my car. Clearly I cannot healthily drive to yoga in a car smelling of ant spray and let it sit enclosed in the sun for an hour and a half, and get back inside of it to go home. So I go to the gas station and vacuum the car. It was needed. Clearly.
So I don’t make it to yoga, and decide to go home, change, and get my haircut instead. So I rescue the roommate from reality television and drag her along on my hair-cutting adventure, where she graciously rescues me from receiving one of several optional Mrs. Brady-type haircuts. I now have 10 inches of dry, strung-out hair to donate to some poor kid with cancer. I do so love doing this. And now I am left with not enough hair to pull into a ponytail. It is lighter, and healthier and that is all I care about right now.
Anyway, I go to my mom’s to drop off laundry, and she is sad. I hate it when she’s sad. She is perhaps rightly sad at what she is sad about, and is more than often not sad about it because she is a strong and admirable lady, but also human with more than any human should be stuck with on her back, and therefore sometimes sad. I hate it when she’s sad.
So we go home, I try to buy tomato soup at the grocery store on the way (which is all I wanted period to eat yesterday but everywhere was out!) but the lines were too long, so I ate crumbs from the fridge, and went to sleep.
Today I wake up at 5:45 excited to run. I love it when this happens because it is rare and the fact that it is happening makes it even more exciting. So I put on my shoes, etc. and head out. Five minutes in to it, I pass the auto mechanic’s, and faceplant. That’s right, I trip on a glass bottle someone had thrown out there on the sidewalk the night before, and since the sun is not yet up, I cannot see it, and fall down. It is not yet 6 am and I am laying on the concrete, crying like a child, because I am tired, with a skinned knee and a severely twisted and terribly painful ankle, and no means of finishing my run. I am a block from home.
I compromise and tell myself if I go home and ice this ankle, I can still do my long run tomorrow (we will see), so I hobble back. I make myself an ice pack, and read a bit of Dostoevsky, and fall asleep. When I wake up I shower (which is hard when you can’t put pressure on one foot) and, since I am unhappy with my food source, put the rest of my edible groceries in a bag and walk out the door, with the hopes that since it is still early I will have enough time to stop at Starbucks and get something to eat to make me feel better. Halfway to the metro I realize something spilled in my bag.
But no, it’s not that something spilled. The cold I feel is actually vegetable oil secretions from the cooked sweet potato in my bag, leaving a giant fist-size oil stain on my rear. There is not enough time to go back and change pants, so I continue on the metro with this stain, trying to cover it up with my dirty lunch bag.
I arrive in Starbucks, excited because they have food, and not really wanting coffee (because work provides it), but order a latte anyway. I grab some yogurt because the place is uber-rushed, and realize that the guy did not charge me for my yogurt and it’s too busy and loud to correct him so I end up walking out with just a latte. Bummer. So since it is still early I go upstairs, drop everything off, and leave again to go grab a bagel at the rival food/coffee/lunch spot next to Starbucks.
So far today at work I have been corrected on three things that my predecessor did wrong, and two things that I had no control over. But at least I am learning.
Up in line for this weekend: Inglorious Basterds, a long run/hobble in Annapolis (10 miles of walking? Sure), consulting work for the sail loft, a great-ass-party with the roommate, a pre-dawn trip to Ocean City on Sunday, and my mother’s birthday.
This is the second week in a row that I have felt I could just throw to the birds because they were so unproductive and frustrating. Next week will not be better since the boy leaves. Perhaps my spa weekend next weekend will make up for that. I see lots of cheap champagne in my future.
My boss leaves to go have tea with Royalty, bringing his wife and daughter along. I am left with nothing to do, so for three hours I watch television via hulu on my computer. I am bored. My mind goes back and forth over whether or not to cut my hair short – an agonizing decision.
It is time to leave, finally, so I do and metro home. On the walk home I talk to the boy who is supportive of the haircut and I come up with a fabulous schedule for our fabulous weekend. I get ready to go to yoga, walk to the car, and it is covered in ants. I mean the interior is crawling with them. Now, I have a personal war against the armies of Ants-Where-They-Should-Not-Be. I have no problem with; even encourage the presence of, ants out of doors. Even in picnics. But two places they do not belong is IN MY KITCHEN and INSIDE MY CAR. So I run and get the ant spray, which has been such an effective nuclear bomb against them in my apartment, and re-enact Vietnam in my car. Clearly I cannot healthily drive to yoga in a car smelling of ant spray and let it sit enclosed in the sun for an hour and a half, and get back inside of it to go home. So I go to the gas station and vacuum the car. It was needed. Clearly.
So I don’t make it to yoga, and decide to go home, change, and get my haircut instead. So I rescue the roommate from reality television and drag her along on my hair-cutting adventure, where she graciously rescues me from receiving one of several optional Mrs. Brady-type haircuts. I now have 10 inches of dry, strung-out hair to donate to some poor kid with cancer. I do so love doing this. And now I am left with not enough hair to pull into a ponytail. It is lighter, and healthier and that is all I care about right now.
Anyway, I go to my mom’s to drop off laundry, and she is sad. I hate it when she’s sad. She is perhaps rightly sad at what she is sad about, and is more than often not sad about it because she is a strong and admirable lady, but also human with more than any human should be stuck with on her back, and therefore sometimes sad. I hate it when she’s sad.
So we go home, I try to buy tomato soup at the grocery store on the way (which is all I wanted period to eat yesterday but everywhere was out!) but the lines were too long, so I ate crumbs from the fridge, and went to sleep.
Today I wake up at 5:45 excited to run. I love it when this happens because it is rare and the fact that it is happening makes it even more exciting. So I put on my shoes, etc. and head out. Five minutes in to it, I pass the auto mechanic’s, and faceplant. That’s right, I trip on a glass bottle someone had thrown out there on the sidewalk the night before, and since the sun is not yet up, I cannot see it, and fall down. It is not yet 6 am and I am laying on the concrete, crying like a child, because I am tired, with a skinned knee and a severely twisted and terribly painful ankle, and no means of finishing my run. I am a block from home.
I compromise and tell myself if I go home and ice this ankle, I can still do my long run tomorrow (we will see), so I hobble back. I make myself an ice pack, and read a bit of Dostoevsky, and fall asleep. When I wake up I shower (which is hard when you can’t put pressure on one foot) and, since I am unhappy with my food source, put the rest of my edible groceries in a bag and walk out the door, with the hopes that since it is still early I will have enough time to stop at Starbucks and get something to eat to make me feel better. Halfway to the metro I realize something spilled in my bag.
But no, it’s not that something spilled. The cold I feel is actually vegetable oil secretions from the cooked sweet potato in my bag, leaving a giant fist-size oil stain on my rear. There is not enough time to go back and change pants, so I continue on the metro with this stain, trying to cover it up with my dirty lunch bag.
I arrive in Starbucks, excited because they have food, and not really wanting coffee (because work provides it), but order a latte anyway. I grab some yogurt because the place is uber-rushed, and realize that the guy did not charge me for my yogurt and it’s too busy and loud to correct him so I end up walking out with just a latte. Bummer. So since it is still early I go upstairs, drop everything off, and leave again to go grab a bagel at the rival food/coffee/lunch spot next to Starbucks.
So far today at work I have been corrected on three things that my predecessor did wrong, and two things that I had no control over. But at least I am learning.
Up in line for this weekend: Inglorious Basterds, a long run/hobble in Annapolis (10 miles of walking? Sure), consulting work for the sail loft, a great-ass-party with the roommate, a pre-dawn trip to Ocean City on Sunday, and my mother’s birthday.
This is the second week in a row that I have felt I could just throw to the birds because they were so unproductive and frustrating. Next week will not be better since the boy leaves. Perhaps my spa weekend next weekend will make up for that. I see lots of cheap champagne in my future.
Thursday, August 20, 2009
Wednesday, August 19, 2009
New Blog
Today has been ridiculously novel -
I have, get this, done the following:
- sent my poetry off to eight different online poetry journals
- created a new blog.
That's right. Another one. But get this- this one is just for poetry. I have posted what I perceive as the cream of my crop of several hundred poems, and will continue to put my better ones up there as well.
This numbers game of publishing work is interesting. The comparison to finding a job is pretty appropriate when you think about it (Thank you Katrina) but, there is another hitch. When applying for jobs, it is not entirely a problem to keep sending out your resume and knowing that eventually, statistically, something will hit solid ground, because you have just that one resume (ok this can be debated, I myself have several) (at least one resume per job possible). The poetry thing, however, is more difficult. Knowing that it took me three months of continual resume-submissions to find a job (10 a day, five days a week, three months, no joke), I have no problem thinking that it could take me over three years to get one poem published. Here is why: I have over 200 poems. And I am writing more as we speak. Most journals only take 3-5 at a time, per submission, and most of them only take one submission per journal (so, anywhere from one to twelve submissions a year). Anyway, I could potentially NEVER submit all my poetry.
I guess the point is that, with enough submissions I can get a few poems published, and eventually an entire book, which would take care of the backlog of poems and get me started on publishing new ones.
