I'm craving a trip to the fabric district downtown. Wanting to be surrounded by the colors and the sounds and the questionable smells. By the shop owners who don't speak English and are at once nonchalant and proud of what they've got to sell. I want to run my hands across the silks and the fake silks, the cottons, the blends, the tulle, even the polyesters, and be surprised by what catches my eye.
Several months ago, I happily canceled my memberships to a couple of book clubs that I'd signed up with years before. You know the ones -- the constant junk mail generators, the never ending "featured selections" to accept (yeah, right) or decline (always). When I finally wrote CANCEL in huge letters across my reply forms to these clubs, I felt a wave of relief rush over me. Gone was the constant pressure to buy books at barely discounted prices, usually by authors who write at what I consider to be a fifth grade reading level! Gone was the filling recycling bin after recycling bin with their "generous offers"! Gone was the fear of forgetting to decline my "selection" and therefore coming home from work to an ominous book-shaped box several weeks later!
Yesterday, I signed up again. With both of them. Hey, there are a lot of good books out right now! I HAD to.
My arms hurt from lugging around a huge lens yesterday at an engagment portrait session. It's always somewhat satisfying to have sore muscles from something other than carrying my groceries, which is what usually does it.
Drove an hour each way for the shoot, managing to keep my newly formed freeway anxiety in check the whole time. I feel proud of myself for that, but still a little sheepish that the anxiety is a factor to begin with. I almost sent April to the shoot on her own.
Will take the small victories when I find them.
i'm going to ignore the fact that i have gained five pounds which feel like twenty and i can't seem to shed a single one
the giving up of pasta and potatoes can wait until Monday
i'm going to pretend that there is no little voice in my ear telling me that i'm better off admiring the work of others than creating anything myself
i'm going to make believe that the sky isn't hazy with smog here, that the air is as ripe and fresh with summer in los angeles as it was up north
and allow myself to breathe it
for the weekend anyway
So anyway, camping was great. It was technically "luxury camping." There was little to no roughing it. Since (regular, real) camping is one of my absolute most beloved things to do, I was very curious about how I would feel about Camping Lite. It turned out to be pretty much exactly what we needed. Relaxing and rejuvinating without being too taxing as far as having to pack and set up a bunch of stuff.
We did some wine tasting, we rode bikes along the coast, we made killer s'mores. We also got pooped on by two adorable owls. Owls pooping from high up in a tree can do a lot of damage. They covered both of us and our entire table of carefully prepared food. We'd just sliced a bunch of delicious cheese to go with our bottle of wine (which we bought at a grocery store, not at a winery, I am only somewhat embarrassed to say), and the whole lot of it was destroyed by the downpour from the tree. We were, at first, quite horrified. But then we laughed, and are still laughing.
every once in a while, usually deep into a chapter as i am now, i have a fleeting moment of thinking "my God, i could very possibly be writing the worst novel ever composed."
thankfully, i've been lucky enough to have read literally hundreds of painfully bad scripts at work, and since i imagine the literary world is not much different, i'm fairly certain that my book will probably be only the 338th worst ever.
when we were camping, i sheepishly sang g. a song i was making up about he and i. it was terrible. terrible. and yet i impressed him, somehow, because he loves me.
"Happiness... not in another place but this place, not for another hour but this hour." -- Walt Whitman
All last week, I didn't feel well. Getting up (early, so early) every day to go to work felt as though it might actually kill me. I started to worry, which is rare lately, given that I've all but abandoned my former love of hypochondria.
But then this weekend I got out of town. G. & I went camping (more on that next time) and it was glorious. I felt healthy and strong (even though I was pretty wimpy while riding bikes, something I haven't done in close to a decade)and alive. The air was cleaner, the food tasted yummier (Though not the wine. I believe, after visiting Santa Ynez wine country this weekend, the SIDEWAYS folks chose the wrong part of California. The wine further north that we had last summer was much better.), my mind felt engaged and full.
