Update: Blog Name Change

UPDATE:

The name of this blog has been changed for the sake of anonymity.

Not that anyone should be ‘looking me up’ but more in an effort to cripple[hinder, break down, destroy, eradicate, erase, hog tie, limit, hold back, hamper, encumber, thwart, frustrate, foil, throw a monkey wrench in the works of, stop, etcetera so forth and so on] my own sense of self censorship.

 

Enforced Happiness

Yesterday, if you had asked me for my opinion on the holiday (in a non-religious sense of course), my answer would have revealed my indifference.

Easter.  Yes, a time to be with family, but once the anticipatory ‘bunny’ fades into the distance of youth  – and prior to having any kids of ones own – what else is there?  This would have been my response last night.This morning, waking up to a sky not yet inundated with overpowering sunlight, I knew what I wanted to do.  Well, if not wanted, at least what I knew I should do if I did not wish to feel the pangs of regret.  So, up I got, stumbling into the bathroom to turn on the muchtobright light, to make myself at least halfway decent in a braving-the-public-at-seven-a.m.-on-a-Sunday-morning sort of way.

The grocery store.    Avenues of display items, the whole of the store devoid of the mass of people I generally encounter on my early evening supply runs.  The ‘holiday aisle’.  Why don’t these baskets come pre-made?  Okay, a basket, some chocolates, some stringy stuff for the bottom, random toys – all, in all, way too many decisions for my sleep-fogged mind.  A couple of donuts.  Some flowers. 

The return home.  Putting everything together.  It’s at this point that something in me changed.  Now, if asked, I would have to respond that Easter doesn’t seem too bad.  Sort of an enforced jump-start on the merry spring outlook. You know, the outlook you imagine everyone having as you scroll through blogs only to find little more than picture after picture of flowers. I have subconsciously been avoiding just such an outlook, holed up in my apartment with the air conditioner telling me that winter is still outside my door.  Maybe this spring is not too bad.  Today, it actually seems quite nice.  Plus, summer is my actual nemesis and spring is only colored in my outlook by proximity..

And the sunflowers I bought for C scream happiness… Today feels like a good day. 

Well, okay, lets quit that too…

It’s the creamer.  It has to be.

 

I happen to be one of those people who are doomed to be forever battling with weight issues.  If I am not carrying a bit too much around with me, then I am on my way to skeleton-ville.  For some reason I can’t seem to find equilibrium – always on the up, or down, swing.

 

With that said, I unfortunately find myself at an impasse.  By all accounts, I should be dropping pounds like there is no tomorrow.  I am going to the gym on a regular basis and giving my body a healthy (over)dose of cardio and strength training.  This, by the way, is somewhat unusual for me and by its lonesome, should be resulting in visibly slimming results.  I have combined this with eating a very healthy diet.  At least what has always worked for me in the past:

Salads with low calorie dressing

Fruits, steamed vegetables

Low calorie wraps with Deli Turkey

…..and coffee and tea (lots) with sugar free creamer and packs of sweet n’ low.  I suppose with all the healthy eating and exercising I may be pouring the creamer a bit too liberally.

 

This one has me a bit stumped.  As I go to pull on yet another pair of jeans from my ‘lets keep these around just in case I get a bit heavy pile’ and find them on the tight side, my mood shifts.  I find myself getting more and more bitter about the fact that all my hard work is paying me a negative return.  Why is it again that I am not going out to eat (which I obviously love to do way too much) and eating bottomless bowls of pasta and never ending baskets of bread?  Why did I work so hard to get all of that dreaded ‘holiday’ weight (okay lets call it NOVEMBER-DECEMBER weight since I gave myself free reign with food during the whole of those two months) – off?

 

It’s the creamer.  Or at least that’s what I can think of to cut.  Oh, I don’t want to do it.  I have this attachment to my creamer that goes back quite a few years now.  It’s good, it’s candy, and until now, it has been the one indulgence I have refused to abandon.  Sadly, it seems that time is over – at least for a while.  Hey, maybe if my coffee (which I make myself – out of extra fine (Turkish) ground espresso beans) doesn’t taste as good, I will drink less of it.  Plus, tea might be better for you if you can actually taste the tea and not just the pseudo-sugary goodness you put in it.

