if you like to sleep
do not run out of cat food.
there is no marzipan prince…
so tonight I ate the marzipan frog.
the googley eyes put me off for a bit, but finally I turned it away from me and attacked from the rear, as it were.
as luck would have it, one of the frosting eyes quickly fell off, so I removed the other as well and set to with relish.
deeeeeelicious! inside there was some sort of proper raspberry cream. believe you me, that was one confection done right.
and now I am working on hatching a marzipan baby. woo! just imagine all the cute little marzipan outfits.
lucky girl x a million + various
(coda: I realize it might seem absurd to call oneself “girl” past a certain point; however, yesterday josue, while reviewing custom mural procedures with tammy and me referred to us as “you girls” not once but twice, and if you knew josue, you’d know this could only be taken endearingly, so I herewith consider myself vindicated)
1. this birthday far, FAR exceeded any possible expectations– comments and even posts and emails and facebook superwall thingamajigs of all kinds from all over reminding me of this insanely beautiful network I have of treasures called friends. bless me, my heart swells near to bursting, really. “thank you” feels insufficient to the task.
2. walked into work to a toasted sesame bagel with cream cheese and superjuice from tammy. moments later gina appeared with a bunch of roses. 10 minutes later a singing train of pals led by laura and gina with giant raspberry danish and marzipan frog. barely a blink later I was taken out for lunch by most awesome work friend crew. visit to the new building in the afternoon, which I hadn’t seen since it was empty and echoing warehouse space, and now it’s all built out, nearly complete, with carpeting and furniture and all– and new products a gorgeous, sunshiney space with delightful new spacious modular furniture– wheeeeee!!! after work quickie photoshoot drink with the ladies, treat of the lovely miss darcie, who somehow eluded frog-kissing documentation, and then off to most delectable french dinner at mon ami gabi with the world’s best brother in law. whew! whatta wonderful whirl. somewhere in there I think I did about five minutes’ worth of work. ;)
3. I had a thought about creative work and its sanity-inducing powers– it sounds obvious, but the key really is to keep doing it. there’s this phenomenon where you make something, and it gives you pleasure, and you look at it– you turn it around in your hand and maybe marvel at some kind of thing that moved through you to make this little bit of wonder and you walk away from it and return to it and admire it a little more– and gradually the pleasure seeps out of it, and the only cure is to get right back out and make something new. that’s how it works. for me, at least. it’s pretty delicious, actually, as long as I don’t get too hung up on the object, fretting it this way or that, identifying with or critiquing or excessively investing in it, and instead remember to reinject myself back into the flow of the process, to surrender to it, to swim.
4. please forgive my occasional existential whinges in this space. it is, for good or ill, an online journal, among other things. occasionally I turn a corner and see what I’ve gone on about and am chagrined at my own smallness and think, boy, I could really stand to get out in the world and do something for somebody else and quit my privileged whitegirl bellyaching. there. I’ve said it first, now you don’t have to. ;)
5. I’m embarrassed to admit false alarm about navelgazer.com. apparently I did pay my renewal fee back before christmas. I don’t know how this fact eluded me, but I’m going to officially chalk it up to Holiday Haze. thank you to the thoughtful and perceptive friend who actually checked whois info and pointed out to me the 2009 renewal date. there is no emoticon expressive enough to convey my sheepishness. but hey! woo! another year of navelgazer. maybe I’ll actually do something with the ol’ site. don’t hold yer breath, tho. and, now, just to be clear: this here’s not navelgazer– I know these online things are confusing, so I’m going to flog this poor hoorse and point out how this is navelgazer.VOX.com versus navelgazer.com, which is my very own domain, purchased in the eons-ago dawn of the interwebs, on which I pretty much posted my dreams for a bunch of years. then there’s the blogger-hosted lint, navelly.blogspot.com, to which I moved said dream-cataloging a coupla years back. and then there’s flickr for the snaps. so virtually these days there’s really not much of anything on navelgazer.com since I quit paying to host a whole lot of images and text archives and whatnot in that space, being cheap, and actually these days there’s no way to see all that ancient stuff except through the wayback machine— but someday I think I may find the energy to put it back out there in some form. though, really, I have a host of good intentions, few of which ever see actual light of day, so probably not.
6. laura’s uncle maya isn’t feeling so hot– please wish some wellness in his direction. thanks.