Anyway, this new poetry blog will take care of my poems so I will no longer be publishing them on this blog. The new blog's name: SEARCH. (Creative, I know, right?) and it's address is searchpoems.blogspot.com
On it now you will find :
-the best from Seattle
- the poems from the chapbook I published for all you guys a few years ago (bet you forgot about that one)
- and various other poems. Check it out!
I have, get this, done the following:
- sent my poetry off to eight different online poetry journals
- created a new blog.
That's right. Another one. But get this- this one is just for poetry. I have posted what I perceive as the cream of my crop of several hundred poems, and will continue to put my better ones up there as well.
This numbers game of publishing work is interesting. The comparison to finding a job is pretty appropriate when you think about it (Thank you Katrina) but, there is another hitch. When applying for jobs, it is not entirely a problem to keep sending out your resume and knowing that eventually, statistically, something will hit solid ground, because you have just that one resume (ok this can be debated, I myself have several) (at least one resume per job possible). The poetry thing, however, is more difficult. Knowing that it took me three months of continual resume-submissions to find a job (10 a day, five days a week, three months, no joke), I have no problem thinking that it could take me over three years to get one poem published. Here is why: I have over 200 poems. And I am writing more as we speak. Most journals only take 3-5 at a time, per submission, and most of them only take one submission per journal (so, anywhere from one to twelve submissions a year). Anyway, I could potentially NEVER submit all my poetry.
I guess the point is that, with enough submissions I can get a few poems published, and eventually an entire book, which would take care of the backlog of poems and get me started on publishing new ones.
Anyway, this new poetry blog will take care of my poems so I will no longer be publishing them on this blog. The new blog's name: SEARCH. (Creative, I know, right?) and it's address is searchpoems.blogspot.com
On it now you will find :
-the best from Seattle
- the poems from the chapbook I published for all you guys a few years ago (bet you forgot about that one)
- and various other poems. Check it out!
Proof
hey guys,
remember junior year - with me totally not into shampooing or hygiene and stuff - and loving it?
i'm not the only one: http://www.naturemoms.com/no-shampoo-alternative.html
remember junior year - with me totally not into shampooing or hygiene and stuff - and loving it?
i'm not the only one: http://www.naturemoms.com/no-shampoo-alternative.html
Tuesday, August 18, 2009
In other news
I finally found a really helpful and informative post about food that pretty much sums up my philosophy (except for the part about how we should not support the meat industry not because of the morality of the animal component, but because it is destroying our environment, our health and our society, etc.):
http://jugalbandi.info/2009/08/the-one-way-to-get-thin/
http://jugalbandi.info/2009/08/the-one-way-to-get-thin/
Quest
This woman is not me. she is a real poet. she gets paid for it, or something like that.
I apparently spend all of my time reading blogs. Literally all of it. Sometimes I run an errand for my boss, or hand him a file from an over-stuffed cabinet, but really I sit at my computer and refresh my google reader to see if any new healthy living tips or yogic thoughts or eco-friendly advise comes across the cables at me. All of this just so that I can enjoy a more bendy, enlightened, calm, and earth-friendly manner of living. Which is comprised of sitting in front of the computer. It’s an endless, useless cycle. But I have added immensely to the subjects I can talk about at the dinner table – take that St. John’s!
On another note, I am pleased to make an announcement. Not only did I send out eight separate poems to five separate online poetry journals yesterday, I have already received three rejections I am so proud of myself. I figure it’s a numbers game. Kind of like job-hunting, where the more resumes you send out the more likely you are to land a job. Except not at all because the manner in which one is compared to other job applicants has no relationship to the manner in which poetry is judged for publication. Or is it?
Monday, August 17, 2009
Poetry Submissions
Update:
I have now submitted of my poems to 5 separate online journals.
I am fairly sure each one has a different submission requirement that I completely ignored.
I am fairly sure I will never be hearing from any of them ever again.
That's all.
I have now submitted of my poems to 5 separate online journals.
I am fairly sure each one has a different submission requirement that I completely ignored.
I am fairly sure I will never be hearing from any of them ever again.
That's all.
Services, therapy, and 6-day weeks
Okay
Big stuff this weekend-slash-today:
First, I schlepped the boy out to my grandmother’s memorial service in Purcellville where he got to be scrutinized by my EXTREMELY GINORMOUS FAMILY OF DUTCHMEN. Seriously, there are 6 kids ( aunts and uncles) with at least one spouse (some are mormon. Only sort of joking) 17 cousins (most with spouses or significant others) and most of THEM have at least one kid. That’s a LOT of family. So much family I often forget names or how I am related to them. And the boy sat through it all, smiling and holding my hand. He now has rights to Saturn, in my book.
Today I took a big leap and sent off a submission to Poetry Magazine. My first ever submission. Of four poems. I know in my heart of hearts I will be reading a rejections e-mail in about four weeks. Which is okay with me. The big effort was in actually hitting the send button and now I can go off and submit more to other journals. I will spend today finding local magazines, etc. to submit to and getting the numbers game of rejection over with. I’m proud of myself
I am feeling grody. I decided that with the boy’s impending oh-too-long trip to the West Coast coming up (20 days. I mean... seriously. Clearly it was designed as a torture method), I would take advantage and do things I would never do when he was around. I.E. lots of me time, lots of body time. I will attempt a Master Cleanse (five days on a fruit fast, ten on the lemonade, five on a fruit fast again) which I am sure will turn into another liquid-diet fast. The first weekend he is away I will treat as a Spa Weekend (still in the planning stages, but expect sea salt scrubs, lots of baths, hair conditioning treatments, lots and lots of yoga, lots of relaxing music, etc.). Let me just tell you – I think I’m pretty much ready for that.
Also I’m just going to put in a little bit of UBER JEALOUSY for all the bloggers at the Healthy Lifestyle Blogging Summit up in Boston this past weekend. If I had known about it earlier I totally would have wasted money and gone. I will totally go next year. If I’m not in Chile by then.
Also I’m fairly certain I am applying for a tutoring position – goodbye beloved Saturday, I hardly knew ye – hello paying off credit cards and actually getting my car fixed/saving for Chile. We weigh our decisions, don’t we?
Big stuff this weekend-slash-today:
First, I schlepped the boy out to my grandmother’s memorial service in Purcellville where he got to be scrutinized by my EXTREMELY GINORMOUS FAMILY OF DUTCHMEN. Seriously, there are 6 kids ( aunts and uncles) with at least one spouse (some are mormon. Only sort of joking) 17 cousins (most with spouses or significant others) and most of THEM have at least one kid. That’s a LOT of family. So much family I often forget names or how I am related to them. And the boy sat through it all, smiling and holding my hand. He now has rights to Saturn, in my book.
Today I took a big leap and sent off a submission to Poetry Magazine. My first ever submission. Of four poems. I know in my heart of hearts I will be reading a rejections e-mail in about four weeks. Which is okay with me. The big effort was in actually hitting the send button and now I can go off and submit more to other journals. I will spend today finding local magazines, etc. to submit to and getting the numbers game of rejection over with. I’m proud of myself
I am feeling grody. I decided that with the boy’s impending oh-too-long trip to the West Coast coming up (20 days. I mean... seriously. Clearly it was designed as a torture method), I would take advantage and do things I would never do when he was around. I.E. lots of me time, lots of body time. I will attempt a Master Cleanse (five days on a fruit fast, ten on the lemonade, five on a fruit fast again) which I am sure will turn into another liquid-diet fast. The first weekend he is away I will treat as a Spa Weekend (still in the planning stages, but expect sea salt scrubs, lots of baths, hair conditioning treatments, lots and lots of yoga, lots of relaxing music, etc.). Let me just tell you – I think I’m pretty much ready for that.
Also I’m just going to put in a little bit of UBER JEALOUSY for all the bloggers at the Healthy Lifestyle Blogging Summit up in Boston this past weekend. If I had known about it earlier I totally would have wasted money and gone. I will totally go next year. If I’m not in Chile by then.
Also I’m fairly certain I am applying for a tutoring position – goodbye beloved Saturday, I hardly knew ye – hello paying off credit cards and actually getting my car fixed/saving for Chile. We weigh our decisions, don’t we?
Friday, August 14, 2009
writing from summer 2007
6/29/07 11:28 pm
I fried an egg and believed in the goodness of people. I ate the applesauce first, knowing it would stifle the pang of understanding the bad. It is 11 on a Friday night and I am alone in my apartment, all three roommates gone for the evening and my companion Bunny Rabbit has gone to bed. I went for a walk; to breathe air and see people, to hear sounds and feel the ground under my feet, to see the moon and the groggy river water that understands and sometimes communicate its own needs but can’t control how it receives them, the way a very sick old man knows where it hurts, but perhaps not why or how to fix it, or who to tell it to.
