Full-Fat Life

Cross-post to Multiply, quick!

Alamak, wanted to post nice long story about being a good candidate for indulgent aunt, but just noticed the time! Must run to 7-11 quickly to buy snacks for the boy, who has promised to wake up and watch the World Cup Final with me. What a turnabout... I have to bribe my BOYFRIEND to watch with me by giving him Red Bull and Mountain Dew. A bit... off. Later later!

I've just noticed that Blogger's post link reads 'Create'. And for some reason, that strikes me as being immeasurably cool. I guess I've been obsessed lately with the notion of making things. I feel as if I've not made anything in so long that the very idea of creating is very attractive to me. It feels as if there are ideas and thoughts and emotions all pent up inside, waiting for expression, for release.

The Bear Witch Project photo I took today was fun to make, and the end result is oddly satisfying to both my verbal and visual sides. I've also dabbled in making other small things, and picking up a paintbrush and just making random practice strokes. I also did some body/face art painting of dragons and suchlike during the recent dragonboat festival, and facepainting almost always satisfies me. It feels good to be picking up old tools: a camera, a paintbrush, Photoshop, and just... making things. I guess D, the therapist I sometimes speak to, would say I have a strong creative instinct and need to make things. When I suppress that urge, I get frustrated and unhappy and lack flow. And more than anything else, I would like some flow right now, to wash away the confusion and uncertainty, to allow me to just be.

I've always been a huge fan of the CSS Zen Garden. While I'm not so great at it myself, I love to see what people can do with CSS, and what graphic designers can do with webpages. The good stuff only, of course; the bad is simply trainwreck fascination.

So I was trawling the CSS Zen Garden (as you do) and came across this gem: an underwater Zen Garden design, called CSS Zen Ocean. Fabulous. It's laid out so that you can actually read more than 5 words and more than 3 lines at a time. Hurrah! I hate those LiveJournal-y type layouts that have huge backgrounds and require you to read any actual content in tiny, tiny viewports. Plus it's got a really cool thing happening in the right-hand column with the diver dude. And it's a dive theme. How cool is that?

I haven't painted my toenails in a while, and it's at least partly because of the navel piercing. I can't bend over enough to get a good view without folding my so-small* navel in half and deranging the piercing and in the process causing myself to go 'owowowow' a lot. I imagine I could use my mad facepainting skillz to decorate my nails pretty nicely... if only I could get down there. I guess this is what they call 'ai swee mai mia' - I've given up so many things for this piercing already, dragonboat practice being the most prominent one. But I reallyreallyreally want it to work this time. :(

And on another note, I've been reading some of my friends' blogs, and they've inspired me to start blogging again too. It's been a long time away from anything creative for me, but I'm slowly finding my way back to making things and saying things again. :) Used to be I did something in Photoshop every single day. Heck, I practically lived in Photoshop. Then I went to design school, and came away hating design so much I could barely fire up Photoshop to resize a picture, let alone create something new. When my old laptop died and I started using my sister's laptop, I didn't even bother installing Photoshop on it. That was late last year; I only just put Photoshop back on it last week. And I'm working on at least 2 websites, and I'm starting to think about things I want to make with my hands, and writing...

I hope something new and lifechanging is going to be happening soon. :) I'm tired of being nice. I just wanna be. And if that means letting out the bitchy so that I can have more inner peace, then SO BE IT.

* So small my piercer made me choose a shorter curved barbell because the regular size would stick out too much.

I've been reading a lot of articles and blog posts about lifehacks recently, probably because I seem to be evaluating everything: what I want for my life, and how I want to get there, and how I'm keeping track of it. So I was looking at the Hipster PDA - just got a stack of index cards today to write stuff on - and thinking about my Palm, and my Filofax.

And ah, the Filofax. It was a gift from my first boyfriend, the one I thought I'd love forever. And in some ways, I still love him, so very much. He was sixteen, and when my birthday rolled around, he bought me the first, and, to date, only, genuine Filofax I've ever owned. It's black leather, soft and smooth even when it was brand new. And he filled it with love before he gave it to me. Customized inserts with hand-drawn artwork of our names, little love notes, a photo. It's one of the best gifts I've ever received.

I was thinking about using it again, but now, writing this, I realize that I can't. It sits on my shelf, a little slice of the eighteen-year old me and my life then. I know some people would call me sentimental and foolish, and perhaps I am. Perhaps I should let all this go, and put a perfectly good (and still very beautiful) Filofax to use. But doing that would mean either tearing it apart so I could accommodate all the new parts of my life, or leaving it as it is and crippling its usefulness. I don't see the point of the second, and I don't think I'm capable of the first.

I'm not sure why I wrote this now, except that for the first time in years I miss him. I miss being that kind of loved, and I'm wondering if I'll ever find it again. I wonder if I'm the same kind of girl I was then, if I could even be loved that same way again. I wonder if I'll ever be able to look at this Filofax and just see a Filofax, and not our dreams of together.

Funny how writing and thinking about organizing your life can bring back so much pain and all those memories of tenderness.

When I was younger, I used to make long, involved and very detailed lists of things I wanted. I don’t know... it was like dreaming on paper. Perhaps it’s time to make lists again. :)

This interactive website's made by The Gap. You pick your body shape, weight, hairstyle, eye colour, and so on, to make an avatar. You then pick clothes to change into, and at the end of the whole process, you get to watch the avatar dance out of the fitting room, do a striptease, dance back into the fitting room and dance out again in the outfit you chose. I... I have no words to describe the performance the avatar puts on.

Autoblogger for the busy blogger who also wants a life!

(Um, can we say 'parody'?)

