Thursday Morning

This morning I was walking the dog and I realized a small rock had gotten into my shoe. With each step I felt it, I knew it was there, but I kept walking. We walked to the end of the block, crossed the street, and down the next block.

The rock hurt, but just a little. I kept walking. Once I stopped and tried to get it out of my shoe but the dog wanted to keep going forward and I had nothing to lean on. So it stayed.

But this entire 10 or 15 minutes I was walking with this stupid rock in my shoe. I was completely aware of it, it caused me discomfort, and yet I continued going.

I got home, took my shoes off, took a shower, went on with the rest of my day.

And now, almost 3 hours later, that exact spot where the rock was, my foot hurts. It hurts more than when the rock was actually there. Even though the rock is gone, all morning, it's felt as if it were still there.

Lately it feels like

Every morning I'm waking up on the wrong side.
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Pages

I'm on the hunt for new an exciting books to read. I practically gulped down the following in a day or two each:

• Jonathan Safran Foer's Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (A fucking heart breaking book that tore me apart with each and every god forsaken word. In all of the best ways.)
• Kazuo Ishiguro's Remains of the Day
• Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go

I feel like there's one more that I can't seem to remember right now.

Either way, I'm looking for something new and absolutely delicious. Given that I've just finished 3 world shakingly depressing books, I'm looking for something with a somewhat brighter outlook. 

There were a small handful of books that I was really excited to read but I don't quite have the money to buy them (or they're not in the kindle library.)

But! Stay tuned! Danielle and I have a new project underway. I can't wait.

Other things to do:

Actually fill out my GoodReads profile.

SO!! Anyone with book rec's?

24

Birthday Loot:

And some odds and ends: a keychain, a card, an orchid. Dinner with the family. A gift certificate.

It was a good year for gifts.

Seriously.

Is it bad that today I feel like the only thing thats keeping me alive is the prospect of gifts at the end of the week?

Better to have a stupid materialistic excuse to be alive than be dead, I guess.

I'll Cheers to that.

Nights

I just wanted to share that:

1. I have really crazy dreams. You all know that, I'm sure.
2. A recurrent image/scene in my dreams is running through fields and fields of different colored flowers that are separated by fences of barbed wire and other fencing stuff. I'm always running away from something, being chased and I have to get through the fields and find somewhere to hide. It's a breathtakingly beautiful scene, all of these flowers and fences. But I'm running through them and jumping over fences. I wonder if it's a sign or a metaphor for something I don't understand quite yet.
3. Lately there has been someone in my dream, and I'm not sure if this is from a movie or a TV show or a book that has seeped into my dreams (I hope it's from something else and I just don't remember what instead of it just being part of my dream-imagination). But there's someone in my dream that's trying to give me a pep talk. And he's saying, "Do jets fly in the rain?" or "Do jets fly when they're sad?" or "Do jets fly through all sorts of storms?!" Thinking of really ridiculous circumstances that a jet might face. In my dream I give an exasperated yes, or I say I don't know depending on the dream. And this person yells, "HELL YEAH JETS FLY THROUGH THE RAIN!!!!" (or whatever challenge the jet was supposed to have faced.) The point is, Jets do all these crazy things so I need to man up and do whatever needs to get done. This one's meaning is a little less mercurial but much more strange in the landscape of things that happen in my dreams. Where the hell did I get this from? Or how did I think of it? Or what does it really matter? Do jets fly through the rain? I don't know.
4. Last night I dreamnt (dreamnt isn't a word, but it is to me.) about a house that was in construction and like an obstacle course. I kept hitting my head on staircases that were too small to ascend and very poorly placed.

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Emerald City! (View from our hotel room)

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Spinning

When I was 7 in our ballet class we learned something called “spotting.”

All the ballerinas did it, you pick a spot, any spot that will remain your constant. You can’t let go of your spot or else the spinning will catch up with you.

We’d start at one corner of the room, one foot turned out, the other pointed. One arm in second position, the other in first.

You pick your spot and as you turn your body, you keep looking until the very last moment, when you can’t possibly look any longer, and you whip your head around, re-orienting yourself on the same spot. 

We did it slowly at first, gaining in speed. We’d do pique turns or pirouettes across the room. We’d do them in the center, on pointe or demi-pointe. Singles, doubles, some of us even tried triples.

The teacher’s voice would ring in the air, “Spot, Sydney! Spot!”

Everyone else could seem to do it. They could keep focused, they could re-orient themselves, they could go turn after turn towards that same spot, never dizzying, never falling, never letting on that the entire world was whirling around us.

They could go faster and faster. Turns and more turns. 

I’d pick my spot and somehow I couldn’t get my head to turn at just the right moment. Was I doing it wrong? Was this something I would just learn better over time? Was this something I just couldn’t do?

All the other girls twirled and twirled.

 and I did nothing but hit the floor.

I couldn’t stop the world from catching up with me…

The Steps

I'm trying to get my life back on track. I'm ready and raring to go.

A while ago, after I first graduated and as an attempt to soothe my unemployed soul I told myself that I needed to find some sort of meaning or worth in not having a goal.

Because I've always been such a goal-oriented, hard on myself, nothing is good enough, with the blinders on kind of person I was often left with that empty disillusionment of having attained a goal. That feeling of, "I got here... But now what?" I felt like I had to somehow discover something about myself beyond that. Beyond the goal.

I've struggled all of these months to find something, anything different. To make me feel like I had "found myself."


I'm considering it an experiment failed.