 We shall see…

Shades of Ourselves; Unformed Friendships

Shades of ourselves. Shades of others.

 We meet people and say things.  Try to get some point or another across while skipping over a thousand other equally important things.  No one will ever really know you but yourself.  We go through life trying to understand the people around us – impressions forming about those we meet – from the most limited of interactions.  It is like a figure giving off a hundred thousand shades of itself.  The figure is the mystery.  It will always be.  If I don’t ‘get’ me, who am I to ‘get’ you? 

 Sometimes I think that I don’t think/act/behave in a certain way that seems prevalent in those in life I encounter.  I don’t understand why people lie or deceive.  Oh, I understand the aggressive tendencies we have.  I understand OVER REACTING and being TACTLESS.  I understand saying something malicious as a defensive maneuver.  But why lie?  I watch so many around me fabricate these complicated entanglements for no clear-cut reason.  They seem to be stuck on dive and evade mode.  Is this a form of self preservation/protection.  Is the truth a place of vulnerability? 

I build my own type of walls.  I distance myself from others.  I have my intense lonely moments but always justify them with an inner desire to remain relatively solitary.  I think this ties into my sense of loyalty.  If I form an alliance, which for me constitutes anything more than a remote acquaintance, I give myself completely to it.  I will do anything for my family.  I am engaged and to be honest, (even as my sense of self rebels against my writing it…) I would do anything for him.  Maybe that’s why I don’t form true FRIENDSHIPS anymore.  In my youth I did.  And true to form, I would have done anything for them and expected the same in return.  Back then it didn’t dawn on me that we don’t all work in this all-or-nothing fashion.  I wound up hurt, used up and ditched.  They always lied too.  Time and time again until finally the point started to sink in. 

That was a long time ago.  I don’t have any steadfast reason for my lack of friendships these days.  I look to my parents (hell, anyone for that matter) and I see them surrounded by these beautiful, lasting friendships.  I understand that, at least in theory, I can form friendships without 1.becoming dependent on them and 2. investing too much in their worth.  In theory.  In the meanwhile I am sitting back from it all.  Searching for myself and what that means to me.  Learning to live honestly – especially with myself.  Trying to ‘get’ me (at least a little ;-) and perhaps at least a few of the shades I am casting.

 Listening to: several but at the moment: Goo Goo Dolls/”Black Balloon”.

My Little Office Apple-Trees

Let me start off by saying that my work schedule is somewhat sporadic.  Because of school, which I attend all day Tuesday’s and Thursday’s, I had to scale down to part time at work.  Now I work remotely on Wednesday’s and in the office on Friday’s.

 So a while back, when I was making the two hour commute to work each day, it finally began to sink in that I had been there almost a year and my work-space [it's not a cubical, it's not a cubical, it's not a ... okay it is a cubical] was quite devoid of anything personal.  Each morning I would walk to my desk (always the first or second to arrive due to the long commute and my theory that it’s better to be absurdly early than late), and look into the lives of my co-workers via the picture-collages, plaques, trinkets, decorations, and so forth that seemed to multiply in an endless desire to occupy all empty desk space.  Then I would reach my desk.  Not much but few stacks of paper cluttered with sticky-notes.  Hmm…no wonder I felt they didn’t think I belonged.  So, in a somewhat defiant manner (or so I told myself because I would not go the picture route), I bought a plant.

I found this plant in a tourist town up the coast – Solvang if you really care to know – in a little store catering to mother’s like mine.  I had let word slip of my plant-search and she (the absolutely wonderful, amazing, supportive, best-friend-of-a-mother she is) found one.  Over priced for sure, this was a delicate ivy of some sort that made its way up a four-leg wire guide that came to a point, about a foot and a half above the pot.  A beauty for sure, not that I had much hope of keeping it alive.