Grumpy, Dopey, Sneezy and Sleepy. (a.k.a. "I'm sick.")

Saw Doc yesterday.

Bashful and Happy don't get a look in.

Can't taste anything!!! :(

Twit in bar: "Get yer coat, babe; you've pulled."
Girl in bar: "What, the short straw?" *slaps*

(This is what happens when you don't get enough sleep and food - you start thinking up rubbish.)

You know you're losing weight when you can pull your jeans off without undoing a single button or zip... especially if at one point they were tight.

Some days, life feels so, y'know, lather, rinse, repeat. Then someone loves you in an unexpected way, or to an unexpected degree, and your life turns into an Organics shampoo ad. :)

Ain't love grand?

My father turned 50 today. As it came midnight, I left a beloved friend and rounded up my sibs and we snuck upstairs and ambushed my father. We woke my mom and the dog in the process. :)

So today was a pretty awful day.

To begin with, I didn't have much of a weekend, but you know how that goes. When I wasn't sleeping, I was worrying about work, all the things not done and the things I think I may have to be doing, but am not because I may not know about them and the things I think I need to be learning to do... (Oh yes, I'm a natural-born worrier! How could you tell?)

Had a work thing early Saturday morning, and then passed out in the afternoon. Dinner with family Saturday night, then I was online until some unholy hour of the morning. Or was I? It's all a blur now. I can spend hours online just reading random blogs and scraps of information, or replying to mail or looking for new music or... Yes, it's sad.

Woke mid-arvo Sunday. Had a meeting with my boys at 5:30, planning events for the upcoming school holidays. Then I realized to my shock and horror that I was supposed to be on duty Sunday night. So the plans for an evening in with D, watching the second season of SOAP and eating yummy apple and chicken curry, went straight down the toilet. So yeah, that was pretty crap.

Then I fought with a dear friend.

We kissed and made up after a while, but it was still an emotional strain.

Then I woke late this morning.

(Will it never end?)

I didn't get as much done as I'd have liked to today. Computer problems (laptop kept crashing), customers yelling at me, things tugging at me leftrightcentre... it all adds up. And my tech tools for work are a little messed up. Add the strain of adjusting to a new job with not as much training as I'd like, and the extra load from post-exam-hyper kids, and a colleague being out of the office, and I'm not in a good place. I've jumped into the deep end, and I'm treading hard to stay above water.

I'm not great at dealing with new situations. No, I lie. I like new situations: they force me to grow and to discover both my limits and strengths I never knew I had. But you know, you can enjoy things in some ways and still be really freaked out by them.

I'm still hibernating. Some things are growing, and other things are going in strange (and perhaps not-so-great) directions. It's a strange time to be me - I feel torn between the adult world and the, well, not-adult world. I suspect when I'm 80 (if I should live so long!) I'll still be feeling a little like this, a little "I'm not growing up!" But really, I don't want to see many of my friends at the moment. I don't want to be social. Or rather, I kinda do, but only really selectively. Most people grate on me at the moment. I think what it is is that I don't have the energy or mindspace to deal with them. So I really only want to be with people who are safe or whom I care a lot about. (The kids take a lot out of me, but I care about them. :))

Oh, but then I just talked to a friend, and he made me smile and laugh, and vice versa. :) So that was good. We've something special between us, and I'm afraid to look too closely at it because it's fragile and may fall apart if looked at too closely right now.

So yeah, ups and downs. Still hibernating. When will my winter end? I want spring again. I sense change in the wind, but do I really want change? Or am I afraid of change because it hurts, even when it brings good things? Does a seed hurt when it splits and sprouts a new shoot and roots?

This short from Waverly Films is priceless. :) Things not to watch while you're supposed to be working. LOL! Chris, behind me, commented, "Doesn't it make you want to hug your cat?" And the answer is, no, it doesn't. My cat is not huggable. She's got claws and she ain't afraid to use 'em. And I have tender skin, so there. But watch the film - it's funny.

Hmmm. A pattern! My last few posts were all at unholy hours of the morning - 4 a.m., 5 a.m.... I need to get to bed earlier. :rolleyes:

It would be easier if I didn't care so much. Easier, but I think I'd like myself less. In the end, it's all about the people. If, in your life, you don't love and cry and laugh and be loved, why bother? I guess you have to find your own meaning in life, and this is mine.

It's not such a terrible thing, I think, to need people. It's not such a terrible thing to need to help others. It would be a terrible thing to deny what you are and what you wish to give.

Over the last few days, I've been wrung dry and turned inside out so many times. Caring for people I love, mostly, and a couple of personal things. Mostly other people's sh*t though. I don't know if this being affected by friends' issues is a good thing or a bad. Perhaps... as it often is, it's just a thing thing. Neither good nor bad, necessarily. Just something that is.

It's hard to be the person you are, whole-heartedly. I think most people are pretty unaware beings. They stumble through life not reflecting, because reflecting means turning the mirror on yourself and asking hard questions to which the answers are often not forthcoming. It means facing yourself, the truth of yourself and the lies you tell.

It's been a long road, and a rocky one. But I think that over time, I'm learning to accept and like the multiplicity of my self. I don't think it'll ever be easy; I think it's written in my DNA, my stars, my nature, to always struggle. But I think that somewhere in that swirling, it's possible to find peace, a moving meditation towards serenity.

Catch me when I'm gorgeous, whydontcha? But then again, if you say I'm always gorgeous in your eyes anyway... I might just love you forever.

The best geek love poem, like, ever.

I quote:
Roses are #FF0000
Violets are #0000FF
All my base are belong to you

Hilarious. How can you not love it?