I walked and went over my tomorrow in list form, shoved it all aside and focused on not remembering the many times I had walked this path earlier this year, and the people with whom I walked and the parties to which I was going and returning from. I got to the dock and sat down on the side after dodging a couple bar-frequenters in short skirts and couples with dogs on late night excursions. Many of the other spaces between pilings were occupied by young couples or older couples or new couples but I didn’t notice this until many minutes later. The first thing I noticed, as did many of the couples, was the man fishing. An odd place to fish at 11 on a Friday night, but actually most of the couples noticed the young boy that was with him first. We all asked the same thing, or variants of it: “Catching anything?” To which the boy would reply “yeah, over here” and would turn to his father and converse quickly in a Spanish that assumed no one was listening. The father, busy with checking his several rods, hooking the bait, and whatnot, and the son, busy with playing with his net and walking around the dock to stave off either boredom or sleep, were skilled at ignoring the repetition of the well-meaning passers-by and was skilled in a way that someone who is used to being ignored learns how to ignore without being offensive – or offended, at that.
These are beautiful people I thought. Beautiful people speaking a secret language that is not woven in among the words of evolved Latin, but is woven in to the simple presence of each other and most importantly the presence of each other shared in the past that brought them here, to a dock at the end of a growing town where men used to earn their bread catching crabs and selling them and now it is all one can do to find them. Even more important than the language of their yesterdays is their language that exists in the assurance of tomorrow morning, with a story to tell someone of their late-night fishing and perhaps no lists to recite and memories to suppress. These are beautiful people who language resounds in teaching each other.
They have inspired me to make goals, to consider the importance and substance of happiness. As usual my thoughts have congealed around the stagnant satisfaction of true happiness, and the discomfort that results from the lack of it, the boredom of everything being well. The only way to counteract this is to take a chance at disrupting it and put forth an understood effort to change something, usually a specific something, and risk shifting all the good. Hopefully to your benefit, but perhaps to a detriment. And then? Then the goal is to again achieve an equilibrium of satisfaction that in the end results in boredom, or something of the sort. After years of going over this argument, like lists for the morning, I believe I realize that the only stagnation that brings satisfaction instead of wastes it, the only boredom that is still caused by effort and produces pure happiness, is that of love. And that God is the true end and bringing of the deepest happiness, but that the way we as human beings experience that is through the love of other human beings and the effort of loving in return.
These thoughts and the road I walk back to my apartment on bring the thoughts “If only he knew how much I loved him!” and another familiar argument returns. I settle this time though, knowing that the reason he left was because he knew he could never take care of me the way I needed to take care of him, and that indeed I loved him more than he was ready for. I am grateful that he made the decision he did, and unfortunately it made me love him more. But I do believe that I can speak to him again if I see him, in a friendly way, in a way with a smile that says how I forgive him but hope that someday I can love someone else like that and that this someone will love me the same way.
And I have put Old Bay on my fried egg and the applesauce is gone. But there are good people finding love in a dock and in fish tonight and I will breathe air in the morning and then…
7/2/07 11:36 am
I know a woman whose life is a painting. She sits in a corner, watching her world in the sky, picking out stars that become instances, lighting up her smiling, inquisitive face and falling through her fingers like yarn or grains of rice or water. I know a woman who cries when I leave her, whose eyes see her childhood and her parents and her dreams in my actions and whose eyes follow me when I leave. I feel danger when I leave her, as if there is ultimate safety in her presence, complete acceptance and a relief from time and people and space and questions. Only “yes” and each other exist.
I fried an egg and believed in the goodness of people. I ate the applesauce first, knowing it would stifle the pang of understanding the bad. It is 11 on a Friday night and I am alone in my apartment, all three roommates gone for the evening and my companion Bunny Rabbit has gone to bed. I went for a walk; to breathe air and see people, to hear sounds and feel the ground under my feet, to see the moon and the groggy river water that understands and sometimes communicate its own needs but can’t control how it receives them, the way a very sick old man knows where it hurts, but perhaps not why or how to fix it, or who to tell it to.
I walked and went over my tomorrow in list form, shoved it all aside and focused on not remembering the many times I had walked this path earlier this year, and the people with whom I walked and the parties to which I was going and returning from. I got to the dock and sat down on the side after dodging a couple bar-frequenters in short skirts and couples with dogs on late night excursions. Many of the other spaces between pilings were occupied by young couples or older couples or new couples but I didn’t notice this until many minutes later. The first thing I noticed, as did many of the couples, was the man fishing. An odd place to fish at 11 on a Friday night, but actually most of the couples noticed the young boy that was with him first. We all asked the same thing, or variants of it: “Catching anything?” To which the boy would reply “yeah, over here” and would turn to his father and converse quickly in a Spanish that assumed no one was listening. The father, busy with checking his several rods, hooking the bait, and whatnot, and the son, busy with playing with his net and walking around the dock to stave off either boredom or sleep, were skilled at ignoring the repetition of the well-meaning passers-by and was skilled in a way that someone who is used to being ignored learns how to ignore without being offensive – or offended, at that.
These are beautiful people I thought. Beautiful people speaking a secret language that is not woven in among the words of evolved Latin, but is woven in to the simple presence of each other and most importantly the presence of each other shared in the past that brought them here, to a dock at the end of a growing town where men used to earn their bread catching crabs and selling them and now it is all one can do to find them. Even more important than the language of their yesterdays is their language that exists in the assurance of tomorrow morning, with a story to tell someone of their late-night fishing and perhaps no lists to recite and memories to suppress. These are beautiful people who language resounds in teaching each other.
They have inspired me to make goals, to consider the importance and substance of happiness. As usual my thoughts have congealed around the stagnant satisfaction of true happiness, and the discomfort that results from the lack of it, the boredom of everything being well. The only way to counteract this is to take a chance at disrupting it and put forth an understood effort to change something, usually a specific something, and risk shifting all the good. Hopefully to your benefit, but perhaps to a detriment. And then? Then the goal is to again achieve an equilibrium of satisfaction that in the end results in boredom, or something of the sort. After years of going over this argument, like lists for the morning, I believe I realize that the only stagnation that brings satisfaction instead of wastes it, the only boredom that is still caused by effort and produces pure happiness, is that of love. And that God is the true end and bringing of the deepest happiness, but that the way we as human beings experience that is through the love of other human beings and the effort of loving in return.
These thoughts and the road I walk back to my apartment on bring the thoughts “If only he knew how much I loved him!” and another familiar argument returns. I settle this time though, knowing that the reason he left was because he knew he could never take care of me the way I needed to take care of him, and that indeed I loved him more than he was ready for. I am grateful that he made the decision he did, and unfortunately it made me love him more. But I do believe that I can speak to him again if I see him, in a friendly way, in a way with a smile that says how I forgive him but hope that someday I can love someone else like that and that this someone will love me the same way.
And I have put Old Bay on my fried egg and the applesauce is gone. But there are good people finding love in a dock and in fish tonight and I will breathe air in the morning and then…
7/2/07 11:36 am
I know a woman whose life is a painting. She sits in a corner, watching her world in the sky, picking out stars that become instances, lighting up her smiling, inquisitive face and falling through her fingers like yarn or grains of rice or water. I know a woman who cries when I leave her, whose eyes see her childhood and her parents and her dreams in my actions and whose eyes follow me when I leave. I feel danger when I leave her, as if there is ultimate safety in her presence, complete acceptance and a relief from time and people and space and questions. Only “yes” and each other exist.
Thursday, August 13, 2009
On becoming a notary
10:43 am
The whole thing is pretty absurd – the process was wrapped up in under an hour, transportation included. A month and a half after I signed my request I take the oath and go on my way, with a “good luck” from the commissioner. It took the others in my office nine months to do it. They could have had a baby.
I walked in to work on my first day and was told to sign the commission request, so I did. I was nervous before the orientation, and nervous before taking the oath, and came to both extremely prepared. The nervousness was, of course, needless. I am always nervous doing things I’ve never done before.
At no time was I asked if I felt comfortable vowing to do these tasks, at no time was I asked if I understood what my responsibilities were. At this moment all I understand is that I filled out a bunch of papers in order to make my signature mean something to the government. I am now bonded and can be trusted to notarize. I have an embosser seal with my name on it, and I Can do it all for a fee of $2, or nothing, whichever I prefer.
The city is so quiet during the day – everyone is up in an office somewhere, and it smells clean without the sweat of the day passing you at a light. The same dapper gentleman, young, my age- early twenties – in a tan linen suit, leather suitcase, thinning hair – that sounded so scared and mild in his Spanish accent – who stood in front of me in the notary office – suddenly stands in front of me now, in the metro, waiting for a train. When it arrives he walks past the car before us to the end, and disappears. When I sit down I pass a crowd of tourists, plaid pants, headbands, well toned arms, and sit behind a woman with a long scratch down her fingers as if from a cat, that is just beginning to bleed. She perhaps hasn’t noticed it yet.
Another woman wears a very shiny diamond ring, and the words of my recently married friend regarding whether anybody else noticed the newness of her ring comes to mind. I remember how that morning I placed my old ring, a promise ring, a thin sliver of silver with a dot of sapphire, on my ring finger. I tried every other one but it doesn’t fit. I turned the stone away and thought about my current boyfriend and the enormity of my love. I And then I stacked on top of it my mother’ sold wedding ring and thought how strange that none of these people tell each other they love them anymore.
