- Tue, 15:53: Modern proverb,if driven breakneck speed in2 forest 8years remember who got u there and no blame current driver 4 only being 2 years out.
More Invisible than usual, sorry but real blog tomorrow
I am moved. The boxes are filling up the living room like the veggie Chipolte burrito is filling my tummy. Son and wife brought them over for dinner. They IS Yummy, (The burritoes not the boxes or my son and DIL, I did not eat them).
I did not write the last two mornings for any real amount of time. No internet and no energy. All spent on the move. Still need to clean the old apartment and still need to unpack and organize but the actual move is completed.
Kind of like writing a nanovel, this packing everything up and moving, gotta stick to the basics, keep the goal in mind the whole time, no side tracking into reading the books or polishing the geegaws….
Tomorrow begins the finessing, which is what the other 11 months are about for a nanowriters nanovels.
Namaste.
Priorities (this blog under construction)
So I had a really cool profound blog that met my 1000 words and filled the time allotted. I shall try to reconstruct it later but my blogging time is up and I need to get to more house packing accomplished for the move. I hit the wrong key and the blog disappeared just as Stevie Wonder finished singing his songs in the Key of Life and my time was up.
I am better at this invisibility than i sometimes want to be. LOL
The alchemy of naming…
Naming my characters and getting to know them is always the most enjoyable and yet most challenging part of my writing. A true name has power, responsibility and gives form to what is expected, who is friend and who is foe.
I did not write last night after all. I called myself occupied and tired and let myself off the hook. I know in retrospect I could have still written. The day proffered me a plethora of inspiration and experiences. I named myself tired, and I was. Today writing has come with more difficulty perhaps just because yesterday was so very full of magic but more likely because I laid aside my self appointed responsibility and so it is harder to pick back up today.
I name myself re-engaged.
The day began yesterday with breakfast with one of two selkies (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selkie) with whom I am privileged enough to be friends. My children’s father was a male selkie, what some would term a merman I suppose, and when he returned to the sea I bore months later my final offspring Dallon (a form of Dylan). Any who know my sons love for all things ocean and water will have no doubt they have a bit of selkie blood and if they are sandal-footed, without being too obvious, note the toes. Since their father was fully selkie and I am a half breed his genes tell more in them than mine. Though honestly the thinner the blood, they say the thinner of the magic, the more just human one becomes until the only memory of being more is stirred when transported by music, engaged in a dream or adventuring in a story-tree rooted book .
Being born of crow mother/wild dog(coyote) father myself means my skin-walking friends are less likely to be feathered or four-legged; even though both are "trickster" persona I am named half breed to both and disdained for my weaker magic. Also I am of the european travellar, not southwestern lineage, true crow not Raven; and wild dog not Coyote. Looks the same unless you are one of us. We could even all have had the same distant origins once, probably do, but our similarities make our differences bigger; therefore my magical friends tend towards the blood of more mythical apparits like selkie or dragon. If this doesn’t make sense to you, no worries, it doesn’t to me either, but it happens all the time.
For instance think of the long bloody history of the whole "One God" wars. Judaism, Christianity and Islam all share the same relatively small (compared to the rest of the planet) geographical, socio-political and idealogical home. All three religions are "sucker" trees off the "Compassionate One God" root yet they fight each other as if they were competing species. We are the same.
Oh, sorry, you mean the way I talk as if magic is a part of everyday life is confusing you. LOL. If it makes it easier for you to swallow, just remember that this journal really is my NanoWrimo persona and therefore name what I say as fiction of fact as it suits you. Truth is only the name we give something we want to believe in or fight over.
It is funny how a name can change things. I have one without a name sleeping at my feet.
I have tried unsuccessfully to upload a picture of this new family member. She is about 8 weeks old I would guess from her teeth, and has the look of a runway model all lean youth and the softest sunlight yellow hair. She doesn’t have a name yet, because naming her would mean that I had committed to another ten to fifteen years of loving, feeding, training and cleaning up after her. My son and his lady are thinking about puppies these days and will come by later to see if this is someone they want to adopt, it would have been easier to do yesterday when she had not already nibbled my toes, irritated the older canine matriarch and fallen asleep with her nose in my armpit..
And I accidentally called her Sammy this morning, short for Samaranth, like the dragon in the Imaginarium Geographica or the lovely Belgium Beer. Both of which played into the magic of my week. She came when I called her Sammy, but I am waiting to discover if that is her true name and if she is staying.
