a terrifying thought

this latest bout of insomnia has seen me awake & fairly productive around dawn for the past week or so.

jesus chrsist on a cracker, what if i'm becoming a morning person?  NNNNNNNNOOOOOOOooooooooooooooooooo.....

ghosts and rabbit holes

It's not even noon and I've already had two exes pop up in unexpected, and not terribly welcome, ways.  These thing so often happen in threes that I'm waiting for the last one to show.  Not in a doom & gloom way, but in a hey, better to know lightning's gonna strike than get caught offguard out in a field with a long metal pole kind of way.

I am feeling somewhat disconnected with reality this week.  This is probably because of a combination an incident of stupidity in which my brain refused to work my leg probably, insomnia, and a new situation that, the more I think about it, sounds so implausible as to make me giggle but there it is anyway.  Time was, this sort of disconnection with reality would have left me frantic - acceptance of things beyond my control was not something I could do.  Now however, I'm delighting in my ability to bob along on the surface of this sea of weirdness.  I've always enjoyed absurdity.  Why the hell did I try to manipulate it for so long?

I am committed to National Novel Writing Month this year.  This is also a breakthrough in the control/perfection battle with myself.  I am now willing to accept that at the end of November I will end up with a first draft of a novel, not a completed, polished and published work.  A first draft of a novel.  First draft of MY first novel.  How could that be bad?

Off to get a wee bit more sleep.  Must "stoke the reserves" as my wise friend said.

what am I to learn from this?

Today I have been called bossy, a bitch, and non-supportive.  This, coming at a time when I feel I have been overextending myself to be good to others and when, in fact, I have felt somewhat undersupported and overlooked by some of the folks making those same accusations.

Fuck it.  I'm eating the last cheeseburger cupcake and taking a bath.

you say it's your birthday

My birthday was a couple of weeks ago.  The mixed blessing of an end-of-summer birthdate is that any celebrations must be extended to compensate for friends and family gone out of town to catch the last few rays of summer sun and fun.  This also gives me pause to think about another year passed and one to come more thoroughly than I might if the whole shebang stuck to its official twenty-four hours.

Each year, I use my birthday as my own personal New Year.  It's the time I choose to reflect, resolve and restore (to me, January 1 is just another date on a calendar).  Looking back on my 37th year, I am overwhelmed by everything for which I'm grateful.

Since the last time I blew out my birthday candles, I have made my first trip to France.  I spent a month living in a flat in Paris, across from the Jardin de Luxembourg and just down the street from the Sorbonne.  Went to the town from which one side of my family is reported to have come, a town old enough that Joan of Arc lived there.  Visited my cousins in England - a 36-hour trip to England, how amazing.  Saw art and history that made my eyes tear up and my soul sing.  That month did more to restore my spirit than many other things I've done in a long, long time.

This year, I started my new career.  Things are not yet official but they are on their way.  I know I am good at this work.  I have a good opportunity to get some support in starting it up, soon.  A couple of setbacks and disappointments recently, now realizing they're learning opportunities in disguise.  This is going to be good.

I lost my Nana this past year.  She was two months shy of her ninety-fifth birthday.  Though her passing was truly a blessing at the time - she was no longer any semblance of the vibrant, fun-loving woman I'd know all my life, and the stress of her care was taking a serious toll on my mother - I lost someone who was essentially a third parent to me as I was growing up.  Every day in grade school, I went to Nana's for lunch.  Every summer, I spent my days at Nana's house and around that neighbourhood.  She's one of the people from whom I got my love and talent for music.  Up until a few weeks before her death, she still played a mean ragtime piano version of any song you could think of.  I miss her.  Every day.

The most amazing thing that happened to me this year is all about people.  Last year around my birthday I had an epiphany and made a vow to myself.  I wish it could be more poetic, but it all really came down to, "I'm sick of games and of not being my own biggest fan.  I'm going to be myself, only myself, all the time and I will no longer worry about what I think I should be or do, look like, or act like.  Fuck it."  And it was like casting a magic spell.  So many new people in my life, so many new things to do, and just the sort of each that I've always wanted. 
While all these people are exciting and meaningful in their own way, two stand out like wonderful shining stars.  The first one is a woman whose spiritual path is very similar to how I'd like mine to wend.  She is intelligent, erudite, soulful, hilariously funny, a fan of the arts - including silly horror movies, and, thankfully for me, an early riser who doesn't mind making the occasional wakeup call to a non-morning-person friend. 
The other of these two people is someone I knew of for a long time, but never in a million years would have imagined being this close to.  He is smart, genuine, thoughtful, and a wickedly funny smartass.  Also so ridiculously talented that I really, really want to hate him but just can't.  More than all that though is that he's there for me like I hope I am for him.  It's been a really long time since I could say that about anyone who is afflicted with a penis, and it's amazing to me.  He's also the only person in a very long time who can make a smartassed comment about me that makes me laugh in spite of myself.  Bastard.
It's almost unbelievable to me that when I think of my last birthday, these people would not even have registered on my radar.  Now, I can't imagine my next birthday without them.  They are also the two people in the world who called me on my birthday and sang to my voicemail.  This makes me unbelievably giddy and I might just save those messages forever - they make me grin from ear to ear each time I hear them.

Other stuff is still in progress - getting my health and my home organized, as well as finding unimagineable wealth without working for it.  I suppose there's always next year to talk about that.

Happy Birthday to Me!

And by the way, Laura and I are making these cupcakes tomorrow for my party this weekend.  Yumms!

Abandon hope, ye who enter

I had a blog. I didn't use it much. I'll be damned though, if I let a grumpy young man out-communicate me.