my mission, should i be forced to accept it.
and, really, i have no other choice except to accept.
i’m all geared-up: laser-like steely gaze, my favorite headphones, and this brownie here. [sugar = fuel = good in this equation, fyi.]
i have several work things that need my attention today, and i intend to focus solely on them without stopping!*
*except to get more food.
*and to pet the dog.
*and to read my book.
*and to get a drink to wash down the food.
*plus the requisite bathroom trip.
*and then touring around the internet for a few minutes so i can be “updated” before getting back to work (so necessary!).
*and to procrastinate, particularly by noodling around with photos with captions about how i’m totally going to focus on work today.
*and that pedicure that i promised i’d get with my mother-in-law and sister-in-law.
*but, wait — brilliant plan — i’ll put the pedicure on my to-do list, and thus can count it as getting things done. like the to-do list equivalent of a tax-writeoff.
*my plan is so brilliant, i’m rewarding myself with a little break.
then i’ll get back to work.
promise. 😉
still here.
i’m pretty sure this is a reminder for me as much as anyone.
i’m still here.
there’s footing to be found in these surreal circumstances.
amidst sterile hospital rooms
foggy uncertainty
crammed suitcases full of nearly every piece of clothing i own
living in someone else’s home 5 days out of 7 each week
late-night talks with “the patient” (a.k.a. my sweet mother-in-law)
10 hours of driving a week
and
navigating the unsteadiest of roads without a clear map
i am still here.
god is still near.
friends and family are very dear.
and other things that rhyme as well.
*note 1: i didn’t mean for that to rhyme. but i kept it anyway. fun with english!
*note 2: the details of this situation are specifically vague, as it is not my story to tell publicly. however, i am nosy mcnosypants and i HATE vague posts that allude to some big story. so, if concerned readers want to know more, i’ll be happy to communicate in a less-public arena.
foxy chevron love.
in honor of finishing a big project and begging for it night and day, i was surprised with this modern little duvet number on my bed courtesy of the boy. he exerted his veto power by changing the color (from bright blue to a more muted grey) in exchange for permitting me to choose bright pillows it needs to punch it up a bit.
we already had this pillow made in a chevron pattern (they were MFEO, people) from fabric from our wedding as a wedding gift from our dear friend sarah.
but it wasn’t enough. it needed more color. something punchy. something…foxy.
liam, the woodland fox, will be joining us here in the domicile.
because stuffed animals for grown-ups are the new stuffed animals for kids.
i’m pretty sure that catchphrase is going to sweep the nation shortly.
perhaps i shouldn’t quit my day job.
but my day job is writing.
hmmm.
i’ll be here with liam thinking of a better plan B.
monday morning ugh-pdate: digested.
my childhood (and collegehood and adulthood, and, well, general lifehood) friend erin’s mom used to have reader’s digest around all the time, which i loved. i loved the idea of getting little stories that traveled to all corners of life and reported back in succinct form.
so, in that spirit and because i’ve been too busy to write, here’s the reader’s-digest-condensed-version-of-things-happening-right-now. catchy title, eh? you can see why people pay me money to communicate for them.
1. here’s the answer to the question i’ve gotten about 8 times in the last month as school has returned to session: no, i am not teaching this year. i may not teach next year. at this point, teaching (as i’ve known it in the public school classroom) is going on a high bookshelf — still accessible and visible, but not going to be pulled down anytime soon.
2. here’s the answer to the second question i’ve gotten about 8 times in the last month immediately following question # 1: what am i doing now? i am copywriting. the boy’s graphic design business, fixer design, has expanded to include me full-time since january. he’s art; i’m copy. i copywrite (which is writing primarily for advertising pieces, marketing campaigns, website marketing, etc.), copyedit (wherein i make what other people write sound all nice and pretty (or angry and disturbed or whatever it is they are going for), proofread/edit (wherein i get to fully embrace my anal-retentive and annoyingly nit-picky fastidious and detail-oriented side and make sure all the commas are not spliced and semi-colons used appropriately), grant write (wherein i…um…write grants), write (articles, websites, tweets, letters, etc.) and then generally collaborate with our art director on various other things like naming companies, editing the design work, making dinner, paying bills, and riding bikes.
note: the art director is my husband, otherwise things just got weird for you.
this week: we’re naming a company and i’m copyediting a few different things. funsies!