Sensibly I know that another mouth to feed, vet bills, and time and love spent are going to be a challenge. I do not need another potential loss in my life, another chance to fail as nurturer. I struggle with the whole not resenting responsibility when I hit the middle of the journey even when I initially accepted the challenge with love and excitement. I absolutely do not need another thing to care about and care for!
Or do I? I look over at Noeine, a Lhaso Apso who has already exceeded vet expectations for longevity and my longest relationship outside of my sons and Zack (my childhood dog). Noeine, like my car, is still running well but already has given my notice of her mortality. I am a better person for loving her and her loving me back. Maybe today what I really need is someone else to love.
Today this little nameless one makes it easy to love her.She is smart enough that the only accident she has had inside was the direct result of my not waking to the whimpering baby pleas to go outside and she is little enough to still be sleeping a lot. She was found by the side of the road and all golden haired with green sad eyes.
As I said Sammy, Samaranth, is easy to love today and I guess she really does have a name and just like that love is the alchemy that makesa dog without name or place, family..
No post tomorrow morning
Will be paper and penning it as I am taking a mini vacation to the far west of Phoenix. Will post tomorrow night instead.
Namaste!
Journeys without a GPS require trust in the navigator
I am cannot say I am a fan of change, and I am currently inundated with flux. State budget cuts in important programs (just before the election in an effort to solidify the Republican vote and keep 80% of Arizona’s income in 3% of the populations pockets) have suddenly reduced my work hours by half. I am moving my place of residence again, and again moving into a situation where there are social dynamics (roommate and renting from son)after a lovely 6 month respite of living alone and just having to pay rent on time to strangers to keep a roof over my head; my car is in the shop, hoping its nothing serious; looking for second job and recently really ended and let go of a on again/off again 3 year relationship; the entire Mayor’s Court cast at Ren Faire will be different this year and still don’t even know what it will be or if I still want to or can afford do it, and some medical &*%$ in there again too. I really want to be bored for a bit.
This grumpy, growly complaints for the world to slow down and just let me rest may be a function of age. I do notice that many other mature (read over 50) people (unlike me) do not even own or know how to operate computers comfortably and (unlike me) always listen to the same music with which they first found love and independence. Resisting the changes in technology, music, social mores and economic realities, they sit beside me at the doctors, strike up conversations at libraries or coffee shops and commiserate that the world we set in motion in the 60’s has gotten away from us. The only thing I see myself having in common with many of them is species and age, so I would like to blame my own Ego in-transient stance and intransigent inner voice on the years, a stiffening of mind and soul, like the stiffening of my joints and legs. However the logic is faulty.
When I eat healthy, do my yoga and run, I have considerably less joint, back and muscle stiffness and pain. When I remember to feed and move my soul through reading healthy, meditating and consciously practicing gratitude I move through the oceans of new opportunities presented me with full sail and smiles, trusting the winds and the tides.
I found myself almost looking for a new "self-help" book on CD on my I-tunes this morning before I smiled and told my Ego to shut up. I have plenty of functional maps to getting through this newest storm of changes, I don’t need to spend my smallest resource looking for a GPS system to replace them. I don’t need a fix. I need to let go and move with winds and the water. No GPS for me.
I don’t actually believe in a spiritual GPS system, I don’t really trust physical GPS systems, a Garmin or TomTom is only as accurate as the cooperation of the operator and latest software. I mean I believe they exist, and they aren’t the original inspired texts. Spiritual truths are maps and travelogues. I think Moses, Jesus, Buddha, Mohammad, or any of the writers of the Upanishads would be both pleased and ashamed at the fruits of the seeds they planted as gardened by modern men and women. GPS spiritual plans are the religions of the journey. A GPS is an Electronic map willing to tell us where we are and where we are going, requiring nothing of the one making the journey but compliance. If the programming is up to date and the person correctly entered their destination, they will arrive exactly where they wanted to go by the shortest, fastest route having learned nothing but how to follow directions.
