Saturday Morning Smiles
I've spent this morning drinking black coffee and reading "White teeth" by Zadie Smith. Just recently Little Man has hopped into bed with me and is excited as he's captured all the Pokemon in his game that he was hoping and working so fiercly to. I feel compelled to write a personal entry, and have turned on the Indigo Girls which happily complements the music from his game :) This marks just another day in my very blessed life.
Last night I lost track of time near the end of work as I was talking with a coworker about her sons. She has one the same age as Little Man and a 6 year old and it was nice to have someone to talk to about everything. I never seem to choose the normal path: get involved with someone around my age, buy an appt together and work up the ladder, get married and have a kid together, live and grow together... I wouldn't change my path, but I do recognize how different it is from my friends' lives. I've always felt a certain distance from friends my age, despite the close ties we may have. And yet still I wouldn't change this.
I feel like life is opening up to me in so many ways and I just can't believe it. I'm amazed by the power of every day.
Yesterday I turned in my first graduate level paper that actually counts for something. I think it's a piece of crap but I learned. This was the first paper I wasn't stressing to finish the night before it was due. I worked on it steadily throughout the course of the past two weeks and calmly finished it the night before with some more proofreading and editing the next morning. Wow - what a change from my undergrad years where I used to stress and be up til 3 in the morning finishing the damn thing. While I still feel the paper was terribly weak and redundant, I expect my professor to help guide me to write better papers, and I look forward to learning.
This paper, and some recent events, shocked me in beautiful ways. Normally I have a really hard time writing long papers - I tend to be succinct and expect others to pick up on what I'm NOT saying - so this was an exercize in being patient and filling in gaps with relevant information, not just filler fluff that amounts to nothing. And the great part was that I ended up writing too much! This gives me hope that I'll one day be able to write a novel. Which brings me to the recent events. I've been asked to write a monthly music column in the Empty Closet and in talking with my friend, Bonnie (yes we're friends now, nothing more, nothing less) she suggested than instead of her initial idea of me coming into her life to help her start her book, perhaps she was due to come into my life to bring the writer out in me. Interesting as it's something I've always wanted to do but never allowed myself to consider. For me, everything has to fit nicely into a box. If I were to be a writer I should've been an English major and studied abroad in London, been in theatre and smoked a lot of pot. Instead I chose French and Spanish and drank to excess on certain weekends while getting up on tables and dancing. I was grooming myself to either be a teacher or a professional translator - not a writer. Why do I allow myself to be so narrow? One of the most beautiful things about Michele is her wandering spirit - and her ability to make everything that she thinks about a reality. She helps me see that ideas CAN be made into realities, and also encourages me to go after what I dream about. She makes me believe that I can believe in myself and think about writing a novel. That's just one of the many things I love about her.
There's a jigsaw puzzle that's waiting for Little Man and I. We three spent last night cleaning out the dining room so that it could not only be clean, but so that I, with help, could attack a 1,000 piece Rosie the Riveter puzzle. What's frightening is that in her picture the only feminine feature of Rosie is her head - the rest is distincly male. Her body's largely out of proportion and so very masculine. It makes me want to jump to perhaps an illogical conclusion that either she's a lesbian. I can't believe that Norman Rockwell didn't know how to draw the female figure as he did it in other paintings. Interesting how we see that a manual laborer must be more masculine, because I bet if he were to draw a woman at home she'd be more feminine - because it's the male's role to be out working and the woman's role to be at home. Man equals rough and tumble, visible muscles and dirty from hard work. Woman equals pristine, small figure, diminutive to her male counterpart, petite, sweet, pretty and clean. Not much has changed, eh?
I had a dream last night about death. My immediate thought in waking was how Michele said that death in dreams meant birth in life - I'm not ready to be pregnant.
I also dreamed that I held my child self in my lap and listened to her/me talk about something she was set on doing and then watched her set out and do it. It was incredible! I was so moved by this child and amazed at her hutzpah. I couldn't believe that I had evolved from that into a quiet, on the sidelines girl who was content in watching. Is this perhaps a message that I need to get out there and go after what I want? Or is it perhaps a subconscious timeline showing me how I've evolved? I don't actually remember my child self, except that I didn't like to wear clothes or take a shower, and that I loved my parents more than anything, along with dirt, cats and playing outside. In any case I really feel that the dream was a gift. Maybe when I'm 40 I'll dream of my 25 year old self and still be excited and humbled by the evolution of me.
