7 posts tagged “random”

It's been over two months since I last posted anything, and far longer than that since I've posted anything substantial.  It's not that I haven't had things to say, it's that I've allowed myself to get swamped, I've gotten confused, and my priorities are all in a jumble right now.

Not entirely.  Graduate school, my research, those continue to be my highest priorities, even as I've had to set them aside for a couple of months.

I can't focus, though, because my personal life priorities just seem to be confused.  And I don't know what to say about them.  A friend of mine often writes in her blog about how she sometimes has it all going on in her head, and can't put it down in writing.  I'm having that issue myself right now.

I'm living in New Mexico right now, just for a couple of months.  After that, it's back to graduate school (well, actually starting my PhD program), and that will help some, I think.

I do not know how to make structure for myself when I have little to none.  Even in my masters program, I'd manage to get to all my classes, and on time, but I couldn't schedule my other time to best do my research or grade papers or just have fun.  Or focus on my out-of-class writing and photography.

I'm not feeling creative right now.  I'm feeling mostly out of whack.  I had a poem start in my head one night, and instead of sitting up and writing down what I "heard", I figured I'd remember in the morning.  That was less than brilliant, and I think I knew that.  I just think I didn't want to focus on the feelings causing that poem.

I'm going to try to get it all back in order.  But at the moment, I feel very built on a foundation of sand, and it's slowly eroding.  There's some bedrock under there, I'm certain, but I can't find it right now.

Anyway, that's me surfacing briefly.  Ironically, I'm relatively certain almost no one is going to see it.  That's okay.  It's good, I think, to put it up here anyway.

So, random tidbit for anyone who's reading.  Not a long entry.

The song "What Would Happen?" by Merril Bainbridge just came on.  There's a couple of lines that are extra clear in her singing:

What would happen if we kissed?
Would your tongue slip past my lips?

And today it got me thinking (very briefly, as it's not a profound thought).

The older I get, the more I dislike French Kissing.  I have no idea why this is true, but it is.

So there.  :P

It's snowing here.  Pretty hard.

I thought I saw a flash out of the corner of my eye.  My curtains are a little screwed up right now, so I thought maybe I was seeing some reflected police lights.

Nope, that was lightning, I discovered a few moments later when the beautiful roll of distant thunder hit.

Thundersnow!  I've never experienced thundersnow before.  I might have to go see if I can photograph some of it, only none of my cameras are waterproof or inexpensive.

I am seriously considering making "rearranged the kitchen" as one of my projects for thing a day.  Of course, I'd have to clear this with my roommate, but I'm starting to get frustrated.

There's a ridiculous amount of wasted space in our kitchen, mostly because it's up high.  This isn't an unsurmountable problem, we just need a taller stepladder.  There's also just a certain amount of inefficiency in where things are located.

The problem is that I don't want to piss off or anger my roommate.  The kitchen works for her, clearly, so she's not going to be inclined to change it, I suspect.  That's not entirely true.  I doubt she'd mind if I put things up high, though she'd laugh at me since I'm so short, but an actual rearrangement might be tricky.

I at least need to do something with my pantry space and see if I can expand into the higher areas.  I'm getting pretty tired of having to wander downstairs and out to the garage if I want to make something specialized.  Furthermore, I'm having a very hard time finding things I own when I'm in the garage.  I wanted to make pumpkin bread today, but my loaf pans are not to be found.  I strongly suspect they are in the garage, but I went looking through my kitchen boxes down their and did not find them.

I'm not much of a cook, honestly, but I do better when I have tools and counter-space.  Also, when the tools I have can be found (both not in the garage, and not jumbled up in the kitchen).  I really, really want to become a better cook, and I have access to a kitchen that's really wonderful.  I just don't know how to bring it to it's full potential for me without stepping on her toes.

I really like my roommate, and I recognize that there's a certain amount of accepting I need to do, since I'm renting a room from her.  But I am wondering if there's a polite way to ask and see if she's willing to let me or help me rearrange.

One of my thoughts for thing a day is that I'd like to make food out of as many of those old "church cookbook" type of cookbooks I can get my hands on.  Failing that, something that is at least reasonably obscure.  I don't actually have all that many of the "church cookbooks", but I have a couple, and I have some obscure cookbooks.