7. xo.
birthday eve
this time last year I was f-f-f-freakin’ out. which is not so much the case tonight.
41 doesn’t feel quite the hurdle that 40 did. and I’m feeling rather more established, or heading-in-that-direction, in my life here and now than I did at this time a year ago. so that’s all good. but I’m still battling the blues. the counselor says she’s impressed, that I’m doing well on the heels of romantic disappointment and so on– and I hear that– I know I’m doing the right sorts of work to help myself be well and proceed forward (I even have car insurance, woo! ;) ). but I said to her I dunno, I’m just tired of doing the work. and she said, what do you want, that the world should do it for you? that roses should tumble from the heavens? (well, not in those exact words, and, no, she’s not a jewish grandmother, but that’s the gist) and I said, no, I know, no… but there was something else– it eluded me in the mortification of how I imagined I’d sounded, and it just came clear to me tonight– I’m tired of doing the work and still feeling crappy. I’m tired of this heavy heavy heart. it feels as if I get short-lived vacations from it (the joy of coffee with a friend, the ebullience of falling in love), but here I am, back again with this dang clunker. and so tonight I think: maybe some sort of elemental lightening is in order for this organ in my forty-first year. we shall have to see about this.
in other news, tomorrow navelgazer.com expires. I hadn’t really planned to let it lapse, but the current state of the bank account dictates it– so rather than going begging, I’m calling it the natural end of an era and letting this be okay. and it is okay.
everything is okay and is going to be okay.
still, if you have a moment, please do this for me: send me a little story about your favorite birthday. you know you have one. dredge it up. I’ve got two, actually– the one with the fishing down the laundry chute and the one with the blizzard 21st birthday surprise party orchestrated by my awesome brother. there was a time I loved birthdays and would play the beatles “birthday” for myself full-blast first thing in the morning. I’d kind of like to get back there again.
cueing up the white album for the a.m…
the avoidance two-step
it’s back and forth and round and round I go. some things get accomplished, some things accrete, and I circumnavigate them. I wake up again and again in the middle of the night and read and write words with no particular path or agenda. refuse to evaluate relative success too closely. have meaningful conversations with friends, in person, by phone, via email. feel marginally saner. do some prep for annual salary review, plan to do more, and retreat soundly into fiction for the duration of a sunday. fail to take any photographs. okay, enough, this is not going to devolve into a litany of failures, which is always far too easy. sometimes the gorgeous world sucker-punches me. sometimes I manage to feed and clothe and care for myself somewhat like an adult. sometimes I lie awake long into the night and wonder what equilibrium looks like. most importantly I keep going in some direction that looks something like forward.
in the interests of fuller disclosure
par for the course:
there is an armchair that has sat on its side in the middle of my kitchen for several weeks now.
oh, hello
NYTimes, 1/1/08:
A Clutter Too Deep for Mere Bins and Shelves
snip
Excessive clutter and disorganization are often symptoms of a bigger health problem. People who have suffered an emotional trauma or a brain injury often find housecleaning an insurmountable task. Attention deficit disorder, depression, chronic pain and grief can prevent people from getting organized or lead to a buildup of clutter. At its most extreme, chronic disorganization is called hoarding, a condition many experts believe is a mental illness in its own right, although psychiatrists have yet to formally recognize it.
snip
Ms. Johnson says she often sees a link between her client’s efforts to get organized and weight loss. “I think someone decides, ‘I’m not going to live like this anymore. I’m not going to hold onto my stuff, I’m not going to hold onto my weight,’†she said. “I don’t know that one comes before the other. It’s part of that same life-change decision.â€
snip
Dr. Peeke says she often instructs patients trying to lose weight to at least create one clean and uncluttered place in their home. She also suggests keeping a gym bag with workout clothes and sneakers in an uncluttered area to make it easier to exercise. She recalls one patient whose garage was “a solid cube of clutter.†The woman cleaned up her home and also lost about 50 pounds.
“It wasn’t, at the end of the day, about her weight,†Dr. Peeke said. “It was about uncluttering at multiple levels of her life.â€
highlights from a thursday
- received yet another ticket for expired plates.
- drove to the secretary of state’s office at lunchtime and renewed them in about :30 seconds with a machine.
- reviewed my tally of tickets online. realized I had been cited by a camera for a red light violation. got the phone number for setting up a payment plan. will call tomorrow and pray to vehicular gods not to get booted.
