daily gratitudes

Today I'm grateful for:

- Hoola hoops.

- The lovely day we're having today, and the fact that the last week actually felt appropriately cold for the season.

- Sesame pretzels. Seriously, they're awesome.

- Time! I don't have to work until 4 and I finished my editing last night for the week. It's wonderful.

- Fuzzy blankets-- the little cheapie 8$ ones from IKEA. I want more.

- The smaller appetite I get after being sick. Makes it easier not to eat myself sick.

letters to the aether

Dear puppy,

Please quit pooping by my door. I'm tired of stepping on it first thing in the morning.

Love,

Me

Dear calendar-in-my-brain,

Please stop making smug little noises only I can hear as I sit here shivering in 55 degree weather, wondering how the hell I'm supposed to survive Pennsylvania in the late fall next year. Also, stop reminding me that it's secretly winter (because the Winter Solstice is Midwinter, so it has to be winter now for that to be the middle) as I'm walking to work on legs that don't want to work right because it's too cold.

Love,

Me

Dear stomach,

WTF? I mean, really. Since when have we not been able to handle even two days of Thanksgiving leftovers? I do not appreciate the late-night pains and the all-day nausea, and I'm not buying that it's a cold until other symptoms start showing up, so you and gall-bladder better tighten up before I scoop you both out with a spoon and build my own mechanical stomach out of old computer parts, a bit of fishtank tubing and a ziplock bag.

Love,

Me

Dear bank account,

You could stand to be a bit fatter.

Love,

Me

the girl in the mirror

There's this funny thing. Most of the time when I look in the mirror-- all the time when I have my glasses on-- I see pretty much the same face I've seen since I started looking in the mirror regularly somewhere around eleven, the age when I started wearing make up (before that, I avoided the mirror, but that's another story for another day / middle of the night). I see the glasses, the crooked teeth and therefore a slightly lopsided lip-line that has to be corrected when I put lipstick on, the bangs that don't like to lie flat, the chin with it's three scars, the nose that could be better shaped, the green eyes that aren't like my mom's (her's are dark jade green and don't have rings or lines or any gold or anything). I don't think I've changed that much since I started looking how I was going to look as an adult,

But the last few months, when I look in the mirror without my glasses, like when I'm putting on or taking off my makeup, it's almost like I'm seeing this other person that's underneath. I think maybe my glasses keep me from noticing that I've grown up. I use face creams morning and night now. I usually remember to take my makeup off. I have little baby crow's feet from laughing and squinting from bad prescriptions and too much sun. I have patches of dry skin and patches of oily skin that need to be taken care of. My nose looks shapelier without the glasses, like it's only pretending to be sort of fat and blobby-- and I know for a fact that it's been improved by that breaking it got when I was hit by the car that time. My eyes look bigger, and my eyebrows arch better. Makeup looks different, like it wants to be more glamorous. My jawline looks more defined. The teeth don't look so out of place-- they add character.

Is it just that I'm seeing who I am now that I'm grown up? I was born when my mom was twenty-four, so when she was my age as I am now, that's when I was starting to solidify memories-- this is sort of how my mom looks in my memory. This isn't the girl I associate with me, this is a woman who appreciates Yves Saint Laurent's new perfume, who wants to have babies if her ovaries would cooperate, who's trying to build a proper career so she doesn't have to work retail anymore, who knows the difference between wines and has a preference, who usually orders vodka and cran with a twist of lime when she's at a bar, who presents papers at a conference where moderately famous people know her name. This is a woman who could be gorgeous. This is a woman who knows what she wants out of life, and maybe one of those things is a darker hair color and flat iron combo. Maybe one of those things is a husband. One of those things is definitely a shelf full of her books when she visits the bookstore. Definitely a house on a hill overlooking water, and a writing room with good light and green walls.

She's a little intimidating, and I think sometimes I skip the nightly routine because I'm not ready to be her.

But I think it'll be great when I am. One of my friends said that when she hit her thirties, she was relieved that she didn't have to worry about not being wild enough to be a typical twenty-something; I think I understand what she's talking about.

appropriate weight and other matters

I just spent half an hour looking up appropriate weight-to-height ratios, and aside from one really scary chart that said I shouldn't be over 99 lbs for my height (?!?), they all sort of agreed that I should be around 120ish for the middle-range height (max, somewhere around 130, min somewhere around 100, though it seems unfair that my min is further from my average than my max).