All of a sudden I was terrified at losing these thoughts and held them in my mind like a sweet moment as more people got on the train, a trio of young people with long hair and sandals and instinctively I pulled up my sleeve to show the tattoo on my arm. I have the habit of not noticing but when I am around my generation I do this, and when I am near older adults I pull my sleeve down to hide it, with unconscious desires to fit in. I long to tell the man in front of me in the “Keep Austin Weird” shirt that I’ve been to Austin, and loved it, and look, I’m just like you even though I wear a suit and work for a lawyer, as if these things connote a betrayal of sorts. I am holding this notebook as I stand and wait for the doors to open, and catch him watching me, with a look that says either “I get you, you could be my friend”, or “How could you do this work”, I couldn’t tell. And now I am sitting on a concrete bench in the station, furious in my scribbles with a thousand paragraphs left to write today and men and women passing me, not noticing, as I notice their shoes and canes and suitcases go by. I had to write this all down, you see.
It is cool and bright as I come up out of the metro, precluding fall, as it was cool and bright this morning. I take a chance and head to the Starbucks – I am not terribly needed at the office as it is slow today. It is August and it is slow and empty and there is no way of knowing how long it takes me in the government offices. I have no change for the homeless man selling newspapers and dodging him I cross the street in front of a Land Rover driven by Georgetown kids. I avoid pollsters with a camera and lament how on a day like this I am taking a break indoors to celebrate the weather. But it is an indoors with windows where I can see the blue of the sky, unlike my office cubicle.
Inevitably the Starbucks is crowded, and inevitably there is a woman in line ahead of me, very beautiful, full, clean, in great heels, that makes me feel as if there is a good reason to spend twenty minutes in the morning and more money on clothes to ensure your appearance. There is also an older woman, dumpy, in high-waisted jeans that bobs to the music playing and has apparently been in this morning already from what the barista says but she looks as if, in contrast to the coolness of the beautiful woman, she is enjoying her life. My coffee is ready and I sit at the only empty table to watch people amble by and ponder how life gives us these options sometimes.
The whole thing is pretty absurd – the process was wrapped up in under an hour, transportation included. A month and a half after I signed my request I take the oath and go on my way, with a “good luck” from the commissioner. It took the others in my office nine months to do it. They could have had a baby.
I walked in to work on my first day and was told to sign the commission request, so I did. I was nervous before the orientation, and nervous before taking the oath, and came to both extremely prepared. The nervousness was, of course, needless. I am always nervous doing things I’ve never done before.
At no time was I asked if I felt comfortable vowing to do these tasks, at no time was I asked if I understood what my responsibilities were. At this moment all I understand is that I filled out a bunch of papers in order to make my signature mean something to the government. I am now bonded and can be trusted to notarize. I have an embosser seal with my name on it, and I Can do it all for a fee of $2, or nothing, whichever I prefer.
The city is so quiet during the day – everyone is up in an office somewhere, and it smells clean without the sweat of the day passing you at a light. The same dapper gentleman, young, my age- early twenties – in a tan linen suit, leather suitcase, thinning hair – that sounded so scared and mild in his Spanish accent – who stood in front of me in the notary office – suddenly stands in front of me now, in the metro, waiting for a train. When it arrives he walks past the car before us to the end, and disappears. When I sit down I pass a crowd of tourists, plaid pants, headbands, well toned arms, and sit behind a woman with a long scratch down her fingers as if from a cat, that is just beginning to bleed. She perhaps hasn’t noticed it yet.
Another woman wears a very shiny diamond ring, and the words of my recently married friend regarding whether anybody else noticed the newness of her ring comes to mind. I remember how that morning I placed my old ring, a promise ring, a thin sliver of silver with a dot of sapphire, on my ring finger. I tried every other one but it doesn’t fit. I turned the stone away and thought about my current boyfriend and the enormity of my love. I And then I stacked on top of it my mother’ sold wedding ring and thought how strange that none of these people tell each other they love them anymore.
All of a sudden I was terrified at losing these thoughts and held them in my mind like a sweet moment as more people got on the train, a trio of young people with long hair and sandals and instinctively I pulled up my sleeve to show the tattoo on my arm. I have the habit of not noticing but when I am around my generation I do this, and when I am near older adults I pull my sleeve down to hide it, with unconscious desires to fit in. I long to tell the man in front of me in the “Keep Austin Weird” shirt that I’ve been to Austin, and loved it, and look, I’m just like you even though I wear a suit and work for a lawyer, as if these things connote a betrayal of sorts. I am holding this notebook as I stand and wait for the doors to open, and catch him watching me, with a look that says either “I get you, you could be my friend”, or “How could you do this work”, I couldn’t tell. And now I am sitting on a concrete bench in the station, furious in my scribbles with a thousand paragraphs left to write today and men and women passing me, not noticing, as I notice their shoes and canes and suitcases go by. I had to write this all down, you see.
It is cool and bright as I come up out of the metro, precluding fall, as it was cool and bright this morning. I take a chance and head to the Starbucks – I am not terribly needed at the office as it is slow today. It is August and it is slow and empty and there is no way of knowing how long it takes me in the government offices. I have no change for the homeless man selling newspapers and dodging him I cross the street in front of a Land Rover driven by Georgetown kids. I avoid pollsters with a camera and lament how on a day like this I am taking a break indoors to celebrate the weather. But it is an indoors with windows where I can see the blue of the sky, unlike my office cubicle.
Inevitably the Starbucks is crowded, and inevitably there is a woman in line ahead of me, very beautiful, full, clean, in great heels, that makes me feel as if there is a good reason to spend twenty minutes in the morning and more money on clothes to ensure your appearance. There is also an older woman, dumpy, in high-waisted jeans that bobs to the music playing and has apparently been in this morning already from what the barista says but she looks as if, in contrast to the coolness of the beautiful woman, she is enjoying her life. My coffee is ready and I sit at the only empty table to watch people amble by and ponder how life gives us these options sometimes.
Wednesday, August 12, 2009
Power Hippy
2:07 pm
My delicious boyfriend was given the opportunity to wander from his office in Annapolis today, and met me downtown for lunch. This morning was a storm of excitement; I had to restrain myself from running when I saw him walking towards me on the street. When he met me, he laughed and said I was a strange mix between the “power suit and a hippy dress”, which I knew referred to the fact that I was wearing my favorite crocheted yoga wrap over my dark vest and pencil skirt combo, but it did not stop me from thinking.
I guess that is pretty accurate – my life does display a strange mix of power suit gusto and professional capability, and hippy-dress love of yoga and food and plants and people. This perhaps is most obvious in my deep desire to move towards environmental law. (“I love you all, but as long as I have my way? I’ll do whatever is best for the world as long as I get to plan it? OR I’ll fix all the problems but only if it’s for the greater good) But I also can’t help thinking if this does not describe our generation en totem.
As we all know, I am a fan of the broad generalization, so I will continue with this one. Raised by the baby boomers, our generation acknowledges the need for freedom, acceptance, diversity, and care. However, we are also a generation that is reactionary, and is moving back to a younger age of marriage, with a great amount of conservatives amongst us. We embrace the fundamental principles our parents raised us on, but react against their own actions?
Just a thought.
My delicious boyfriend was given the opportunity to wander from his office in Annapolis today, and met me downtown for lunch. This morning was a storm of excitement; I had to restrain myself from running when I saw him walking towards me on the street. When he met me, he laughed and said I was a strange mix between the “power suit and a hippy dress”, which I knew referred to the fact that I was wearing my favorite crocheted yoga wrap over my dark vest and pencil skirt combo, but it did not stop me from thinking.
I guess that is pretty accurate – my life does display a strange mix of power suit gusto and professional capability, and hippy-dress love of yoga and food and plants and people. This perhaps is most obvious in my deep desire to move towards environmental law. (“I love you all, but as long as I have my way? I’ll do whatever is best for the world as long as I get to plan it? OR I’ll fix all the problems but only if it’s for the greater good) But I also can’t help thinking if this does not describe our generation en totem.
As we all know, I am a fan of the broad generalization, so I will continue with this one. Raised by the baby boomers, our generation acknowledges the need for freedom, acceptance, diversity, and care. However, we are also a generation that is reactionary, and is moving back to a younger age of marriage, with a great amount of conservatives amongst us. We embrace the fundamental principles our parents raised us on, but react against their own actions?
Just a thought.
Saving the World
12 Aug 09
10:57 am
My legs are different sizes. Yes, true, most people have different leg sizes. Mine are over ½” different and you will not notice it when I walk. But, because of this, my body developed differently than it should have. My pelvis twisted to compensate and therefore I do not have a limp. Instead, I have developed bulging discs (two of them) and have had several bouts with sciatica in my mid-teens that has left me with permanent hypersensitivity in my right leg.
Okay, so why do I feel this need to overshare? Well, because my legs are different sizes, I practice yoga.