I don’t need that, or really want that. It was laziness looking for a quick fix. I don’t really want that either. I enjoy the journeys and remember the roadtrips as well and some times better than the destinations. So it is not a function of age, just a function of my very human laziness so that being said I am done for today and off to run with my dog and pack some boxes…but before I do
Something completely different, my dog right now is so totally making me laugh I am almost peeing my pants. I have tried to photograph or film this but the second I pick up the camera she stops, so narrative it is. Noeine is almost eleven years old and like me is not only getting long in the tooth but wide in the girth, so she like me, is on restricted rations. She used to get at will fed but reduced activity did not reduce her (or my)appetite. So anyway the unthinkable happens now, her dish is empty. To illuminate me to this horrendous factoid she is chasing it around the floor, picking it up in her mouth and banging it against my leg "accidentally" while I type, then dropping it on the floor and looking at me. She learned this stare from years of living with cats I am quite sure. Anyway, what is quite funny is I got up and gave her a new scoop of food and then she didn’t eat it, catlike she just cant stand an empty bowl.
Anyway off to sail through my ocean of change….
Invisible Friends
I just checked my guest stats and it seems my invisible friend from childhood is back and visiting quite regularly. I do love invisible friends, some I can see while no one else does and the ones I can’t see. Welcome invisible friends. If you read my blog yesterday you know I am partial to invisibility.
I am not a stranger to online blogs as I have been cyber soliloquizing since the Bulletin Board systems of the 1980’s (the last decade I was cutting edge) but am relatively new to Live Journal. I actually made this blog on Live Journal because of the plethora of Nanowrimo participant connections available AND the fact I do not already have a Live Journal persona. Bonus fact was discovering that authors I admire also have Live Journals where I can read bits of their lives and inspiration on a daily or almost daily basis. I did not realize that I could look and see who had visited my page until this morning as I scrolled through the top key options, I saw "guest stats" and the old Ego jumped up crying "is anybody listening?" and clicked the button . This is when I realized my invisible friends are back.
The first thing I learned though as I scrolled through my options, is that for a mere 20$ a year I can rid myself of the advertising and optimize my journal experience. Since I am someone who once supported herself through more intangible creative efforts than my current gig as a nurse, I like to support those whose genius make my life better, I will therefore willingly pay the $20, and yes ridding my morning of advertising loading then clearing is definitely a bonus motivation. I also learned that I have invisible friends.
I on the other hand feel no need to sneak here so “ Yes” Live Journal creators and maintainers and bloggers I will be your visible friend and you can bank on that as well. Paying for the privilege of using someone else’s ideas brings me to another musing as I here my Inner Budgeter way the time spent earning against the privileges of paying, "but you can still use it for free.." I ignore and pay.
I am constantly amazed at the creators, writers and artists out there who will in almost the same sentence tell me how they wish they could really support themselves (get rich) through their artistic, design or verbal efforts and then tell me how they got someone else’s efforts free. I smile and listen because I am trying to do that more. [This entire decade has been about letting go of my ego driven attachment to judge the world or make everything about me and my opinion of things, a challenge for someone whose youthful gifts of concise sharp penned criticism (bloodying the egos and professional reputations of other creative types) were rewarded with lots of accolades and attention and financial remuneration.] See, this last interjection is just proof of how far I have to go in my struggle to allow Authentic Self to master ego, as I once again make it about me.
Bleh! I almost erased that last line but will not as really the personal rules of preparing for Nanowrimo deny that possibility and it is an ironic twist that makes me smile, my squirmy, uncomfortable smile but still a smile. Now back to the blog I mean to write….
I read authors’ blogs because I also like free stuff, but I like free stuff that is offered for free. I grew up believing that taking something for free, that someone is charging for, is called stealing. I do not believe in stealing. Reading authors blogs is meant to be free stuff so I like reading them for the same reason I like samples while grocery shopping. I also read authors blogs because I am a too avid reader and no human being can create books fast enough to feed my appetite for their work. Blogs give me snacks of my favorite living authors words and ideas between the book meals appearing. (New Gourmet Meal "The Dragon’s Apprentice" is sitting on the table right now waiting for me as my reward tonight for updating my resume and putting in an application.) Finally, I read their blogs because it gives me a chance to feel, however misleading the feeling really is, that I know them a little in this the real world not just in the world and characters they created.
I like the sense of connection between me and someone I admire. Author blogs stream into my everyday life like some cyber ley line; their blogs bring their light and magic into my home with just a few clicks of a button. Some blogs I read are of less famous but equally talented people, life a particular australian poet who if she wants you to find her can be found in my blog comments frequently, she is not invisible. I read them for the same reason I read famous authors. Also I like the safety of internet “connections” as well as its ability to fit anywhere in my over scheduled life. I do not like its cultural counterpart “loss of privacy”.