 Live it did, however, under the flickering, fluorescent light above my desk.  How? I have no idea, but sure enough new, tiny, brilliant green leaves started to appear and reach their way up in the air.  To me it was perfect and to the best of my knowledge, it declared that yes, this was some one’s desk, and no, there was no way to know the details of this person’s life just by passing their desk in the morning.

That was until my schedule changed, school began and this ‘part-time’ business started.  At first, during the hectic time of becoming one of the company’s first remote – or work-from-home - employee’s, I had yet to request that Friday be an in-office day.  I didn’t see the office for a three month stretch and when I returned, you guessed it, the plant was a crisp skeleton of what it one was.  This was not a case of withering and dying or simply a, leaves falling off the steam, issue.  No, my plant was a completely preserved version of its former self, down to the tiniest new foliage.  Damn.  Couldn’t someone have thrown a cup of water into the pot for you?  No, of course not, they didn’t have the trinkets and picture collages to bring you to the forefront of whatever they were thinking as they passed your desk. 

So on Friday’s when I make it into the office I look at the bones of my plant, and wonder at their stuborn defiance in holding on to each fragile leaf.  I do my best to water it – I guess this points at some belief that there is a core in those thin stalks which has not died out completely and which will reemerge in a glorious green statement of triumph. 

Nope.  Nothing.  Months have gone by and there was not the slightest sign of life.  Until the apple, or apples I should say, that is.  I was occupying my lunch in front of the computer one day, eating a Granny-Smith (my favorite, although they’re the only apples I eat so it’s not much of a contest).  When I got to the core – I eat the core, don’t ask me why – I saw that one of the tiny seeds had started to root. 

…I didn’t think this was possible:  as children we had a nanny from Romania.  She would bring back chicken or duck eggs – can’t remember which – on the plane with her and try to hatch them at our house.  It never worked.  Something to due with the metal scanner ‘rays’ you walk through.  I just applied the same logic to why, whenever I tried to plant a seed from something grocery-store bought, it never worked…

On an impulse I put the seeds into the pot of my skeleton plant.  Yesterday at work I looked over and sure enough there were about three, one inch apple trees growing. Green again.  It was nice.

Flash Mob versus Flash Individual

Doing my best the other day to waste as much time as possible, I was browsing through the school newspaper and came across an article on Flash Mobs.  Apparently I was a bit behind the eight-ball because I had never heard of such a thing. 

Flash Mob:  ”A flash mob is a large group of people who assemble suddenly in a public place, perform an unusual action for a brief period of time, then quickly disperse.” – courtesy of Wikipedia

[The example given by the article was a group of people, gathering outside of some retail environment or another, "holding bananas up to their ears and chatting as if they were on cell phones."]

Since reading the article I can not seem to get the idea out of my head.  Not only do I expect to see a “mob” around every corner, I WANT to see them there.  Why?  Perhaps I am just sick of the day to day conformity I feel surrounded by.  I ‘expect’ and ‘WANT’ to believe that everyone else around me is inwardly as fed up as I am.  Why does everyone go from one task to the next – from one day to the next, from weekend to weekend - without really noticing their life blurring by.  I do understand the whole ’society must abide rules, laws, and morals to avoid utter chaos’ thing.   Still, every time I drive on the freeway, jammed with cars, [and yes, maybe this is a Los Angeles thing...] I can’t stop imagining every vehicle using whatever off-roading capabilities they posses, driving up curbs, sidewalks, hillsides – making their own roads – and actually getting to where they have to go. It is the unending lines of break lights that do me in.  I can’t stand them.  I can’t stand everyone going about their day, caught up in whatever triviality they are currently obsessing over, standing there, obediently, ‘in line’ – metaphorically and literally.

I expect and want to see flash mobs wherever I go, and to be honest I don’t understand why we all seem unable to think outside the box which is our life.  The reason this bugs me – I am sure – is because in a large part it reflects the aspects of my own life I most abhor.  Some of the things I do – I DO – because society sets them in front of me and I mindlessly succumb (or at least I am unable to think of and enact an alternative).  This begs the question of why, if I so abhor the continutiy and mindless flow, do I not start my own, one-person-flash-mob?  Because that would be ‘crazy’, and because it would seem that it takes numbers to say anything sanely.