Ok - off to seize the day!
Last night I lost track of time near the end of work as I was talking with a coworker about her sons. She has one the same age as Little Man and a 6 year old and it was nice to have someone to talk to about everything. I never seem to choose the normal path: get involved with someone around my age, buy an appt together and work up the ladder, get married and have a kid together, live and grow together... I wouldn't change my path, but I do recognize how different it is from my friends' lives. I've always felt a certain distance from friends my age, despite the close ties we may have. And yet still I wouldn't change this.
I feel like life is opening up to me in so many ways and I just can't believe it. I'm amazed by the power of every day.
Yesterday I turned in my first graduate level paper that actually counts for something. I think it's a piece of crap but I learned. This was the first paper I wasn't stressing to finish the night before it was due. I worked on it steadily throughout the course of the past two weeks and calmly finished it the night before with some more proofreading and editing the next morning. Wow - what a change from my undergrad years where I used to stress and be up til 3 in the morning finishing the damn thing. While I still feel the paper was terribly weak and redundant, I expect my professor to help guide me to write better papers, and I look forward to learning.
This paper, and some recent events, shocked me in beautiful ways. Normally I have a really hard time writing long papers - I tend to be succinct and expect others to pick up on what I'm NOT saying - so this was an exercize in being patient and filling in gaps with relevant information, not just filler fluff that amounts to nothing. And the great part was that I ended up writing too much! This gives me hope that I'll one day be able to write a novel. Which brings me to the recent events. I've been asked to write a monthly music column in the Empty Closet and in talking with my friend, Bonnie (yes we're friends now, nothing more, nothing less) she suggested than instead of her initial idea of me coming into her life to help her start her book, perhaps she was due to come into my life to bring the writer out in me. Interesting as it's something I've always wanted to do but never allowed myself to consider. For me, everything has to fit nicely into a box. If I were to be a writer I should've been an English major and studied abroad in London, been in theatre and smoked a lot of pot. Instead I chose French and Spanish and drank to excess on certain weekends while getting up on tables and dancing. I was grooming myself to either be a teacher or a professional translator - not a writer. Why do I allow myself to be so narrow? One of the most beautiful things about Michele is her wandering spirit - and her ability to make everything that she thinks about a reality. She helps me see that ideas CAN be made into realities, and also encourages me to go after what I dream about. She makes me believe that I can believe in myself and think about writing a novel. That's just one of the many things I love about her.
There's a jigsaw puzzle that's waiting for Little Man and I. We three spent last night cleaning out the dining room so that it could not only be clean, but so that I, with help, could attack a 1,000 piece Rosie the Riveter puzzle. What's frightening is that in her picture the only feminine feature of Rosie is her head - the rest is distincly male. Her body's largely out of proportion and so very masculine. It makes me want to jump to perhaps an illogical conclusion that either she's a lesbian. I can't believe that Norman Rockwell didn't know how to draw the female figure as he did it in other paintings. Interesting how we see that a manual laborer must be more masculine, because I bet if he were to draw a woman at home she'd be more feminine - because it's the male's role to be out working and the woman's role to be at home. Man equals rough and tumble, visible muscles and dirty from hard work. Woman equals pristine, small figure, diminutive to her male counterpart, petite, sweet, pretty and clean. Not much has changed, eh?
I had a dream last night about death. My immediate thought in waking was how Michele said that death in dreams meant birth in life - I'm not ready to be pregnant.
I also dreamed that I held my child self in my lap and listened to her/me talk about something she was set on doing and then watched her set out and do it. It was incredible! I was so moved by this child and amazed at her hutzpah. I couldn't believe that I had evolved from that into a quiet, on the sidelines girl who was content in watching. Is this perhaps a message that I need to get out there and go after what I want? Or is it perhaps a subconscious timeline showing me how I've evolved? I don't actually remember my child self, except that I didn't like to wear clothes or take a shower, and that I loved my parents more than anything, along with dirt, cats and playing outside. In any case I really feel that the dream was a gift. Maybe when I'm 40 I'll dream of my 25 year old self and still be excited and humbled by the evolution of me.
Ok - off to seize the day!