3. i love my job. i love that i’ve been able to do it since january and hope that it continues to be so by the supreme grace of god. i love working from home in my office, i love being able to change my schedule around, i love being able to walk to the gym, i love working with the husband. it should be said, however, that work love is not all that dissimilar from relationship love, in that it comes with all the signature issues: i don’t FEEL happy/joyful/amazing towards/about my job every minute of the day. the job makes me doubt, wonder, fret about my ability to do my job well. it’s challenging on a consistent basis. i often feel as though i don’t know what i’m doing or if the job will stop. (now, tell me this doesn’t look exactly like a typical love-relationship?) good and bad, it’s what i’m doing now and i’m quite contented with it.
and if you need a writer/editor and/or a graphic designer, or just someone to help you transfer your music files from your hard drive to your computer (hi meg!) — you know who to call.
4. football camp. i work out twice a day, 5-6 days a week, and have been since the 4th of july. it’s going well, in the sense that i’ve learned to take the middle path (what some might call balance and not beating yourself up terribly because you had two cupcakes at the baby shower you went to because they went well with the cookies you had on your plate). it also means recognizing those actions as exceptions, and not rules. explaining, not excusing. being merciful to yourself. and much healthier. and i have a very cute running buddy, so that helps.
note: the running buddy is my husband, otherwise things just got weird for you again.
in order to not get bored, my workouts consist of the following: walking, jogging (increasing my endurance as my ankle is STILL recovering from the puffyfoot ankle incident in april), spinning (or bicycling-nowhere as my friend calls it), weights, elliptical machines, zumba, kickboxing, yoga, and annoying workout videos from people on television.
eating-wise, since that is such an interest of everyone (including me, i suppose), it’s probably about 85% paleo, and 15% let me have a freaking tortilla, kashi and a bit of raw-milk cheese for the love.
and, the occasional cupcake and frozen yogurt.
5. whatever marketing-trend-force that made frozen yogurt come back into vogue, prompting about 6 frozen yogurt places in town to open up: THANK YOU. i will totally give you my first born child.
6. i’m not pregnant. don’t even ask.
7. the current book i’m reading for my virtual book club is this one.
8. we just threw a baby shower for my friend Sarah who is having identical twin boys in another few months, and it was so much fun. i left all the details/planning/food organization to my friend Ashlee of Smash Events, and got to do what I love best: design & decor. and lots of cleaning of the house to host 16 people. more on that when i get pictures from ash, because of course i didn’t take any. what gives?
9. we aren’t really buying anything we don’t need right now in an effort to pay some things off, so i refuse to buy clothes until they are in a smaller size right now and can be justified as a need. it should be noted that shoes, accessories and jewelry DO NOT fit in this category, because i am the queen of loopholes.
10. i feel very adult because we actually have and are in the process of sorting things out like our IRA, savings, emergency fund, paying off debt, selling the jeep, looking into health insurance. these things feel very satisfying to do, but also make me uneasy. i’m still figuring out why the uneasiness…any thoughts?
11. we borrowed a monstrous fan from my parents to blow the a/c air from my office into the giant living room to cool it off and it worked AMAZINGLY. why didn’t we do this before? downside: it sounds like my office is a runway for jet airplanes.
12. speaking of adult things, we actually got excited when we came upon a new furniture layout for our living room which we will implement in winter when we don’t store our bikes by the front door. seriously, that’s the lamest sentence i think i’ve ever written.
13. the boy hates costco, but can be begrudginly convinced to come with me only on sample weekends when he can eat his way through the store. this is good for him (and me), because it lets him gain back 1/2 pound from the ridiculous amounts he seems to be losing by participating in 1/2 of my football camp regimen. i’d hate him for that, but he’s so cute and tall and gets excited about new furniture layouts.
14. my cousin lauren just moved to town and she’s opening up a lululemon athletica showroom downtown. you should have her explain what it is, because it’s all sorts of awesome. if you are into nice people, changing the average into extraordinary, yoga, being healthy, other healthy activities, awesome athletic wear…you will love it. and my cousin is just the nicest person you’ll ever meet, too.
15. i have been really enjoying spending time with my family, and i miss my sister who has moved even further away than my parents are (although still in the same town).
happy monday, all. tell me something nice.
the direction you are looking for is “right”.
this is where i was last week.
but it’s definitely not where i’m going this week.
so you can just turn yourself around, little arrow.
you’ve got other places to be.
(image via)
the watch lives?, or how my husband awesomes over six months, only to be stymied by a watch troll.
first of all, yes i did use the word “awesome” as a verb. i believe that if dinosaurs can do it, so can i. i can also sexy, but that is not anything that should be described in words for anyone to read (hi dad!) who knows me.
moving on.
