Month: October 2018

Halloween

Well, I took Siri’s recommendation for my Halloween costume this year.

You see, she always comes up with totally nerdy ideas, whenever I ask her what I should be for Halloween…, and I kind of always want to do them…, but they usually just would take a little too much effort or extreme creativity actually to produce.

The last time I asked her, however, when I genuinely was looking for a good idea, she gave me a totally doable one!

Okay, so hers was a doable idea, but with some adjustments….

She recommended I put a calendar on my head, and be “an update”…, but 1) a calendar isn’t easy to make stay, 2) I don’t have a paper calendar lying around, and 3) a calendar isn’t a date.

However, I easily could write out a date on paper, and fasten it to a headband…

And so I did!

Talk about dorky and nerdy… I’ve got them both covered. 😛

P.S. I always find it interesting how I tend to refer to Siri as “she”, even though my Siri is a (British) male voice (and has been almost since I got an iPhone in the first place)…, but I also use “he” at times, too… so the many sides of Siri all get airtime in conversation, I guess… 😛

Post-a-day 2018

Forward thinking

The problem with everything being automated, electronic, is that, as I have said many times before, when the power goes out, not only can you not see the toilet, but you can’t really use/flush the toilet, and you can’t even wash your hands afterward… which gets really terrible in a building filled with a thousand-ish high school girls…. even if the power is out for a short time.

But we live in Houston, Texas, where hurricanes take out power for days just about every year in the late summer and early fall.

Forward thinking, to me, doesn’t just mean going digital and automatic/electronic/whatever… it’s about actually thinking through things…

Post-a-day 2018

Work

I’m not at a place to turn down a work-for-money opportunity, really, and so I’m going in tomorrow to work, though it wasn’t on the schedule until late this afternoon….

I usually love getting to go in to work, though – I genuinely enjoy it…

And the funny thing is that I’ve felt more and more down and out since I agreed to go in tomorrow…

… and I’m really not sure why…

Post-a-day 2018

Photography life insights

Attending all these weddings has been a unique experience…

I wander between delight with joyous tears and skeptical wondering… how lovely that they love each other so much to be marrying… I wonder if they have any idea of how long they’ll live (and therefore if they realize for how long they have committed to being together with their vows)… how magical to have someone to love mutually like that… I wonder if they still will be married in three years… five… ten… one…

I also wonder at the decorative and stylistic choices of just about everything at these weddings… I see and attend and analyze enough of them, that I notice the actual difference this or that makes for just about every detail… if I ever have a wedding, it’ll be a unique affair, and not one to be missed, I can assure that… (however, if I ever have a wedding in the first place, I don’t see myself throwing loads of cash at it, so very few people will be in attendance).

Post-a-day 2018

Life being Nuts

It almost magical how much something seemingly permanency can change in a short time.

Just two weeks ago, I was noticing how few guys seemed to be in my life (not dating-wise, but just at all), and how I missed having males around.

As of tonight, it feels as though guys are overflowing in my life, and in various ways (though surprisingly many of them have made clear efforts to date me).

Life is crazy (as though I don’t already know that), and totally worth it (I’ve know that one for quite a while, too). 🙂

Post-a-day 2018

Dorks

I sent this to my mom, and we laughed about it:

From an article I was reading for my school research, talking about critical approaches to literature:

One scholar recently referred to a character’s “first fatal heart attack.” Who could have two?

I’m totally a dork, I know. 🙂

Post-a-day 2018

The voice of the story

We’ve been reading the book Absalom, Absalom! by William Faulkner in one of my classes.

As part of the research I have to do for it, I’ve been reading all about the intentional, semi-genius absurdity that is Mr. Faulkner’s sentence structure and story-telling in this book, and especially how details of the one big story come out from four different storytellers in all sorts of crazy order… always leaving the key details for the end, though they all knew these details from the very beginning.

Now, I read from a happy book every night before bed – a book that has me excited to snuggle up in bed to read it each night, anyway,if not always “happy”.

That book right now is The Voice on the Radio by Caroline B. Cooney, a book from a series I admired and loved as an elementary schooler.

The sort of irony of it is that, while I wasn’t really a fan of the Absalom reading and research originally, I finally got interested in it today with my findings on the style, as I was mentioning already…. and then tonight, reading my book, a conversation comes up in which a professor says how his wife keeps a chart by their radio – you see, the student is a radio talk guy for the campus station, and has been telling pieces of the story of a kidnapping (don’t worry, though, because the kidnapping got all sorted out, and everyone is safe from it all in the story now) all out of order and only in tidbits here and there – so that she can note whatever tidbit the student shares that night, and hopefully eventually piece together everything to understand the full story.

The student’s mental response to this comment from the professor is, “So his master plan was working,” and that “[t]he delivery of overlapping stories, out of order, had hooked the audience[…]” (quote from page 81 of the September 1998 printing)

… just like Mr. Faulkner’s Absalom style, I found myself thinking…

And so, I start to like this bit about Absalom, and, that same day, I find a strong connection to it in another book that I already like lots and lots… 😛

Kind of crazy, huh?

And I said ‘sort of irony’, because it’s kind of coincidence combined with irony – finding a connection to something I hated in something I love, except that I now actually like some of the former, so the irony is semi-replaced by coincidence…

Post-a-day 2018

The Last Samurai

I just watched the film “The Last Samurai”, and it was the first time I’d seen it all the way through, as well as the first time I’d seen any of it post-Japan (remember that I lived in Japan for a while).

I balled my eyes out over and over and over again, and mostly for things I never would have considered before having lived in Japan.

As Katsumoto-San says, ‘There are many of our customs/traditions that seem strange to you… Yours are the same for us.’

And now I see both sides of it all, and I wonder at how anyone could consider that only one side to anything in life is good enough, satisfactory enough, adequate… for anything beneficial to anyone or anything.

It can be terrifying, but seeing through the eyes of ones we don’t understand creates a solution to any problem, because, as Ender Wiggin said, once we understand our enemies, we can’t help but to love them.

Post-a-day 2018

Where we belong

Today, I was reminded that I am exactly where I belong right now… Just like when I let go of things having to look a certain way when I lived in France – when I acknowledged that the exact French life was not for me, because, well, I’m not French – and I could just be myself (while, of course, still being respectful of and to those around me), I ran into the people whom I liked best.  I started going where I liked to go and doing what I liked to do, and friends showed up.  I had failed at making friends by trying to be French, so I stuck with being myself truly, and friends popped up all over the place, better than I ever could have expected.

And today was just like that, but on a miniature scale.  I was doing what I felt was the right thing for me to be doing, and I followed my heart and intuition while doing it… and that led me to a wonderful person (someone about whom I have been wondering a lot lately, but whom I haven’t seen in years!).  As we chatted, walking together to the person’s yoga class, I felt as though this one encounter was perfect for me and my life, and that it had a positive impact on that person’s day and life, too.  It was like one of those feel-good movie moments, those “meet-cute” situations, where the music is happy and everyone leaves the scene feeling better than ever about life in general.  My being the main character of the scene, I especially felt wonderful about life – things are still totally insane right now, but I can see that that’s really okay for right now.  It’s going to be even more amazing than I ever could have imagined, and so I just need to stick with moving forward in what feels right, and let go of being so tear-prone angsty and totally freaking out on such a regular basis (except actually… that’s no joke, though it totally makes me laugh).

Yeah… so I’m trusting what feels like the right path, even though it’s terrifying right now. It serves no one when I am so stressed and panicky as I have been, least of all myself.  And I want to take care of myself, so that I can do all of these extraordinary things I’ve been dreaming up, and better.  ðŸ˜‰

Post-a-day 2018