I read this article today on Huffington Post: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/lauren-cahn/five-words-that-do-emnote_b_250065.html and at first it made me angry. Especially reading about it on other blogs made me angry. But what I was angry about was the thought that this woman could be so critical of a practice that has brought me, and millions of others, so much benefit and joy. This is a closed minded thought, and once I realized that, I took a closer look at her words.
She is not saying that yoga is terrible. She is not saying that yoga itself is closed-minded and regimental to army extremes, or imprisoning or limiting. She is saying that she began to feel that way with that particular method of practicing. Yes, yoga has hundreds of hundred-paged books telling you exactly how to live. There is also the Bible of the Western world, the Tao of the Far East. These are all regimental scriptures designed to be guidebooks for life in a specific culture, a reference journal for survival in a specific climate and a specific territory with other specific cultures surrounding you. These journals have often aided in the preservation of the beauty and rituals of the people they were designed to help.
Yoga is not a part of our culture in America, it is an element of our growing interest in whole-body health. America has no guidebook for its culture because we designed ourselves to be incapable of cultivating one, needless to say incapable of following one. America does not tolerate specificities. But people can, and many people thrive on it. Many people crave and flourish with a specific diet and rules about exercise and with the permission and drive that many things provide. Many practices involve these things, like team sports, or race training, or hyper-competitive graduate degrees, or physical ailments, or advanced corporate culture, or ashtanga yoga. It is not alone in its specificity. And those who prescribe to it are not animals.
I have been experiencing a lot of internal conversation about my opinions on yoga recently, as I have gone through several difficult weeks relating to my self esteem, my goals in life, my outlook on my current life. I cleared up many of them yesterday both in my yoga practice and in my conversation with Lauren, and I would not have the understanding of myself right now at 11:24 am that I would have had if either of those had not happened the way they did (Thank you Lauren).
Yoga seems to be a method of teaching yourself, both body and mind, how to best align yourself with the way the world is. I will elaborate. Physically, the asanas give you an opportunity to strengthen muscles and lengthen ligaments. The benefits to this have to do with our specific circumstance of gravity – your body is strengthened into an optimal relationship to itself to best move around from place to place in our specific atmosphere. Mentally you have an opportunity to place yourself as the only vessel in your life, to understand yourself as the cause of movement, to choose to not think. This is especially beneficial in a world that demands our thoughts be on everything else all the time. And spiritually, the culture of yoga provides a way to guide your self through the world in a particularly diplomatic and varying array of relatively neutral and kind beliefs through the practice of intention and care.
Ultimately, the practice of placing all of these benefits into the same movements highlights the fundamental integration of our mind, body and spirit in everything we do. By performing the asanas with all three aspects of self we can see how I was grumpy all day because my hips were tight – by opening them I release that tension physically and prevent injury and pain, I release the tension mentally because all of my anxiety had been caught there all day through some manner of distraction, and I release the tension spiritually because I am no longer upset at everyone who crosses my path for no reason other than I had tight hips. This happened last night – when I went in to class I did not want to go, I was upset at the world and every person I saw, and I was walking funny without realizing it. When I left, I could not stop smiling, I made way for every car on the road, and my body felt great. This is why I love yoga – because it makes us better people in our own world.
These are broad statements, and there are many many types of yoga and many people who need many different things from it. My yoga is positively critical, pushing my body when I need to, being kind to my spirit on a bad day, gentle on my self. This is often hard – my twisted pelvis puts serious limitations in about a third of the poses, but on the flip side it offers me a tremendous advantage on about a third of the others. The last third I just have to move through with the same challenges as everyone else. I have been practicing at least once a week for over four years and feel the strength I have gained. I am by no means an advanced student, but am moving there. I am noticing recently my desire to practice more often, which is a desire I have waited for, having been impatient with practicing for several years. There was a full year when I could not stop thinking about becoming a teacher, but the drive was based on the feeling of being in a club that yoga teachers give off, the advantage the knowledge of training would give me in class, the thought that all the yoga I would be doing would automatically make me a more advanced student. None of this is true. As I grow deeper into my yoga practice I am finding more patience with myself as a competitive person, I am more accepting of the challenges I face, and I see the depths to which I must learn to move forward.
The past few weeks have been harbor to many challenges regarding my acceptance of my relationship, my job, my routine. This is where I need to be in my life, but why? Never have I been satisfied with just one job, but here I am unable to acquire another one because of the time commitment. There is extra time in my life again. How do I fill it up? I don’t. This extra time is time to think, to slow down, to sink into the areas that are causing problems, or to relish the areas that aren’t. Just like I am learning that I cannot rush through an vinyasa, I cannot rush through life. Every piece can be perfected, every transition an opportunity for grace and thought, not just to benefit yourself but to enrich the lives of others.
This is the conclusion from yesterday. I need no “new project” because life itself is a project enough. What right do I have to demand another diversion when I cannot ensure that I am communicating my love for my friends and family enough? Why do I want something else to do when I cannot yet save the world?
10:57 am
My legs are different sizes. Yes, true, most people have different leg sizes. Mine are over ½” different and you will not notice it when I walk. But, because of this, my body developed differently than it should have. My pelvis twisted to compensate and therefore I do not have a limp. Instead, I have developed bulging discs (two of them) and have had several bouts with sciatica in my mid-teens that has left me with permanent hypersensitivity in my right leg.
Okay, so why do I feel this need to overshare? Well, because my legs are different sizes, I practice yoga.
I read this article today on Huffington Post: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/lauren-cahn/five-words-that-do-emnote_b_250065.html and at first it made me angry. Especially reading about it on other blogs made me angry. But what I was angry about was the thought that this woman could be so critical of a practice that has brought me, and millions of others, so much benefit and joy. This is a closed minded thought, and once I realized that, I took a closer look at her words.
She is not saying that yoga is terrible. She is not saying that yoga itself is closed-minded and regimental to army extremes, or imprisoning or limiting. She is saying that she began to feel that way with that particular method of practicing. Yes, yoga has hundreds of hundred-paged books telling you exactly how to live. There is also the Bible of the Western world, the Tao of the Far East. These are all regimental scriptures designed to be guidebooks for life in a specific culture, a reference journal for survival in a specific climate and a specific territory with other specific cultures surrounding you. These journals have often aided in the preservation of the beauty and rituals of the people they were designed to help.
Yoga is not a part of our culture in America, it is an element of our growing interest in whole-body health. America has no guidebook for its culture because we designed ourselves to be incapable of cultivating one, needless to say incapable of following one. America does not tolerate specificities. But people can, and many people thrive on it. Many people crave and flourish with a specific diet and rules about exercise and with the permission and drive that many things provide. Many practices involve these things, like team sports, or race training, or hyper-competitive graduate degrees, or physical ailments, or advanced corporate culture, or ashtanga yoga. It is not alone in its specificity. And those who prescribe to it are not animals.
I have been experiencing a lot of internal conversation about my opinions on yoga recently, as I have gone through several difficult weeks relating to my self esteem, my goals in life, my outlook on my current life. I cleared up many of them yesterday both in my yoga practice and in my conversation with Lauren, and I would not have the understanding of myself right now at 11:24 am that I would have had if either of those had not happened the way they did (Thank you Lauren).
Yoga seems to be a method of teaching yourself, both body and mind, how to best align yourself with the way the world is. I will elaborate. Physically, the asanas give you an opportunity to strengthen muscles and lengthen ligaments. The benefits to this have to do with our specific circumstance of gravity – your body is strengthened into an optimal relationship to itself to best move around from place to place in our specific atmosphere. Mentally you have an opportunity to place yourself as the only vessel in your life, to understand yourself as the cause of movement, to choose to not think. This is especially beneficial in a world that demands our thoughts be on everything else all the time. And spiritually, the culture of yoga provides a way to guide your self through the world in a particularly diplomatic and varying array of relatively neutral and kind beliefs through the practice of intention and care.
Ultimately, the practice of placing all of these benefits into the same movements highlights the fundamental integration of our mind, body and spirit in everything we do. By performing the asanas with all three aspects of self we can see how I was grumpy all day because my hips were tight – by opening them I release that tension physically and prevent injury and pain, I release the tension mentally because all of my anxiety had been caught there all day through some manner of distraction, and I release the tension spiritually because I am no longer upset at everyone who crosses my path for no reason other than I had tight hips. This happened last night – when I went in to class I did not want to go, I was upset at the world and every person I saw, and I was walking funny without realizing it. When I left, I could not stop smiling, I made way for every car on the road, and my body felt great. This is why I love yoga – because it makes us better people in our own world.
These are broad statements, and there are many many types of yoga and many people who need many different things from it. My yoga is positively critical, pushing my body when I need to, being kind to my spirit on a bad day, gentle on my self. This is often hard – my twisted pelvis puts serious limitations in about a third of the poses, but on the flip side it offers me a tremendous advantage on about a third of the others. The last third I just have to move through with the same challenges as everyone else. I have been practicing at least once a week for over four years and feel the strength I have gained. I am by no means an advanced student, but am moving there. I am noticing recently my desire to practice more often, which is a desire I have waited for, having been impatient with practicing for several years. There was a full year when I could not stop thinking about becoming a teacher, but the drive was based on the feeling of being in a club that yoga teachers give off, the advantage the knowledge of training would give me in class, the thought that all the yoga I would be doing would automatically make me a more advanced student. None of this is true. As I grow deeper into my yoga practice I am finding more patience with myself as a competitive person, I am more accepting of the challenges I face, and I see the depths to which I must learn to move forward.