[i suppose this is second of all? but really, if i only have two points to make here, would “all” just be misleading? you could get to the end of this pair of thoughts, wondering if you’ve missed something, all because someone was careless with their idioms and tossing around “all”s like so many … somethings.]
no, really now, moving on.
several years ago, presumably for my birthday, the boy gifted me this watch.
she was my dream watch, and i wore her nearly every day.
i got SO many compliments (and comments) when i wore this watch, the most frequent question being: “does it do anything else?”
besides keeping perpetual time, which i think is more than enough…no. it does not. sometimes i liked to pretend it had an intercom and the ability to launch my super powers ala wonder woman bracelets, but that’s another story.
sadly, while i was teaching my 1st hour english class, the elastic broke. the dear boy sent my watch back to the company who made it, vestal, and they looked at it to see if they could fix it.
over the next 6 months, they corresponded back and forth, advising that they could not fix it (sad) but they would replace it for free….but not with the same watch, because they no longer made that particular model. they could give me this one:
but purple is so very not my color. alas, we thought all hope was lost and were beginning to poke around to see if i liked another watch just as much as my beatles-white-album-of-loveliness watch, when they said they found one in the way, way back of the warehouse (after pestering them for a few months to respond) and were sending it posthaste.
the watch arrived, it was lovely, and all was well with the world.
until.
i realized that my watch was perpetually several hours behind.
i changed the battery.
i fiddled with the knobs.
still, several hours behind.
so.
now, my watch sits in a bowl until i can figure out who to take it to to get my watch fixed, otherwise having to force the boy to get sucked back into the 6-month-for-service vestal black hole to get me a different watch.
and the worst part is, now the boy has the cooler watch of the two of us (gasp!) and gets compliments on it ALL THE TIME. and each time he does, my angel-watch sheds a little tear.
i’ll take door number three, please.
question: what do the following items have in common?
a potted aloe vera plant (alive, but on its way out)
an eyelash curler
a 3×5 glossy photo collage of 16 faces of the same baby
a dust buster
an empty terra cotta plant
possible answers:
a) things found in my friend sarah’s daughter’s bed last week
b) items on my shopping list
c) presents i got on my last birthday party, indicating that i should no longer have birthday parties involving people giving me presents
d) items that have appeared, like magic, on our front door step over the last month
e) suggested gifts for dads for father’s day 2011
i’ll give you a minute to ponder this.
if you answered A, you’d be close, but not quite; although, the story of the things in aria’s bed is a pretty amusing one that i should tell you later, hopefully accompanying illustrations from
if you answered C, i’d seriously just stop having birthdays. and friends. full stop. but no.
if you answered E, i’d wonder what crazy-ass gift guides you’ve been reading. you should stop reading everything the internet machine tells you to. just because it’s a link on your screen does not mean you have to click it. i know the police says “click it or ticket”, but they’re not talking about this.
it’s D.
D.
which means all of these items have appeared at our front door or on the shelf right next to it. this location is important to note, because it means that in no stretch of the imagination has someone inadvertently placed or dropped the item there. these items were purposefully (to what purpose, who knows) put there.
it’s like a magician’s mystery box, opening up my front door is.
it reminds me of when i was living with a roommate several years ago, and i opened the front door to a huge stuffed dog that was nearly as tall as i am and (thankfully) much bigger around. i introduced myself, of course, and then invited it in. it just stood there, like an idiot, until my roommate noticed the card for her dangling from his neck and proceeded to hoist it over her shoulder (she was rather short, so the dog was actually taller than her) and carry it in to her room.
that was the strangest thing i had ever seen on my doorstep.
until now.
how bizarre, right?
*extra points to you if, in your head or aloud, you started singing OMC’s annoyingly catchy hit of the mid-90’s “how bizarre“.
[editor’s note: since press time, the following items have also appeared: a paper airplane and some keys.]
pavlov and pomodoros.
i have writing-specific ADD. never heard of it?
According to me a reputable source, Writing-Specific ADD, or Write-SADD, occurs only when you sit down to focus on the piece of writing you have to produce. Once you sit down to focus on said piece of writing, your attention span severely shortens, while the cavities of your brain fill with unrelated miscellany (i.e. celebrity gossip, that squirrel over there, what you should make for dinner, old episodes of project runway, etc.) that distract the writer from completing this perfectly reasonable task in a perfectly reasonable amount of time. The writer, usually ready with the words, becomes unable to write the first sentence, instead producing inane simple sentences (and not in the cool way, either) that belong in children’s books for basic readers, ones involving the one-syllable family members dick, jane, and spot.
This condition is chronic, and seems to occur despite the writing task at hand and certainly gets worse when writer is being paid for said writing (although the condition appears regardless of monetary conditions). Like the acronym, this condition in fact makes the patient write sad, sad pieces of writing.