So, for the moment, I've been looking through the Greater Albuquerque Family Child Care Association's cookbook, My roommate's Aunt J's cookbook, my recipe card book, the Red chile Bible, the Green Chile Bible, Virginia Bed & Breakfast Cookbook (probably the lease obscure of the obscure), and the Pie Town, New Mexico Cookbook.

Long ago, and far away, say about July across the country, I had more peaches than I could shake a stick at.  And I decided to freeze some of them, so I could make peach pie in December, when I knew my friends and I would be craving something different.  Little did I know that I'd be moving in December. So now thing a day is coming up, and I still have frozen peaches (hey, I was moving in the winter, it was easy to move frozen foods!).  I also have a cookbook from Pie Town, New Mexico, and I know their pie rules. (I went to the most recent Pie Festival.  The pie ruled so much they ran out of pie.  Mmm.... pie....)

If you, like me, see the wonderousness that could be possible from this combination of items, I bet you're just drooling right now.  I've found a good pie crust recipe, though I may need some pie stones.  What I haven't found is a good looking peach pie recipe.  I know they're in here.  I had peach pie at the pie festival.  It was tasty.

I bet you, like me, are saying, "Go to the index, woman!  Peach Pie awaits!  PIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIEEEEEEEEEEE!"

Problem:  I went to the index.  It's in page number order.  The GAFCCA cookbook is in aphabetical order by recipe name rather than major ingredient(s), but that's at least 90% functional.  This index?  Not so useful.  I can't just look up peach pie and have three to five fabulous recipes for peach pie.

Woe is me.  Now I have to look through the whole cookbook.  The whole Pie Town pie cookbook.  Clearly, my life is tragic.

As my roommate was flipping through the OnDemand channels today, she settled (briefly) on a movie called, "The Weight of Water."  It looked interesting, but I wasn't really able to sit and watch.  I'd like to catch it at some other point though.  There was an actress in it who may have been Elizabeth Hurley, or may have just looked like her out of the corner of my eye.  I didn't recognize or think I recognized anyone else.

One of the things about doing “Morning Pages”, as suggested by my neighbor Artgeek, is that it strongly urges you to get away from the chaos of the house and take a moment to write three pages worth of stuff down.  The stuff is fairly unimportant (one link she gave me said it was even permissible to write, “I don’t know what to write” over and over for three pages), but the process matters.  The idea is that it will help you clear your head and unleash your creativity.

I’m reading a lot about that right now, as I embark on reading, “Getting Things Done”, by David Allen.  He also has suggestions on how to clear the head and allow yourself to be creative, whatever your endeavor.  However, I find his book starkly intimidating.  It’s a puzzle to me, and while some of what he says makes a bucket full of sense, much of it feels reminiscent of reading a foreign text.  Sometimes I think my brain is hard-wired for disorganization, no matter how frustrating I find it.  Hell, looking at my little room right now, I really wonder about that!  Looks like a tornado hit it, but by the end of tomorrow it will be completely tidy.  There should be a way to keep it looking like that all the time, but I haven’t managed it.  Nevertheless, it is my ongoing ambition to try!  In previous incarnations of my life, a half-hour dedicated to tidying my space might merely have resulted in a small dent.  Tomorrow, it’ll look nearly sparkling.  I call that progress.

Back to the subject at hand – “unleashing creativity”.  When I was in Kenya, I loved mornings.  It took about a week, maybe two, to get into a rhythm of waking with the sun at 5:30am (and my roommates loathed me for it, despite the fact that they could, and did, sleep through anything).  However, the returns were worth it.  Trillions of times over.  I was the only student consistently up at that time, possibly the only person, and usually I was even up before the cook crew (a rotating group of students, and my original motivation to get up that early).  I wrote so much more while I was there, and truly developed my interest in photography.

How much of that was just the fact that I was on a study abroad to Kenya will remain forever a mystery, but the truth is that I am certain a significant amount of it was also the rhythm of waking with the sun and having all of camp to myself.  I allowed myself more silliness, for no one could see.  I allowed myself more writing space, because I wanted to miss nothing.  And if I wanted to take a picture of that millipede, by god, I could.  (It was huge.  Totally awesome, and I don’t care how many people question my sanity for photographing it.)