The past few weeks have been harbor to many challenges regarding my acceptance of my relationship, my job, my routine. This is where I need to be in my life, but why? Never have I been satisfied with just one job, but here I am unable to acquire another one because of the time commitment. There is extra time in my life again. How do I fill it up? I don’t. This extra time is time to think, to slow down, to sink into the areas that are causing problems, or to relish the areas that aren’t. Just like I am learning that I cannot rush through an vinyasa, I cannot rush through life. Every piece can be perfected, every transition an opportunity for grace and thought, not just to benefit yourself but to enrich the lives of others.
This is the conclusion from yesterday. I need no “new project” because life itself is a project enough. What right do I have to demand another diversion when I cannot ensure that I am communicating my love for my friends and family enough? Why do I want something else to do when I cannot yet save the world?
Lame Lemming
Ok I’m lame. I saw this on facebook and thought I’d try it ( I have nothing else to do at work, right?) so I went to google and typed in “Annelies needs” and here are the first fifteen (plus a few extra ones)
1. To be kept in the loop
2. a ride to the airport Friday around 2 pm
3. a holliday! (direct spelling)
4. to add some contacts and favorites first
5. a photo to post
6. about another 5 hours to cook
7. share accommodations
(here they ran out of answers for the spelling of my name, so I said it was okay to receive answers for the spelling Anneliese)
8. help I want Anneliese to fly to Timbuktu
9. to understand that you never give up on a kid, and get rid of him just because he misbehaves
10. dental work.
11. to see a woman of her age with a functioning prosthesis to refresh her determination and to give you a rest!
12. to smell extra pretty, and a hairbrush
13. your calmness at 4pm
14. a better mic though, but thats ok
15. to go
I posted the next 3 too because they were extra funny.
16. to turn 3 more or gain 70 more Slayer points to reach the next level
17. more :lol:
18. to develop a pattern of success by making short-term commitments and following through.
1. To be kept in the loop
2. a ride to the airport Friday around 2 pm
3. a holliday! (direct spelling)
4. to add some contacts and favorites first
5. a photo to post
6. about another 5 hours to cook
7. share accommodations
(here they ran out of answers for the spelling of my name, so I said it was okay to receive answers for the spelling Anneliese)
8. help I want Anneliese to fly to Timbuktu
9. to understand that you never give up on a kid, and get rid of him just because he misbehaves
10. dental work.
11. to see a woman of her age with a functioning prosthesis to refresh her determination and to give you a rest!
12. to smell extra pretty, and a hairbrush
13. your calmness at 4pm
14. a better mic though, but thats ok
15. to go
I posted the next 3 too because they were extra funny.
16. to turn 3 more or gain 70 more Slayer points to reach the next level
17. more :lol:
18. to develop a pattern of success by making short-term commitments and following through.
Tuesday, August 11, 2009
A look at love, again
In an inevitable 180 from last week’s sentimentality, I had an interesting thought when looking at pictures of a friend’s wedding today. Well, she is not a friend I guess but a recent ex-girlfriend of a friend, a woman who aspire(d/s) to modeling and fine art brockerage, and who, apparently never smiles. Seeing these pictures and her pointed jab at conventional wedding choices (she wore a tank top and a long gray princess skirt, the kind I wore to my 8th grade graduation parties), I thought – I wonder if they did it for the insurance?
8/11/09 1:28 pm
I have poured you my secrets, so far, from a shaker
And we have watched them fall,
Like salt,
From a shared bed.
When do I know that you know it all,
But for when I wake up still holding your hand
With you watching the door
In defense of my heart?
8/11/09 1:28 pm
I have poured you my secrets, so far, from a shaker
And we have watched them fall,
Like salt,
From a shared bed.
When do I know that you know it all,
But for when I wake up still holding your hand
With you watching the door
In defense of my heart?
Crazy
I think I've gone crazy. Today I decided I liked this menagerie of clothing from urban outfitters (yes i did this at work):
clearly this job is getting to me in the opposite ways that it does to the jcrew-laden hill interns.
should i be worried?
clearly this job is getting to me in the opposite ways that it does to the jcrew-laden hill interns.
should i be worried?
Bucket List
In the past six months I have accomplished the following:
- led a successful charity walk for my cause of passion (water management)
- switched jobs to where I am working less and making more and also working towards my career goals
- ran a half marathon
- committed to several yoga practices weekly
- acquired a boyfriend (of whom I am extremely proud)/fell in love
- moved to my favorite neighborhood with a great friend
- raised plants
- began marathon training
- started writing this blog
- started consulting
- discovered how to make kombucha
- gone on vacation
- finished many projects
- and much much more! (now at new low price)
I hate it when this happens!
Let me explain: I am project oriented. Extremely so. This means that I like to start many projects and be very very busy getting them done all the time. Unfortunately, this also means that I often finish these projects (finish, abandon, same thing sometimes). And THIS means that I am left where I am now – fitness and health goals underway, finances reasonable, career track followed, love life perfect, social life healthy, and hobbies running along. So, sounds great right? Wrong. I’m bored.
My mother laughs at this, as well she should. My boyfriend laments the issue with me, and then laughs, as well he should. I too laugh at this, but only after getting more upset than I probably should.
Here are some more goals that I hashed out for the next six months on my run this morning:
- run the Paris marathon April 11 2010 with Rory
- see Patagonia before my 25th Birthday (okay, not the next six months, but still)
- Learn how to make cheese
- Put together a writing portfolio by my 24th Birthday
- Submit 5 poems to 8 magazines by January 2010
- (aren’t you starting to be impressed with my goal-setting abilities? Thanks lululemon!) (I goal coach for a fee, along with marrying people, sailing your boat, organizing your offices, cooking your food, painting your walls, and sitting on your steps looking pretty)
Here is a beginning bucket list of things I want to do in my lifetime (to be fair, I’m really thinking before I’m 35)
- climb Mt. Ranier
- Places to see:
o Mayan temples
o Mumbai
o Alaska
o Thailand
o Jordan
o St. Petersburg
o Patagonia
o Mexico City
o Ireland
o Amsterdam
o Greece
o California
o (growing)
- Run a marathon
- Have a kid
- Get married
- Publish a poetry book
- Publish essays
- Skydive
- Snorkel the great barrier reef
- Fly a plane
- Learn another language
- Go to grad school
- Live in another country
- Complete a sail trip for a significant amount of time (>six months)
- Teach Yoga
- Complete a triathlon
- Sell the furniture I make/paint
- Save a watershed (or, you know, help to)
- Own a dog
- Plant a garden
- Learn to ride a motorcycle
- Re-learn guitar (desired playability – sitting around campfire)
- Re-learn piano (desired playability – personal company)
Ok any other suggestions?
- led a successful charity walk for my cause of passion (water management)
- switched jobs to where I am working less and making more and also working towards my career goals
- ran a half marathon
- committed to several yoga practices weekly
- acquired a boyfriend (of whom I am extremely proud)/fell in love
- moved to my favorite neighborhood with a great friend
- raised plants
- began marathon training
- started writing this blog
- started consulting
- discovered how to make kombucha
- gone on vacation
- finished many projects
- and much much more! (now at new low price)
I hate it when this happens!
Let me explain: I am project oriented. Extremely so. This means that I like to start many projects and be very very busy getting them done all the time. Unfortunately, this also means that I often finish these projects (finish, abandon, same thing sometimes). And THIS means that I am left where I am now – fitness and health goals underway, finances reasonable, career track followed, love life perfect, social life healthy, and hobbies running along. So, sounds great right? Wrong. I’m bored.
My mother laughs at this, as well she should. My boyfriend laments the issue with me, and then laughs, as well he should. I too laugh at this, but only after getting more upset than I probably should.
Here are some more goals that I hashed out for the next six months on my run this morning:
- run the Paris marathon April 11 2010 with Rory
- see Patagonia before my 25th Birthday (okay, not the next six months, but still)
- Learn how to make cheese
- Put together a writing portfolio by my 24th Birthday
- Submit 5 poems to 8 magazines by January 2010
- (aren’t you starting to be impressed with my goal-setting abilities? Thanks lululemon!) (I goal coach for a fee, along with marrying people, sailing your boat, organizing your offices, cooking your food, painting your walls, and sitting on your steps looking pretty)
Here is a beginning bucket list of things I want to do in my lifetime (to be fair, I’m really thinking before I’m 35)
- climb Mt. Ranier
- Places to see:
o Mayan temples
o Mumbai
o Alaska
o Thailand
o Jordan
o St. Petersburg
o Patagonia
o Mexico City
o Ireland
o Amsterdam
o Greece
o California
o (growing)
- Run a marathon
- Have a kid
- Get married
- Publish a poetry book
- Publish essays
- Skydive
- Snorkel the great barrier reef
- Fly a plane
- Learn another language
- Go to grad school
- Live in another country
- Complete a sail trip for a significant amount of time (>six months)
- Teach Yoga
- Complete a triathlon
- Sell the furniture I make/paint
- Save a watershed (or, you know, help to)
- Own a dog
- Plant a garden
- Learn to ride a motorcycle
- Re-learn guitar (desired playability – sitting around campfire)
- Re-learn piano (desired playability – personal company)
Ok any other suggestions?