This condition is contagious, and can occur in other situations where patients find themselves having to focus on anything of merit (see: Work-SADD, Design-SADD, etc.)
my current remedy to this SADD affliction is the pomodoro technique, which further proves my point that you can make anything sound much cooler if you just say it in italian. the pomodoro technique is essentially starting a timer (the inventor’s timer was shaped like a tomato = pomodoro in italian) that you can hear (tick tick tick tick) for 25 minutes, then you get a 5 minute break. that time frame equals one full pomodoro.
the timer helps me stay on focus, the ticking (which i thought would be annoying) helps me remember that i’m focusing, and the 25 minute parameter is long enough to get something done without being too long. i used this when i had to hammer out my upper-level english papers, and it only failed when my 5 minute breaks turned into 5 hour marathons of project runway (how did that happen?).
i use it now to just get me through my writing work for fixer design, but it helps me to not get hung up on the leads, or the right words or structure the first time around. i usually just need to GET SOMETHING DOWN and let it marinate for a bit before i come back for (multiple) revisions. that’s tough for me. i’m a one-tripper. leaving the house? i only want to make one trip from the upstairs to the downstairs on my way out. grocery shopping? i look like a nepalese sherpa, but i’ll be damned if i can’t haul three weeks’ worth of groceries in one over-loaded trip. i don’t know where this obsession with only making one trip came from, but it certainly has weaseled its way into my writing. and one perfect trip down the blue-lined notebook page the first time out, as i prattled off to my students, is antithetical to good writing.
so i’ve been pomodoroing it up around here, and it works great.
except for one thing.
the pomodoro timer i’m using (on my computer) sounds a fairly standard bell when the 25 minutes is up, but when the 5 minute break is up (which i typically just work through, actually), the alarm is a doorbell.
my apartment doesn’t have a doorbell, but how many of you think that this fact has not prevented me from looking up EVERY SINGLE TIME it rings?
yeah. this morning already i’ve completed 5 pomodoros, and i’ve looked up at the front door expectantly five times.
pavlov’s dogs are no match for me.
i would explain who pavlov is, but i was writing this on one of my 5 minute breaks about an hour ago and i have to get back to work. oops.
yes, please.
these marketing-savvy folks, i tell you — they are good at their jobs. no free lame swag, nope. paris. par. is. those periods mean business, people. they mean someone is getting a free trip to paris.
and they get to read a lovely blog while they bide their time thinking about it.
ooh, ooooooh — pick me, internet gods of the random.org picking machine.
i’ll practice my french, just in case.
the first year.
they say a lot about your first year of marriage.
you know who.
“THEY”. the ubiquitous “they”, the experts all around you chiming in.
how tough it is.
how great it is.
how much you struggle to communicate (or, more simply, fight).
how easy it is because you are still in that “honeymoon phase” (side note: phrases talking about phases make me…hurl. and wish that i could find a word that rhymes with “phases” that means “vomit”.)
the challenges unique to the first year of marriage: adjusting homes, habits, expectations, disappointments.
how important communication is.
how important communication is.
how important communication is.
are you sensing a pattern of advice here?
i’d have to say, after a year of this marriage thing, that on this multiple choice question about what marriage is like, i’d select answer (E). All of the Above.
it’s all of these things, and then none of these things, because things feel palpably different with us now than it did a year ago and we feel as though it’s been a fairly unsteady year externally (choosing entirely diverging career paths from what one has intended for years can throw you (and the person tasked with unfurrowing your brow and peeling you off the bathroom floor) for a little loop.)
things are different.
and good.
and challenging.
and still exciting at times.
mundane at times.
all of the above.
and i do still like him on idle tuesdays, when it’s hot and i’m bored around 3pm and the dished have piled up and we can’t think of anything good to do.
that was important to me.
liking him on idle tuesdays.
but, i think the really REAL things in life, the priceless things, the sure things that become really just a part of our identity…they are the most difficult to describe in words.
we just don’t have the language to contain it.
(it’s partly how i know i’m so amazed by something; the word amazement doesn’t even cross my mind — i’m quite speechless.)
this is how it is with the boy, on our first anniversary.
so, there’ll be more wedding anniversary-related fun this week for you to read about, but i leave you with this for now:
this is an email i wrote to the boy exactly 3 years to the day before our wedding. it’s as relevant now as it’s ever been, a wonderment about the exciting adventure before us:
What’ll we do with ourselves this afternoon? And the day after that, and the next thirty years?”
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
* * * * *
we still don’t know the answer to that, but i am quite certain of the person who’ll be beside me.
sara, darling. 