I found it amusing, though, because I am a nightowl, through and through.  Here in the States, it’s not at all unusual for me to be up until 2am or later.  I pay for it the next day, but it’s still very much an inclination for me.  Some of it is that I can’t wake with the sun consistently, as I did in Kenya.  A dawn simulator has helped tremendously, and I recommend it to everyone.

My night habits have only increased, though, since moving to my latest destination.  I now live with a wonderful roommate, her cat and her puppy.  Unlike my roommates in Kenya, I am not as prone to sleeping through anything.  In the middle of the night, I can sleep through some things, but not everything.  As the morning inches in, though, it becomes tougher and tougher.  And if there’s one thing I cannot sleep through, it’s an alarm.  Even if it’s on the other side of a wall.  Especially then, actually, since I can’t turn the damn thing off.

So I’ve found that those moments of peace come for me these days, at the end of the day.  In some ways, I guess they always have.  I’ve enjoyed mornings when I’ve felt able to truly wake up for them, but it is difficult for me in my NorthWestern quarter of the globe.  True dark to fall asleep to is all but impossible (especially where I am now), and as the seasons change, so does sunrise.  Mornings are just as much a struggle as they ever were before Kenya.

Furthermore, in my current house, there’s no way to escape the chaos first thing.  Even were I to wake up earlier (which is quite questionable, given my predilections), I don’t think I could get as much done before the obnoxious 6am alarm that is my roommate’s first (of many) wake up sounds.  That thing goes off forever.  And, eventually, the puppy wakes up.  And then it’s attempts to get her to pee and eat and behave.  Sometimes it feels like I’m hiding in my room!  Even lying in bed, there is no escape.  I have an extreme desire to jump out of bed and fix whatever that obnoxious noise is, or to help my roommate with whatever dog training thing she’s got going on.

Combine all of this with a wonder-woman on the East Coast who tends to be a nightowl herself, and the fact that all of my friends are an hour or more behind me…

Well, nights are just my time.  I, at this point, journal in the mornings and at night, most of the time.  The night journal is not always long hand, the morning journal is.  I haven’t figured it all out.  I want to get up and pee before doing morning pages, but it feels like I’m available for the world the moment I open my door.  It’s hard to make a 15 week old puppy understand that I’m not around when I’m standing right there!

I tried this morning, after having read about morning pages last night, to actually have my wake up.  Pee, brush my teeth, make some tea.  From the links Artgeek gave me, this was acceptable.  Except, it really did toss me right in the middle of it all.  Oddly, though, I wonder if it was more like what the morning pages were supposed to be.  Seemed somewhat like what the “collection” phase of “Getting Things Done”.  It was much more scattered and like notes to myself than I feel previous entries were.  I don’t much go back and reread old journal entries, so I can’t swear to that, but it’s a feeling.  I was spacey enough that when I went to get dressed, I managed to pull on clean underwear, socks and pants, but then wandered out to the kitchen in my night shirt.  And didn’t even realize it until about halfway through morning pages/dealing with insanity.  So, I wasn’t entirely clear headed. 

The nice thing about the room being messy though, is that there are a lot of books out.  Since I’ve felt so long like I’ve lost my direction as a reader, having 12 books out and about feels sort of homey.  I’m only in the middle of six of them.  Though I think I’m not going to finish number six.  And I may return number five.  Number seven, though, goes with number four, and number two is a book on writing.  Number one is GTD, and number three is a nice fantasy novel I’m looking forward to and I promised a friend I’d read for her experiment on me.  Number eight is the next book in that series, so will be tucked away soon.  Number nine was one I thought I’d read snippets of this evening (was a toss-up between that and the writing book), so will also be put away soon.  Number ten is a book on local foods, also soon to be tucked away.  Eleven is a second book on writing I just got, and twelve is a book I just finished that was both a light-hearted read and a study for working on my own book in that genre.

Feels like home.

Post Script: After shutting down the computer, and using this as the evening’s journaling exercise, I went and put away about four of those books.