Monday, August 10, 2009
Nirvana
Today I watched this video: http://www.ted.com/talks/jill_bolte_taylor_s_powerful_stroke_of_insight.html
About a neuroanatomist who studied her own stroke. At the end of it I almost cried.
There is such a power to the desire to “transcend”, to see beyond what we notice every day, to penetrate our physical experiences to a greater understanding. I think in some way this is what all exercise is about – shutting off the brain that monitors, quieting the dialogue of our place in the world.
Jill explains that the left hemisphere of our brain monitors linear time and experience, projecting forward from the data of history it picks up. The right hemisphere processes sense and the current moment. She comments on how we live always with our left brain, planning and taking stock, and in her stroke she experienced the full death of that process. Dr. Taylor labeled her experience in right-brain existence as nirvana, the state that ancient philosophers and Buddhists spend lifetimes trying to attain. Is nirvana as simple as shutting off the left brain, of silencing our thoughts on time and duty?
I must do some more reading, as I am confused. From what I thought, nirvana traditionally also incorporates shutting out sense, it is a quest for pure removal of the individual from our experience of everything, which is not the same as isolating our senses to one particular form of interpreting it. The thought, though, is beautiful, of the ability to escape, to understand our inter-connectedness, our eternal fluidity of existence. This is what made me want to cry.
About a neuroanatomist who studied her own stroke. At the end of it I almost cried.
There is such a power to the desire to “transcend”, to see beyond what we notice every day, to penetrate our physical experiences to a greater understanding. I think in some way this is what all exercise is about – shutting off the brain that monitors, quieting the dialogue of our place in the world.
Jill explains that the left hemisphere of our brain monitors linear time and experience, projecting forward from the data of history it picks up. The right hemisphere processes sense and the current moment. She comments on how we live always with our left brain, planning and taking stock, and in her stroke she experienced the full death of that process. Dr. Taylor labeled her experience in right-brain existence as nirvana, the state that ancient philosophers and Buddhists spend lifetimes trying to attain. Is nirvana as simple as shutting off the left brain, of silencing our thoughts on time and duty?
I must do some more reading, as I am confused. From what I thought, nirvana traditionally also incorporates shutting out sense, it is a quest for pure removal of the individual from our experience of everything, which is not the same as isolating our senses to one particular form of interpreting it. The thought, though, is beautiful, of the ability to escape, to understand our inter-connectedness, our eternal fluidity of existence. This is what made me want to cry.
Friday, August 7, 2009
blog thoughts
Today I:
a) did not run
b) wrote two blog posts that were basically complaining and word-vomiting self-analysis psychobabble
c) deleted those posts
d) read five bajillion more food blogs and asked myself why I enjoyed reading about other people’s healthy food so much (answer: because I can’t afford it myself), and then realized I overindulged and don’t want to read another blog by someone just like myself again, Or at least until Sunday.
In my travels around the blogosphere (I love that word) I realized a few things, which I will put out for you also in list form:
- everything has already been done. I mean EVERYTHING
- there are seventy hundred thousand people JUST LIKE YOU in the world, and they all have the same interests, ambitions, and are probably thinking and writing out the exact same thoughts as you right now
- all the new female singer/songwriter/musicians are ALL REDHEADS. I mean, what’s up with this? Is the ole’ Irish poets gene come to wreak havoc on the indie scene?
A few observations:
- I aware that perhaps we all attract like minded-ness, but it seems that everyone in my generation right now has the exact same thoughts as me. I am a little frustrated with this, even though we all spent all of high school trying to fit in, once we grow up a little we realize you only make money if you are original or have a great publicist, and then we grow up some more and stop caring.
- so far I have encountered three types of blogs
1) the early-thirties set with young kids who spend their time photographing and writing optimistic and grateful posts to a rose/lilac/palegreen colored anthropologie-inspired blog
2) the twenty-something set with a degree and a passion in something has nothing to do with their degree, usually living with a dog or a boyfriend/fiancée and blogging about their food choices and runs with friends and trips to the other coast
3) the late twenty-something set living or traveling abroad that writes about culture shock, food, sites they see, and how it compares to home without actually ever really wanting to go home.
All have a few things in common: they like to use “z”’s a lot, they have a habit of changing vowels in the middle of words, they are often witty, all seem like I would like to be friends with them.
a) did not run
b) wrote two blog posts that were basically complaining and word-vomiting self-analysis psychobabble
c) deleted those posts
d) read five bajillion more food blogs and asked myself why I enjoyed reading about other people’s healthy food so much (answer: because I can’t afford it myself), and then realized I overindulged and don’t want to read another blog by someone just like myself again, Or at least until Sunday.
In my travels around the blogosphere (I love that word) I realized a few things, which I will put out for you also in list form:
- everything has already been done. I mean EVERYTHING
- there are seventy hundred thousand people JUST LIKE YOU in the world, and they all have the same interests, ambitions, and are probably thinking and writing out the exact same thoughts as you right now
- all the new female singer/songwriter/musicians are ALL REDHEADS. I mean, what’s up with this? Is the ole’ Irish poets gene come to wreak havoc on the indie scene?
A few observations:
- I aware that perhaps we all attract like minded-ness, but it seems that everyone in my generation right now has the exact same thoughts as me. I am a little frustrated with this, even though we all spent all of high school trying to fit in, once we grow up a little we realize you only make money if you are original or have a great publicist, and then we grow up some more and stop caring.
- so far I have encountered three types of blogs
1) the early-thirties set with young kids who spend their time photographing and writing optimistic and grateful posts to a rose/lilac/palegreen colored anthropologie-inspired blog
2) the twenty-something set with a degree and a passion in something has nothing to do with their degree, usually living with a dog or a boyfriend/fiancée and blogging about their food choices and runs with friends and trips to the other coast
3) the late twenty-something set living or traveling abroad that writes about culture shock, food, sites they see, and how it compares to home without actually ever really wanting to go home.
All have a few things in common: they like to use “z”’s a lot, they have a habit of changing vowels in the middle of words, they are often witty, all seem like I would like to be friends with them.
this is 1/2 of what i had posted earlier
It has been a hard week, and for reasons not pertaining to the fact that for the week previous to it I did nothing but eat and drink beer and ogle my boyfriend and laugh with his family while acquiring sand in every possible way (I found some in my ears as recently as yesterday) (and yes I have showered extensively since I returned for once).
I will recount the difficulty of this week in a minute. First I would like to elucidate the details of how I have earned approximately seventy-bajillion brownie points so far.
a) I woke up early and ran, or came home from work and ran, on the following days: Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday (it was raining on this one – bonus points!).
b) I went to yoga on the following days: Sunday, Monday, and Thursday (yes, two days I did nothing but run, work, and yoga)
c) I remembered to drop my Netflix in the mailbox on my way to work for the first time, instead of just letting it sit in my bag for a week until it gets too crumpled to read anything off the envelope.
d) I DID NOT give in to the urge to buy ingredients for martinis on Monday, or Wednesday. AND I only had TWO glasses of white wine last night when I finally did cave to the temptations of a hot August.
e) I DID NOT buy cookies any day during the week.
f) I drove out and sat and talked with my dear dear friend G in nap-town which is much more fun than therapy but just as necessary and stayed afterwards with the boy.
g) I got all of my laundry put away and the paper that was sitting on my floor somewhat organized
h) I accomplished all of the research I wanted to get done during the week.
I will recount the difficulty of this week in a minute. First I would like to elucidate the details of how I have earned approximately seventy-bajillion brownie points so far.
a) I woke up early and ran, or came home from work and ran, on the following days: Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday (it was raining on this one – bonus points!).
b) I went to yoga on the following days: Sunday, Monday, and Thursday (yes, two days I did nothing but run, work, and yoga)
c) I remembered to drop my Netflix in the mailbox on my way to work for the first time, instead of just letting it sit in my bag for a week until it gets too crumpled to read anything off the envelope.
d) I DID NOT give in to the urge to buy ingredients for martinis on Monday, or Wednesday. AND I only had TWO glasses of white wine last night when I finally did cave to the temptations of a hot August.
e) I DID NOT buy cookies any day during the week.
f) I drove out and sat and talked with my dear dear friend G in nap-town which is much more fun than therapy but just as necessary and stayed afterwards with the boy.
g) I got all of my laundry put away and the paper that was sitting on my floor somewhat organized
h) I accomplished all of the research I wanted to get done during the week.