I am unclear what the national obsession is about, this voyeuristic knowing as intimates people we have never and may never meet while ignoring the people in the same room; think reality TV, blogs, gossip magazines, paparazzi, etc. While I am not immune to its siren call, I do not understand it anymore than I understand cheeseburger addiction. However, fast food friendship is not what I mean about wanting to know them a little. I read my favorite living writer’s blogs (for example James Owen: http://coppervale.livejournal.com; John Scalzi at http://whatever.scalzi.com/) for the same reason I more than occasionally buy cut flowers for my home (the cheap ones from Trader Joe’s are the longest lasting and most beautiful), not because I think this makes me a gardener but because I want raise my light quotient I carry forward and take through my door in my smile and thoughts some of the beauty and light they bring to my world on a daily basis.
Hour finished. Time is up and I still need to ramp up a bit. I only managed 886 words and my goal is 1000/hour. I hope my invisible friends you enjoyed today’s installment . And I am off to apply for jobs! Have one already but am moving the end of this month and need a second one to get the ends to meet. ….
Being “Meme”ingful with Alien inspirations
This Meme is borrowed from the blog of Gini Koch (http://ginikoch.blogspot.com/) an author whose work I stalked in her too few pseudonymic incarnations. Recently I got to share a bit of whole grain bread, organic peanut butter and ginger marmalade with her as well as talk about her novel "Touched By An Alien". I like all kinds of reading material just like I love all kinds of food. Her Kat books, if they were a food, would be Krispy Kreme Donuts. So since the writer’s block prompts sent me off in directions of which I intend to keep this blog clear, I will meme instead.
1. If you could have any superpower, what would it be? Why?
My choice has varied between flying and invisibility, although both are super powers that seem to less useful if they aren’t coupled with hours at the gym buffing up for the punch or years at college to make sense of the overheard and over"seen" info. Today I pick invisibility as favorite
2. Who is your style icon?
Easy peasy, except not so much….which style? Fashion? Philosophy? Lifestyle? I would say my style icon is Victor Frankl as played by Doris Day in a tribute to Katherine Hepburn about Kuan Yin.
3. What is your favorite quote?
Today it is "How far you go in life depends on your being tender with the young, compassionate with the aged, sympathetic with the striving and tolerant of the weak and strong. Because someday in your life you will have been all of these. "
George Washington Carver
4. What is the best compliment you’ve ever received?
I have a box of awards, published articles and even programs from conventions where I was a "noted speaker" that speak my attributes with erudition but whose memories are faded and grey if not intangible. On top of that is a 10 year old picture of me with one of my sons from a day when I heard . "That’s MY mom", spoken with pride by my teen-ager when he thought I couldn’t hear and I can still smell gamer socks, cheesy puffs and mountain dew with a huge warm smile.
5. What playlist/CD is in your CD Player/iPod right now?
Its a self-made list called "Jason, no Argonauts" that begins with U2’s "If I Don’t Crazy….", moves to some Jack Johnson with "Breakdown" then I Concretely "Dance Along the Edge" and eclectically meander on through other semi-pop and rock music of the last two (3?)decades including some Ego Likeness, Queensryche, and Dreamtheater. This playlist is one of the three I made last year for Nanowrimo. Just before that I was listening to Stings amazing John Dowland CD.
6. Are you a night owl or a morning person?
I am a crow so what do you think? Corvids are up at dawn and asleep by sunset .
7. Do you prefer dogs or cats?
I am happiest when the proud Mother of both but always have a dog, cats come and go.
8. What is the meaning behind your blog name?
The name I want to legally change to as a final means of escaping into my super power of invisibility, and Ok, its my magic pirate name and if a black feather is found in your soup when I am around, I know nothing…
And the importance of this meme to my preparations is that now all my Nanowrimo 2010 characters will be answering this as well as the Faire Character interview on the days leading up to November 1.
And now I am supposed to tag three people….but I don’t think I even have three readers here.LOL. See it IS my superpower already! Nanowrimoers, friends, and invisible readers chomping at the bit go for it…..
Having nothing to say is not saying nothing
If having nothing to say was the same as saying nothing then political spots would be fewer and shorter, and half the Tempe public library (both fiction and nonfiction) would disappear so having nothing to say can never be an excuse not to sit and write my 1000 words. That is my next goal, Not just to awaken at the ungodly hour of morning and open the laptop with a loose connection (subject of a whole other blog someday) and begin typing but to actually complete a minimum of 1000 words a day.