Today, back at work, I am sore, allergy ridden and tired. I got a massage yesterday (My first real one ever.) so I feel better than I did last week, but I'm still somewhat stunned at how profoundly my current work life affects my physical well being. I find it fascinating and sad. I'm grateful that I have a very satisfying life outside of the office. I feel deeply for people who have nothing to go home to when they are done with their work day. I can't imagine how one would make it through.
Tommorow's entry: A tale of two owls and some ill fated cheese.
For our anniversary, G. gave me a gift certificate for the two of us to take dance lessons together. This is something I've been wanting to do since we first started dating, so I'm very excited about it. I'm also a little nervous because while I'm the one with years of dance training, G. is the one with a natural sense of movement. All of mine is hard earned, and frankly not that convincing. These classes should result in some interesting stories.
This weekend we saw the documentary MAD HOT BALLROOM about children in Manhattan schools who are part of a mandatory ballroom dancing program. The movie follows three of the schools as they prepare for a city-wide competition. I highly recommend this film. It's by far my favorite movie this summer, and I think that would be the case even if the other movies I've seen in recent months hadn't been totally blah. Go see it.
I let my brain rest this weekend. With the exception of a few moments, I didn't think about character arcs, about photos that needed photoshopping, about the change of address cards I'm making for my friend, or about the bizarre and frustrating turn of events that has lead cat hair to be a disturbingly more prominent tenant in my apartment than I am. Instead, my weekend was about reading great magazine and newspaper articles, day dreaming about my grand schemes for the future, and eating good food with G.
This was all very dandy and charming until last night when I was forced to remember that I have a lot to do right now. Itchy, unclear things that will require much brainstorming and learning in order to figure out. In almost all ways, I am absolutely thrilled to be doing this stuff. My mind desperately needs and wants to learn new things. But there's another itty bitty part that is scared that I'll be rather bad at it all.
This Wednesday, two of my friends got long-awaited jobs in Chicago. I'm so excited for them that I almost feel as if it is me who will be embarking on the big adventure of moving to a new city and starting a new phase of my career. I'm trying to embrace this borrowed sense of anticipation and renewal, and channel it into my own life. I have a lot on my plate right now, and nearly all of it is stuff that I will have to do on my own, with deadlines I've set and motivation that I've conjured up myself. I'm not very good at this, really, although I've been much worse in the past. I do better when I have someone who is expecting something from me, waiting for me to complete it. I've still yet to fully grasp that it's just as satisfying and important to do things for myself, that in fact, it's crucial for me to feel that way. So much of writing and art must be realized and propelled only by the person creating it. After a certain point, there's very little that outside forces can do for an artist who isn't willing to show up for herself every day.
I am learning, slowly but surely, to be a girl who shows up.
I sometimes worry that I am steering my characters in the wrong direction, or not telling the things about them that I need to tell. I worry that I won't realize how far off track I am until it's too late. In my mind, my characters are fully formed people. I know what they look like, how they react to things and the choices they are inclined to make. It's actually BECAUSE I feel I know them so well that I fear I will underexplain them, keeping them too close to me. Trying to create something as big as a novel still overwhelms me, even though I am about a third of the way into it.
In other news, I wish I were Samantha, and could wiggle my nose while here at work, and arrive home later to find my laundry completely done -- folded and put away and everything.
Some days (most days) I feel as though there is too much I want to do, and it overwhelms me to the point where I end up doing very little at all.
I'm such a bully to myself in that way.
Last year, in late spring, Gym and I started noticing these beautiful purple flowers on some of the trees in the city. At first there were just a few of them, but as the weeks went by, the flowers became more plentiful until it seemed like every street was glowing with violet. Neither of us had ever noticed these trees before, despite having lived in Los Angeles for years, and we decided oh-so-sappily that they must have bloomed just for us. On more than one occassion, we half-joked that we could get married underneath one and not need anything else by way of flowers or decoration. Just standing by these trees was magic enough. When the flowers on the Jacarandas eventually faded, and the trees looked normal again, I worried that they might not bloom again, and that we'd missed our chance.