- learned that since my car insurance check cleared, my rent check won’t. not sure how to solve that one.
- while driving to and from car reg lunch excursion, ran through a homeric catalog of possible second jobs, meanwhile decimating cuticles.
- wished for the gazillionth time that I were smarter and better at making/managing/saving (ha!) money.
- driving home from work, felt about .5 inch tall. 20 degrees and wicked windchill. knew I should go to the gym, that it would be the Right thing to do. wanted, fervently, only to crawl into bed. reminded myself of a certain donkey-photographing promise, so instead made a couple of stops and operated the camera with icy fingers. afterward felt enormously happier and calmer, nearly even sane.
- then the car engine started making an unsettling high-pitched noise.
- watched people bicycling down the frozen chicago streets and thought, what virtuous people. and then soon that will be me.
- saw a woman pushing a shopping cart and wearing a black plastic garbage bag and drew the line right there.
deja vu
I’ve been here before. called to account for some indiscretion I’d posted on my web page by my sister after some Good Samaritan had forwarded her a link.
the truth is I know I air too much in this space, and for the most part it is mine to air. but certain details may not in fact be mine to air, for all that they are mine to process. and my intention is not to cause pain or shame to anyone I love. it never was. but my actions, making public what is private, can tend toward that end.
I debated with myself the ethics of posting the item under question. there were a couple of days where I really didn’t know how to proceed and at first proceeded privately, with this material viewable to friends only–a small subset of people who, I hoped and trusted, would take their dismay up with me directly should they feel the need to express dismay.
generally speaking, my family does not observe what I do. I am aware of this. so after a time, after I’d posted a few other things and superficially buried this piece, I deemed it safe to change the post to viewable by anyone. why? arguably, that was thumbing my nose. but ultimately I wanted to own the project fully—as a project.
to which I truly felt (perhaps mistakenly) there were not people attached– until someone outside my family, observing silently, opted to step in and forward the link to my sister– thereby throwing her into embarrassment and concern on behalf of other family members.
I do know that no one in my family would have likely taken any notice of this project of mine without the intervention of a third party.
well and good. this is a fine lesson to me that I don’t operate in the vacuum I tend to assume. that the gossipy world I was raised in persists. it reminds me that I do not in fact intend harm or shame to my family members by my personal, processing project, despite the fact that it might seem to be “about†them– and reminds me to revise my actions to suit this intention. and it teaches me to remember that the web is in fact a public forum, as enclosed as the process of writing and posting might feel, at times.
as the process of living might feel, at times.
it is worth noting that people are quietly judging me.
wishes for a new year
2008, yo. so has the novelty of being out of the 1900s worn off? not for me, still. the digits we’re in continue to give a little tweak somewhere. and then there are the other digits, the 40s, whose tweak is more directly personal.
I rang in the new year with some truly delightful creative chicago people at a mustache-optional party in a flat still bearing remnants of 1980s well-heeled decor and walls of polaroid-immortalized friends– floated past midnight on a gin wave, eating my weight in stuffed mushrooms and meatballs on toothpicks, upper lip raw with the piney stink of spirit gum, dancing up a storm and smoking exactly one quarter inch of an absolutely disgusting chinese cigarette– and now…
bring on the resolutions. yesterday, at the 11th hour, as it were, i actually joined a gym. good heavens. but it’s easy walking distance from my house and crazy cheap, so it seemed like a no-brainer. and now, still dark on the morning of january 1, but quickly getting lighter in the snow-white world out my window, here are a few wishes I make for us collectively for the coming year–
may our conversations be rich and either swiftly to the point or luxuriously circuitous.
may we honor those who’ve come before while seeking our own, right ground.
may the roller coaster ride bring views of distant lands and plunging, beating hearts that assert life above all– and may we all successfully keep our hands and heads safely within the vehicle.
may we continue to strive to find creative solutions to adversity, never despairing.
may this brilliant world and its kooky and gorgeous inhabitants keep us feeling a part of an immense living family– at times fraught with dysfunction among our closest siblings, the human kind, but boisterous and persistent and riddled with grace throughout green and swimming and creeping cousins.
may we love as much as possible and beyond and continue to open and open and open though daily experience might make us want to shutter and fold, may we go on opening.
xo to all.