During Nanowrimo the goal on non working days will up to 3000, this lets me complete the gazillion word novel in the 30 days. OK, not really a gazillion but I don’t remember exactly what the number of words is and stopping right now to go to the page and look it up would be one of those distractions that I am observing and not indulging at the moment. In the interest of knowing the number of words I am actually writing I may start composing in Word. Not to say there isn’t a way to count my words in LiveJournal itself but once again, looking that up right now would again be a distraction from writing.
On paragraph three, not bad for having nothing to say. Or at least that is what my brain said when I rolled over, looked at the clock and saw it was 3:48 AM and knew sleep would only come again if I got up and increased my water intake, while also beginning my output totals for the day. My brain immediately suggested that I reset my alarm from 4 AM to 430 AM, walk without turning on lights to kitchen, then bathroom and grab another 30 minutes of sleep. I could always write tomorrow it whispered. I would just turn on my Meditation Podcast and pretend I was getting in some subliminal meditation time. When my Authentic self replied that I had made a commitment to myself to write every morning and discipline was the important principle here, Ego retorted that I (we) had absolutely nothing to say and no one was reading it anyway. Which Authentic self just sighed at and put my feet on the floor.
It is true. I really have nothing to say and my readers are just almost as few as if I were writing in my paper journal but that is and is not the point. This journal is about discipline and about my continued work on separating myself from my enslavement to ego. If I wanted to be read I have other venues. As to having something to say, I am committed to listening and understanding first. I have been talking or writing my whole life, trying to be understood and equally trying to subvert truly being understood and then defining my worth or lack thereof through others acceptance, inclusion, admiration and inevitable betrayal/departure, and then filling the holes in my soul with habitual consumption.
I am in short an American Human who is now out of time way before rambling around to any brilliance or point. Except the point this morning was to get up and write. Which I have done. My thirty minutes "about me" cause now I shower, don the scrubs and head back to another 15 hour day where it is not at all about me, if I am doing it right that is.
Counting down to Nanowrimo and pebbles in a pond.
I did it. I am writing at 5:15 AM for 15 minutes before running off to my 15 hour patient day. I was kind of slow moving this morning because of having to lift a 115 pound patient yesterday as well as lots of bending and suctioning, and gloriously it is raining this morning. However that was of benefit as well. No long walk this morning, LOL. My decade+ old dog refuses to do anything more than pee and bolt back for the door when its is raining or over 100 degrees. So here is one to the discipline I need to complete nanowrimo again. Then comes the rewrites on all three books since the last three years have been a trilogy of sorts, not linear but more like a triangle placed in of course that moment when the world is about to end.
Now to pebbles in a pond. I am still to wrapped up in the actual magic of the whole event to write well about it. I am holding it close to my chest like my ongoing faith in Santa Claus, just enjoying the joy of it. I was anything but happy that I had been called to go to this patients house. He is really too big for me to handle safely and so when he contracts and coughs it takes all the strength and dexterity I have to suction his trach clean again. However, I believe nothing ever happens by chance and this was true here as well. This patients life is small, filled with love but due to medical constraints and developmental disabilities limited in scope. I grabbed James Owens "Here There be Dragons" and threw it into my nurse bag yesterday because when I go to this patient, I usually turn off the TV and read aloud (honestly I do this everywhere I can get away with it because books trump TV in my world). Where usually this patient falls asleep within 10 minutes of me beginning to read, yesterday he was entranced. Every time I would stop reading to do care, whether feeding, suctioning, etc, he would begin emphatically shaking his head no until I began reading again. When I would read he would just lay there and listen and smile. Now I know it wasn’t my reading cause i have read him Twain, Stevenson and Lewis; it was the story and the way it was being told.
Unfortunately, I had to leave at the end of my ten hour shift with John and Jack and Charles and Artus and their company in the greatest of peril. So I decided to use my Borders giftcard to get him the book on CD and drop it off later this week. And I was very reassured to know that it was no happenstance that I was the nurse yesterday but had through Owen’s talents made a real difference in his happy quotient.
Then to make the story even more magical, I had sent a letter of thanks to James Owen last night telling him how lovely it was to share his transportive magic with my patient, he wrote me back that he is sending the CD’s for me to deliver. I cried a little, then almost said no since it was not at all why I wrote. But maybe he is also feeling some of the heart swelling joy of making someone truly happy and it is n’t my right to be selfish so I sent him my address, because yesterday was physically hard, skill challenging, and yet a fabulously spiritually fulfilling day.
Life is magic and life is good and yes, there is a Santa Claus and he lives in every one of us.
Now off to work.