What place in line was I again?

A Scary Situation

Throughout my life I have been in various ’scary’ situations.  Situations when one thing or another has lead to some unsafe circumstance.  Why is it when someone we love is in such a situation it is SO MUCH WORSE?  The feeling of helplessness increases exponentially…but it’s more than that.  I can block out my own memories, fright/flight impulses – I can glaze over the top of them as only quasi-real moments in my life.  With someone I love it’s a different story.  There’s no forgetting.  It happened, it was scary, it was real, and it is not going away anytime soon. 

TV Challenges

Okay, I have to say I love the challenges.  I am talking about TV shows like Fit Camp, Biggest Loser, Gladiators, etc. and so forth.  It’s the challenges that I can’t get enough of.  Who thinks of these things?  What will people agree to do in the name of TV?  So you are being filmed for this show and therefore have agreed to do WHATEVER you are asked [sorry, not asked - told].  Why don’t we ever hear about the people coming up with the challenges?  They are like mini gods.  They get their kicks out of making people pull hot air balloons, run up mountains, and complete rediculous obstacle courses (which in turn remind me of dog obedience and agility competitions). I have to admit, it seems a bit silly.

Why do we need to watch TV to get our fill of these ‘challenges’?  It seems like there should be clubs, organized sports even, dedicated to the creation, participation, and observance of just such events.  Maybe we all just want to act like kids in made up games and competitions. ‘Bet I can race to the end of the street, around the light-pole and back, before you.’

An Endless Production

So I sit here mindlessly waisting time as I push the ’scroll-to-the-next-random-blog-button’ over and over again. Why? Probably because I have a ton to read by tomorrow and an essay I really should be working on.  What’s driving me nuts right now is not the reading or the essay.  Well, I guess it is the reading – the blog reading – that’s getting to me.  As I click from one site to the next I am searching for something – anything really.  I just want to read something that is a part of the person who wrote it.  I want to read some insightful observation or a blatant honesty that will remind me of the vulnerability of the AA meetings I used to attend.  I want to read something that will make the day feel real.  Apparently, this will not be happening.  It feels like I am reading the same nonsense – or sense rather – over and over again.  Give me pain and struggle – but not of the everyday variety.  Give me something that hurts and feels real. 

 Have you ever had that moment when you are in a phone conversation, telling the other person something, and you realize that the responses you are getting are fake?  Filler or auto responses.  You hear the ‘un-huh’, ‘oh yeah…’, ’sure’s’.  Suddenly you realize that it all is a sort of production.  Your telling them something – their listening.  Why?  As I read through random blogs it is gradually dawning on me that they are all essentially the same.  Filler or auto blogs.  People writing because they haven’t said anything for a few days and they feel obligated to do so.  I guess this is okay, who am I to judge?  It just doesn’t make anything feel real…

Some of The ‘Kids’

[EDIT][picture of cat's] hmm…the photo wouldn’t load as a reasonable size.  Have to work on that….

They always make me happy ;-)

Today was a good one.  C taught me to ride the 500 Polaris ATV [okay so I have the basics down, but apparently trying too go fast in a low gear is a major no no...], then we drove around going to fish stores.  This going to fish stores is something we do ALL THE TIME.  I know it’s a bit strange, but I love it.  It all started about a year ago when I told him I had an empty tank sitting at my parents.  I wasn’t sure if we had the room to set it up, plus I didn’t want to get stuck as the only one cleaning and taking care of it.  This could not be further from the truth.  That original tank was a 29 gallon.  We have since added a 110 and a 25 gallon to our collection [we live in a one bedroom apartment at present...].  Despite my hectic schedule and C’s on-call full time job, he always is on top of cleaning their tanks and bringing home feeders. 

Our other ‘kids’ include an Argus monitor, a green iguana, and Chaos and Psycho - our two cats.   Some may be a bit nicer than the others but in truth – we love them all ;-)