Now, I'm currently at 159, as of this morning. I know this is too much, but I don't feel like I'm well into obese as far as these charts are concerned-- I mean, I don't look like those women that come in and order triple-scoop icecreams, have three chins and huge elbow-fat, and look like they're smuggling pillows under their shirts. I'm also not as mean as them, but that's a different story. And I know from experience that at 100, I'm bony and boobless. 120 should be about where I was when I started college, though I carry my weight in all new and different places now, and I think I wouldn't feel too skinny there, but that's alot of weight to lose to get there, and-- well, here's a confession:

In highschool, I was anorexic. I spent more than a year eating once or less a day, and at my lowest, I was under 89 lbs. At the same height I am now. I didn't realize at the time that I was anorexic because I didn't have the mental problems or the exercise addiction that went along with it, but I did (and do) have a stomach-valve malfunction that makes it hard to eat sometimes. In high school, it made it better to just not be hungry, so I stopped eating. But now, I know my triggers, and I know that when I cut my intake too much, I start obsessing, and I develop the OCD I didn't have then. And it would be so easy to just stop eating again. After a few days, I'm just not hungry any more.

But I don't want to starve myself, so I have to be careful to keep this reasonable.

And I still hate exercise.

I'm working on only eating when I can sit down and have a proper meal. I'm drinking more tea again, both because I love tea and miss it and because it speeds my metabolism without getting me so wired that I can't function (although I have to be careful about drinking it too late, it seems). I have a hoolahoop that I really like, and there are apparently hoola-hoop-exercise videos on YouTube, and maybe I'll take up poi or something, too. Things that take effort but are about the opposite if boring. When it stays cool, I'm going to try to walk more and maybe start running some, when I can afford to buy a pair of shoes that aren't flip flops. I'm working more, and that means I'm lazing less, and that's already good. And I'm going to start enforcing weekly weigh-ins so I know where I am and have to face it when I eat poorly.

And that's where the Plan is right now.

And in other matters:

I think we're getting a pitbull puppy. I'm not ready to pottytrain a baby dog, but I think as long as we're nice to it, it should grow up nice, right? Just because they're bred as fighting dogs doesn't mean all of them will clamp on and have to be killed to get them to release, right?

things you should know if we ever get married for your greencard

... I am a pro procrastinator. I know dozens of ways to waste time and get far less done than I should.

... I am addicted to lipgloss. I'm also very picky about the texture, so I'm constantly buying new ones.

... I refer to the cats as 'So Many Kittens', even when there's only one visible. Like so: "Hello, So Many Kittens! Where are the other ones?"

... I have at least two years' worth of pictures on my SD card at any given time. Before this, I had up to eleven undeveloped cameras hanging around at any given time, and before that, up to five rolls of film. I'm working on getting the leftover cameras from before I had a digital fixed.

... I go on tangents all the time. Usually for a week or two, I'll research the crap out of some subject or other, memorizing details, tracking down sources, finding downloads and pictures and what have you, incorporating the concepts into my brain and my life... and then I'll find something else to do.

... I am a perpetual work in progress.

... If reincarnation is real, and I have any choice in what I come back as, I'd choose a spoiled house cat in a nice home every time.

... I'm sure that delusions of grandeur are only delusions if you don't achieve grandeur.

... Shiny things will always distract me, and I'm really kind of okay with that.

... I never get enough sleep.

... I'm convinced that at some point in my life, I'll be distressed and out on a moor or some sort of moor-like location, I'll yell HEEEEAAAATHCLIFFFF!! and someone wonderful and meant for me will yell CAAATTHEERRRIIINNNNEEE!! and I'll know in that moment that it'll be all right because we've found each other.

lushness

I think my life has been too spare lately. There isn't enough in it that I could call Lush or Sumptuous, and I want to fix that. Nicer fabrics, better foods, better makeup, all the perfumes I've recently fallen in love with*-- or at the very least, I need to pay more attention to my camera and learn to take pictures of things so that they look better. And then remember to post those things here.

Because I'm not a monk**. I've just been too damn poor to get past that sort of living. And I'm getting tired of it. I'm getting tired of the constant feeling that I don't have enough money for things and that I never will-- and I'm pretty sure that at least part of perpetual poordom is accepting these things to be true, so I'm fighting against them. I'll be successful. I'm already working toward it. I have my articles, I have two jobs now, one of which is basically outside the budget***, and I'm starting school next fall in a program that should introduce me to all sorts of people who are already doing what I want to do, while simultaneously teaching me how to work in that world.

Relief. That's what I feel.

This blog is helping, like a therapist or something, to get my head where it needs to be, so thank you, readers mine, for working through my crazy with me. And thank you internet for making me do so in a public way, instead of suffering on my own. And thank you recovering economy for helping someone make just enough extra money to hire me for a few days a week, loosening up my situation even as it ties up my schedule.

* All of them from Avon, who used to only have horrible musky old-lady perfumes when I was a kid, and now has wonderful fresh things that I love: first and foremost, Rebel Rose, but also London, Jet Femme, Spotlight, Play, Vitality and 50s Glam.