Early this year, when winter had passed and the trees in LA were just starting to think about becoming green again, I was suddenly struck with a fleeting thought of the Jacarandas. Gym and I were broken up then, and in my saddness over that I couldn't imagine that I'd be able to handle seeing those purple flowers, should they decide to reappear.
Cut to a day at the beginning of May when I was driving home from work and a flash of lilac colored tree caught my eye. My heart bounced with happiness. Life had taken unexpected turns in the preceding months, and Gym and I were back together. He was doing reshoots on a movie in London at the time, I couldn't wait to call and tell him to get home because the Jacarandas were in bloom again. Over the next several weeks, we watched the trees get full and fat together.
Tomorrow is the two year anniversary of our first official date. We are going to celebrate it despite the five months we spent apart because blessings, the ones you can count on and the ones that surprise you, ought to all be cherished.
Yesterday marked one full year that I've been keeping this journal. In going back to read my first few entries, I'm struck by how, on the surface, it appears that very little has changed since then. In truth, almost nothing remains exactly as it was.
Last year at this time, I was struggling with job dissatisfacion, just as I am this year. But now I'm at a completely different job, in an entirely different industry, and my mind set is also quite changed. I no longer put so much pressure on my day job to be a social outlet, a confidence booster, or a form of entertainment. I simply slug it out every day and bide my time while I pursue other endeavors. This doesn't mean that I don't still groan every morning when I get out of bed and prepare to spend my day under the buzzing florescents because I do. It just doesn't cause me nearly the internal anguish it did then. I do wish I could see the light at the end of the Assistant Tunnel, but I no longer feel that if I don't see it by tomorrow, I'll risk plunging into a state of psychosis.
I was spending these same days last year preparing for my first anniversary of dating G. My very first entry ever was about the gift I was making him. I'm working on a new gift for him this year, one I'm just as excited about, one that we're working on together. I never imagined last June that there would be so much heartache and turmoil in our relationship between that anniversary and this one. But the result is that we are stonger and happier, as individuals and as a couple, than we were then, when our relationship already had incredible stains on it that I just hadn't acknowleged.
Last June, Sweet Monday was still not much more than a domain name that April and I owned, and a dream we talked about constantly in order to help get us through our work days. It's still just a seedling of a company, a baby, but it's growing. We're actually getting paid to do what we love, to photograph and create. While our goal of being able to do this full time is a long way off, it's much closer than it was when we were doing little more than hoping for it.
I also wasn't writing much back then. Aside from this blog, I suppose I probably wasn't writing at all, unless you count my daily marathon email sessions with MS. I did a lot of READING about writing, I did a lot TALKING about writing, but I was loathe to actually put down words. Now I am 85 pages into my novel. I don't know if it will sell, or if the only people who ever read it will be my dad and G., but I can't even say how good it feels simply to be doing it.
I read a great quote recently, and stumbled across it again the other day on the blog of Andrea Scher, a girl who I've really come to admire as a wonderful artist and all around great person. The quote is by Van Gogh, and it says: "If you hear a voice within you saying, 'You are not a painter', then by all means paint...and that voice will be silenced."
In the past year, I have learned to silence, or at least quiet, some of the voices I've carried with me for a long time. I'd like to think this journal has helped me, and I'm grateful for that.
It's the first day of summer and I am craving Traverse City.
Missing the cherry trees, the roadside fruit stands, the antique stores and the quiet water lapping at the shores of Bass Lake.
Only got to page 82 last week. I'm supposed to be much closer to 100, but have only been averaging three pages a week instead of five. I'm strangely okay with this. (Although don't get me wrong. I will throw a party for myself when I reach the triple digits.)
Why I'm alright with not having written as much as I ought:
I spent time this weekend with a friend I hadn't seen in two years.
I played with Photoshop and learned how to do a couple of new things, which makes me feel confident that I can learn to do a couple more.
I saw Wicked at the Pantages theatre on Saturday, after watching April try to eat surpise rabbit stew at Cafe Des Artistes.
I boxed with G. (Well, you know, I hit his focus mits, and he pretended I'm strong.) Am reveling in the sore arms that resulted.