Wednesday, August 5, 2009
Favors
Dear My Friends,
As some of you know, I spend a great deal of time reading other blogs and have counted it as my duty to do so in order that I may recommend them in authority. You can see which ones I follow to the right. Multiply that number by about 17 and you see how many I have gone through to find them. Seriously these are the good ones.
Also, please scroll down and watch my fish. They need love.
In the words of Ms. J. Seiler,
love and guts,
Annelies
As some of you know, I spend a great deal of time reading other blogs and have counted it as my duty to do so in order that I may recommend them in authority. You can see which ones I follow to the right. Multiply that number by about 17 and you see how many I have gone through to find them. Seriously these are the good ones.
Also, please scroll down and watch my fish. They need love.
In the words of Ms. J. Seiler,
love and guts,
Annelies
Love is a Bouquet of Flowers
At sixteen, they were playmates. They looked alike, and ran around town pulling pranks and acquiring a slow realization that they had a childlike curiosity for each other's bodies. Childishly they acknowledged this, and childishly they stayed a safe distance from their fears. They threw each other parties, did each other's homework, and skipped class. Peter and Moriah shared a devotion that can come only from the utter acceptance of a sibling-like bond, but when, after two years, Moriah asked if Peter would buy her some flowers they walked by on the street one day and he refused, she knew it was over. Still, though, in their twenties, they laugh at the same jokes and wrestle and call each other family.
Next it was Louis, who was set in his ways. Moriah relied upon him to be there - to be company for grocery shopping, to buy the beer for the party, to be on her arm when she wanted nothing to do with anyone else in the room. They did just that, rely, and in their fading adolescence they named that love. This love, too, they relied upon to carry them through school, but their passions rested at opposing ends of the intellectual spectrum and the steadiness they relied upon in each other could not catalyze their interests. After years of lavish gifts Louis forgot roses on Valentines Day. Moriah re-scheduled dinner. He arrived late, and forgot the roses again.
Sean was a lost cause, a wild thief who in his neediness and fear stole Moriah's heart. Their tryst was relatively brief but encapsulated all of the passion that was absent with Louis, plus some. Impractical, destructive, an exciting grasp at a reality that existed only in their romantic literature, they read French poetry and stayed up drinking bourbon and smoking cigarettes, scandalizing their small college and tearing holes in themselves. When Moriah woke up from an illness he had sat with her during, she knew he would never buy her flowers. It wasn't until Sean woke her from sleep to tell her he was afraid and leaving, that she knew she needed them.
This morning Moriah woke up with a scream at her alarm clock, shaking. James held her, assuring her he was there and had a hold of her, nothing would happen. As she drove to work she realized that it was not, in fact, a startling from the alarm that had scared her that morning, but the inevitable leaving of the bed she shared, the long hours away from James that had terrified her. At breakfast she thought of the farmer's market that past week, the one he asked to go to, that they walked through in the rain. She had passed a stall full of giant stemmed flowers and showed him an oversized bouquet of white petals. He asked if she wanted some. Startled, she turned to him and responded that no, she did not, he had just given her all she needed by asking.
Next it was Louis, who was set in his ways. Moriah relied upon him to be there - to be company for grocery shopping, to buy the beer for the party, to be on her arm when she wanted nothing to do with anyone else in the room. They did just that, rely, and in their fading adolescence they named that love. This love, too, they relied upon to carry them through school, but their passions rested at opposing ends of the intellectual spectrum and the steadiness they relied upon in each other could not catalyze their interests. After years of lavish gifts Louis forgot roses on Valentines Day. Moriah re-scheduled dinner. He arrived late, and forgot the roses again.
Sean was a lost cause, a wild thief who in his neediness and fear stole Moriah's heart. Their tryst was relatively brief but encapsulated all of the passion that was absent with Louis, plus some. Impractical, destructive, an exciting grasp at a reality that existed only in their romantic literature, they read French poetry and stayed up drinking bourbon and smoking cigarettes, scandalizing their small college and tearing holes in themselves. When Moriah woke up from an illness he had sat with her during, she knew he would never buy her flowers. It wasn't until Sean woke her from sleep to tell her he was afraid and leaving, that she knew she needed them.
This morning Moriah woke up with a scream at her alarm clock, shaking. James held her, assuring her he was there and had a hold of her, nothing would happen. As she drove to work she realized that it was not, in fact, a startling from the alarm that had scared her that morning, but the inevitable leaving of the bed she shared, the long hours away from James that had terrified her. At breakfast she thought of the farmer's market that past week, the one he asked to go to, that they walked through in the rain. She had passed a stall full of giant stemmed flowers and showed him an oversized bouquet of white petals. He asked if she wanted some. Startled, she turned to him and responded that no, she did not, he had just given her all she needed by asking.
Monday, August 3, 2009
Monday post vacation
My friends, it is true. I have returned from the land of pirates, sand, and rednecks. I have spent a lovely week with the Crooks family. Here is a concise, yet accurate, list of what occurred from Sat. July 27 to Sun Aug 2:
Saturday:
- pack the vans, drive south.
- Stop and eat, stop and get gas, see sophie, eat, and drive south
- Arrive, unpack, drink beer, swim, dinner, beer, sleep
Sunday:
- Run, Coffee, sand, swim, beer,
- lunch, beer, swim, sand,
- Sophie’s, margarita’s, whiskey, splat, sleep
Monday:
- coffee, swim, sand, beer,
- Lunch, swim, beer, walk, hot tub, dinner, tequila, swim, tequila, pictures, sleep
Tuesday:
- Coffee, yoga, breakfast, swim, sand, lunch, beer, pool, swim
- Sand, beer, dinner, walk, hot tub, beer, sleep
Wednesday:
- Coffee, breakfast, hot-pepper-on-contact, nap,
- Lunch, beer, sitting by pool, beer, walk, dinner, movie, sleep
Thursday:
- Coffee, phone calls to optometrists, eye appointment
- Search for brother John, beer, sitting, grocery shopping
- Make dinner, margarita’s, hot tub, walk, sleep
Friday:
- Coffee, surf shop, sand, beer, swim, beer, sand
- Walk, beer, swim, sand, dinner, beer, television
Saturday:
- Coffee, pack, drive north, stop, eat, stop, gas
- Arrive, unpack vans, eat, drive home, sleep
Sunday:
- Coffee, farmers market in the rain,
- See mom, buy plants, see whole foods, yoga, make food, sleep
End result:
Several brand spanking new pounds, sand in my bed, a hug from my best friend, a thoroughly relaxed muscle system, a several week aversion to beer, a deepened love for my boyfriend, an awakened respect for extended family, sunburn, a few hundred more freckles, and a couple photos.
On another note, having been terribly angsty about going back to work and my inability to slow down or pay attention to accuracy in general, I arrived today smacked in the face with my solo status (I had been training until I left for OBX). This has gone surprisingly well. I have accomplished everything I was told to do at 9 am this morning, have caught up on most of my blogs, researched a few things, and had time to write this blog post. Ta-Da! I AM somewhat capable of doing what I think I am capable of doing in my dream-world!!!
Saturday:
- pack the vans, drive south.
- Stop and eat, stop and get gas, see sophie, eat, and drive south
- Arrive, unpack, drink beer, swim, dinner, beer, sleep
Sunday:
- Run, Coffee, sand, swim, beer,
- lunch, beer, swim, sand,
- Sophie’s, margarita’s, whiskey, splat, sleep
Monday:
- coffee, swim, sand, beer,
- Lunch, swim, beer, walk, hot tub, dinner, tequila, swim, tequila, pictures, sleep
Tuesday:
- Coffee, yoga, breakfast, swim, sand, lunch, beer, pool, swim
- Sand, beer, dinner, walk, hot tub, beer, sleep
Wednesday:
- Coffee, breakfast, hot-pepper-on-contact, nap,
- Lunch, beer, sitting by pool, beer, walk, dinner, movie, sleep
Thursday:
- Coffee, phone calls to optometrists, eye appointment
- Search for brother John, beer, sitting, grocery shopping
- Make dinner, margarita’s, hot tub, walk, sleep
Friday:
- Coffee, surf shop, sand, beer, swim, beer, sand
- Walk, beer, swim, sand, dinner, beer, television
Saturday:
- Coffee, pack, drive north, stop, eat, stop, gas
- Arrive, unpack vans, eat, drive home, sleep
Sunday:
- Coffee, farmers market in the rain,
- See mom, buy plants, see whole foods, yoga, make food, sleep
End result:
Several brand spanking new pounds, sand in my bed, a hug from my best friend, a thoroughly relaxed muscle system, a several week aversion to beer, a deepened love for my boyfriend, an awakened respect for extended family, sunburn, a few hundred more freckles, and a couple photos.
On another note, having been terribly angsty about going back to work and my inability to slow down or pay attention to accuracy in general, I arrived today smacked in the face with my solo status (I had been training until I left for OBX). This has gone surprisingly well. I have accomplished everything I was told to do at 9 am this morning, have caught up on most of my blogs, researched a few things, and had time to write this blog post. Ta-Da! I AM somewhat capable of doing what I think I am capable of doing in my dream-world!!!
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