** I dated someone who was willingly monklike once, and that only proved to me that I'm not an ascetic, and that's not at all what I want my life to be like. I'll leave empty rooms and bland color schemes to someone else; I want big airy rooms, vintage furniture, good and plentiful food, sunlight, a garden full of roses, and good tea every day.

*** The Budget is the list of all the bills I have to pay every month, and the usual pay covers that, so long as I don't want to buy food or toothpaste or shampoo or go to the movies or anything. Job the Second provides for that part of life that is actually living.

ps: I also want to be skinner, as has been mentioned before, but in a chic, beautiful way, not in a starving because I can't afford food with nutrients way. Hopefully Job 2 will provide for that, too, by keeping me more active and keeping me away from the icecream samples that keep thwarting my current attempts. It's time to get my food back in line, now that I can almost afford nice things to eat again.

organization

I'm not organized. Like, at all. I generally know where everything I need is (generally...), but there's very little that a person could call organization about my life. But with this being NaNoWriMo and with taking on a second job (what will allow me to eat and maybe have a little more spare monies for things like books and movies and other things in the category of Not Living Like A Monk Until I'm Crushed Under It All), and still having the articles to write and the editing to edit and the various other things I like doing to do still demanding my time, I've decided to try and organize.

I've been using the Organized Writer's Planner for a while now. It's awesome. Even though it's geared more toward freelance than fiction, it has the idea that creative types need different ways to wrangle themselves and have other things to wrangle than non-creative-business types, and that means it's already something I can live with. And it breaks things down so they aren't so scary, which I've realized recently is a big part of my natural procrastination: being overwhelmed.

And since I never could leave well enough alone, I combine it with the D*I*Y Planner that has a lot of other pages I can and frequently do use, and I make several specific pages for myself, like the debt management pages (I want to get most of my debt, meaning everything that's not a school loan, paid off within the next ten years, because that's when I plan to start being Important and I don't want stupid old debts from when I was 18 dragging along after me), and the expenses pages. And Avon is very good at sending me pages to help track that, so that's good, too.

I'm freakishly visual, so I have a calendar on the board in my bedroom and by my desk, and a dayplanner in my purse, all with everything I'm expected to remember in them.

I make lists constantly.

And it's starting to work. As long as I remember to keep up with it all, it makes everything much more reasonable and handleable.

How do you, readers mine, organize yourselves?

crisis management

No details, since I don't have permission to give them to the internets, but there was a crisis when we got home from a dull and annoying day at work on Monday, and it's resulted in hospital visits, many calls, and no time for all the side work I do. I'm fine, but one of the room mates is probably not, and we're still waiting for news, apparently. I work today, so I won't be there, and I'm starting my second job tomorrow, so I won't be there then, either.

This is probably selfish, but I feel like it's the universe slapping me in the face. Whenever I think things are going well, something crappy and unexpected happens to someone I care about, or I lose my job and someone starts spreading vicious rumors about me that keep me from getting another one for a long time, or all my bills bounce because of one small thing that I didn't remember to write down or something equally out of my control. And it leaves me devastated and knocked entirely off track. That wobbling platform where my mind and my sense of wellbeing lives is tilted again, and I feel like I'm scrabbling at nothing to try and keep it all together. I'm pretty sure this is how crisis works, but it's not something I'm good at handling, and I'm trying really hard not to internalize the fear and the uncertainty and trying not to shut down and zombie through life. That doesn't help anything at all, especially not when someone's in the middle of a Big Writing Project, and not when someone's time is being consumed by multiple jobs.

But I feel better since I vented here. Thank you, internets.

new leaves

You know that feeling when everything changes for the better? How you feel like you fit into your own skin better? I always sort of feel like I'm made up of several voices all talking at once, or several layers of image and color, all overlayed, but mostly I'm a little out of focus, a little off-center, and you can see all the layers as separate things instead of them shining through together, all in one plane, all making up one cohesive me.

I started NaNoWriMo this year, and even if I never get to the end, it's already fixed me. It's brought me back into focus and reminded me that I'm not where I work or what I wear-- I'm made of the people I create and the stories I tell, and that's why I'm here. That's why I'm going to school in the fall, why I'm trying to find places to publish me. It's the only think I've ever wanted to do that I could actually accomplish, the only thing I can imagine doing for my whole life and never getting tired of.

I feel like the air has all been let back into the room. I feel like a fever has broken and now I can get better, or like I'm fertile and unpoisoned again. If I can keep this on track, maybe I can get the rest of my life back where it belongs. Maybe I can get back to the right headspace without the WTF Island bullshit.

These are my gratitudes today.