intrepid candid photographer laura snapped this live action shot of a perspective seldom granted in this space.
rearview
nuff said
the love/hate, in all its degrees
I know one day I’ll look back and miss the cute puppyhood, but right now floyd is getting on my every last nerve– and I’m kind of looking forward to the middle-aged lap dog he’ll be.
I expect it to be an occasionally similar thing with kids– not-as-young-as-they-might-be parents kind of daydreaming of one day being emptynesters. I expect kids, if I ever have them, to kick my ass. it’s one ass-kicking I welcome, and it pretty much terrifies me.
ah, that thrill ride of caring a lot, about people, things, the work we do in this world, whatever.
I am absolutely hating being kind-of indifferent to the work I do daily. it’s not even the days that make me crazy that make me crazy– ultimately it’s simply not caring enough. I really miss feeling like I was in a position to effect the way forward in substantive ways. wouldn’t it even be nice to find one’s work meaningful? well, there’s reaching for the stars… but, concretely, I miss the high tech world and working in teams of targeted aptitudes. I miss intelligent organization and management. I miss california and north carolina for those things, and some other things.
which leads to nostalgia and the oh-so-long list of the things missed for various reasons– things, of course, from the past, rendered seemingly tame in retrospect.
the present has these intense pockets of authentic feeling and then stretches of … caring less.
I want to care more, I want more. and I stop myself continually in a hundred different ways out of the fear of change and the unknown. I’m not so much afraid of feeling a lot. I am learning that I fear being and appearing stupid (there is ego in it). and I have a concrete fear of being downright dumb. not trusting myself not to render disasters. I feel I have wrought them. the mistakes I’ve made have been rather doozies. I guess it’s the risk you run.
who wouldn’t like to be smarter and more skillful? better liked? charmed and charming? though I’ve seen those with silver spoons choke themselves with them. the risk they run.
we work with the tools we have– or we muffle our own hands with hesitation.
ho ho holiday
spent xmas with the future inlaws (which sounds totally scifi) in the south burbs. this holiday already has been most relaxing, welcoming and familial: full of tasty eats made by several different sets of beloved hands; a new stocking with “floyd” glitterscript by “grandma”; cards and packages by post including little schoolboy cookies, a cheese-making kit, and a hand-spun, -dyed, and -knitted hat from my sister. we welcome a new learning guitar into the house for the shower crooner. watched “julia and julie” this afternoon and identified so much with its chaotic women and their quietly brilliant men.
[interlude: at the moment floyd is giving the toy some love in a fashion that feels utterly wrong to us to witness.]
ten. daaaaaays. without any work schedule. open air and wide open space. we’re planning a couple of mini-adventures, getting out and about, packing cameras and setting out to discover fragile dilapidations or inspiring conglomeroddities out along the Somewheres Roadside. we’ll see what turns up, which is the point. and I’m booking some playtable time, for sure– got a start xmas eve eve– started out with wrapping and kind of took off. glue now sits drying, ideas jelling amid cluttered and resifted cutouts. I foresee several cups of cocoa, cups of tea, glasses of wine in the days ahead. this is the friday night of the long holiday stretch. staring down the double barrel of 2010 and 43– out of the aughts we go!
I have been remembering to articulate the need for TIME. just to be, time without feeling rushed or late for or behind on one thing or another. really I have missed timelessness. to have it, even in small sputtering doses and within a confined space before returning to whatever ordinary routine, defined of course in part by having a routine to return to– this feels like such a gift just now.
and quiet deeply craved… tho my inner mouth yearns to say “craven”, just all kinds of wrong meaning, obstinately meaning-full language. logic foiling the tastiness of the straight and curly sound of things. a frequent trouble in my poetry days– I’d let myself go traipsing down some nonsense for the pure auditory seduction in words, of letters thrown together in loving hodge-podge, and then wind up amounting to what, exactly? ah, yeoldesaga of sarah’s tumultuous relationship with writing– fraught with long silences and adverbial clot, the struggles with and hellyeah against meaning.
o, hello, quiet to listen through all this hubbub, the engine-starting, throat-clearing first paragraphs of getting down into the underneath and moving it forward. by gum and golly. Ima be moving it forward. that’s the deal. into the fear. right into the jaws of a host of discomforts. toward the other side, up over the wall.
floyd assists darcie with graphic design
okay
so I may not 100% love my job every single day, but by golly it’s nice having a puppy to snorgle in the afternoon sunshine.
simple pulse
weekend morning peace– hanging in the quiet kitchen with the wee beastie snoozing at the foot of my stool, chimes singing away through the open balcony door. following a few days of clogged kitchen sink drain, maintenance maestro snaking it out yesterday, this morning I’ve done loads of dishes and somewhat mastered the workspace chaos– though a big bucket of fetid-smelling drainwater remains shut up in the under-sink cupboard, which I’m choosing to leave for the tending of the manly man before I can put back away all the cleaners and whatnot that reside down yonder.
spent yestderday in the south burbs with the fella’s fam, pre-cousin-wedding-ing, introducing small monster to puppy grandparents, whose dogs generously tolerated his utmost sass, and returned home laden with a panoply of jewel-bright rubber chewables. surely human offspring would bring tenfold welcome.
work is work is schmerk. home organization drifts and lags, though thanks to heroic cohabitant we’re now equipped with plentiful bathroom shelfage. bit by bit. the days spin by. at night I feel my forties and find a dozen hundred larger, more meaningful accomplishments I wish I’d made yet. evenings are tough in the sathead, mornings kinder, weekends best of all– though the weight to make large changes swaggers in then with all its impatient bravado and sunday eve descends like a wicked clunker.
summer swelter has arrived after a full-on july reprieve, and we’re running the ginormous a.c. unit in the front rooms for the first time since the move– dim and cool in there with a small lake forming on the sidewalks below.
requesting suggestions for sanity please!!!!
what do you do when you’re feeling incredibly frustrated and irritable in the middle of your working day?
ordinarily, if I were at home, I’d go walk it off– but here I have to keep sitting at my stoopid desk surrounded by all the same stoopid stuff that’s tweaking me out.
help.
p.s. you know it’s bad when you add an agenda item to your google calendar that reads “filled with murderous rage”. hell, it could be hormonally compounded for all I know– but I totally just don’t want to be here today.
Little work pals
photo booth
somebody just unearthed photostrip stickers from the company holiday party– featured here are the lovely and expressive mesdemoiselles darcie and tammy:
