Month: February 2019

Comfort

At ease….

It’s funny to me, though totally believable, that my kakizome has already begun to do its work in my life for this year.

安心 Anshin

It roughly translates to a combination of the following:

  • Peace of mind, freedom from care
  • Relief, be quite free from care (anxiety, fear)
  • Feel easy (about), feel at ease
  • Feel relieved, stop worrying (about something)
  • Feel reassured, be confident (of, that), be (rest) assured

And, somehow unforeseen by me, 安心anshin has found its way further and further into my daily life these past couple weeks.

I am actually excited about the near future and the present almost every day, even when I wake up in the morning (In case you don’t know, the morning thing is huge for me).

I am not fully where I want to be – not by a long shot – but I am actually moving there now, actively and effectively heading in that wonderful direction, becoming who and how I want to be every day and night (and morning) of my life.

And it feels amazing (including the muscle soreness)…

Thank you, 安心 anshin, for your existence, care, and support in my life… truly, thank you. 🙂

Post-a-day 2019

For Tonight

I love theatre, especially the musical kind.

Tonight, after much work on the part of many people, we finally got to sit down and watch an official, real, full performance of the world premier of the musical “For Tonight“.

Throughout its preparation and rehearsal time, I had learned all about the story of the show, and didn’t think anything super special about it…

Upon my actually sitting in one of the final run-throughs to do notes, I heard, for the first time, the music, the songs…

And I spent a good portion of the show, to varying degrees, in tears – it was that wonderful and beautiful.

Tonight, after seeing the whole show, with everything mostly polished and actually in order, I fell even more in love with this show and its music.

Let’s be real here: I want a CD right now, so I can listen to those voices singing those songs over and over (and over) again, until the words ride within me on their own… at the moment, I can feel the music inside me, swirling around, whooshing to the various rhythms and beats…, I just don’t have all the words in there, nor any sort of organization going from one song to another…

After tonight, I have my mental fingers crossed like crazy to have an album recorded, which would be totally awesome, using this cast of voices – I love these voices, both individually and as a whole cast.

Yumm… that’s how wonderful the Romani and all the others sound – you just want to eat them up, but savor them, too, like your favorite food/dessert.

Post-a-day 2019

Inspiration flattened

Do you ever get all excited about doing something, and so do some research on the subject to see what others are currently doing for it, and then become utterly downtrodden about it, because what you find is so good that you kind of don’t even want to bother going for it yourself?

Yeah… I might be experiencing that right now with photography… rather than inspiring me, the awesomely successful work of others just makes me feel like I’ll never be good enough, and so why even bother trying?

I know there’s more to it than that – especially, but not only, the fact that no one will bring to the table quite what I will bring, and I never will bring to the table what anyone else brings, because we are all different people… and that is a good thing – it grows rather boring rather quickly when everyone does the same exact thing…

I think I just need to feel the depressiveness of this right now, so that I can let it all go by morning. 😛

Yep… that’s it.

Here’s to inspiration and self-confidence – huzzah!

(lolz! [genuinely laughing at myself right now for the huzzah – I love when I be me]) 😛

Post-a-day 2019

Phone crush!

Are we allowed to crush on people we meet over the phone?… on a help line?…is that a thing?

Certainly not, but that’s okay – I have a mini crush anyway.

I think it was his chuckles that got me… we were talking about how somebody messed up delivering a package, and yet somehow we both ended up chuckling a lot during our 14-minute phone call… that and his real warmness every time he said my name, calling me “Miss Hannah” in an uplifting way (as opposed to the near disrespectful and demeaning version I have heard on many a helpline).

I just got off from a phone conversation with an adorable Bradley, who happens to be living in the future (by eight hours) in Cape Town, South Africa.

Sometimes, the whole outsourcing of help lines is terrible, and nothing seems to work out, due to language and culture barriers, combined with a terrible phone connection, or something else absurd.

And sometimes, it works out wonderfully – I’ve already had one of my absurd fairy-tale-like stories play out in my head, where adorable, chuckling Bradley in South Africa and I end up meeting in real life and becoming besties or something – maybe even marrying…. ‘How did you two meet?’ ‘Well, it was an outsourced help line phone call that brought us together… Hannah called, and Bradley answered… and it turned into true life, half the world apart.’

😛 hashtag guffaw 😛

It is things like this that make me feel confident in my ability to produce absurd and entertaining stories that nod to Sophie Kinsella books – silly and goofy and crazy things already go down in my life, and then my mind takes them, in a mere moment, to a whole ‘nother level… truly.

What’s really fun to me about it all is the fact that I had called in to the hotline already, but the person had somehow messed up the call, or something, and had just disappeared… so Bradley was my second call in to the hotline.

Boy am I glad my call was messed up the first time. 😛

I really do love my life, and I am grateful for it, with all of my being.

🙂

Post-a-day 2019

Friends in action

There is a bit of a tizzy going on amongst those sitting in the director’s circle, just after my friend begins her solo song. I hear something like an ‘I don’t Know,’ from the circle as Blue Sweater turns ’round, shaking his head intensely with an air of sighing disbelief.

“Are you talking about the rag that was left behind?” I ask, since she had just had to step over a dropped white rag from the previous scene.

“What?”

I repeat.

“No. HER,” he says, somewhat dramatically, tipping his head toward the girl on stage, toward my friend. “She’s …perfection. She’s… she’s just perfection,” he says, hands flying with something like exasperation.

‘Oh.’ I agree… a few moments of silent awe follow, as everyone watches her on stage.

Shaking his head, “I mean, she has to know how perfect she is… she Has to know – I Have to give her the note,” and he flips open and begins writing in a notebook.

Everyone watching the stage is smiling, and they are smiles from deep within.

🙂

Post-a-day 2019

Uninvited overnight guest

Not the messages you want to be sending anyone at three in the morning:

Not great news: 80% certain that there is an animal in the attic right now. I went out front to look on the wall, and saw no creature there (just some old vines). There is a hole in the roof by the porch, though, and I can hear it going crazy right now.

It sounds like it is genuinely destroying boards inside the wall. I hear things falling down the wall.

And yet, I just sent them.

And it is terrifying me just a little bit, because this creature sounds totally capable of breaking through the walls within definitely a few hours…. so I’m nervous to go to sleep, and risk having a creature fully in the house when I awaken with a jolt at its entry.

……. 😦

Post-a-day 2019

Lingo-bot Life

Occasionally, I feel a bit lame and down about my seemingly lessened and lowered Japanese skills.  But then I have experiences like tonight, where, when speaking with a Japanese man, he was unable to come up with the right Japanese words immediately or at all – we all take longer to process, when we aren’t using a language all the time; even native speakers.  When it happened tonight, I told of the many times I, myself, was unable to come up with an English word while living abroad.  When immersed in one language, it id much more difficult to recall another, native or not, language.  So, I just need to immerse myself more often in each of my languages, and that will help significantly – it is all still there; it just needs a bit of encouragement and exercise.  😛

Not that this is news to me – it was merely a welcomed reminder.  🙂

Post-a-day 2019

Time to get up

The struggles of not being an early-morning person… Tomorrow, I don’t have to be in until around 10am…

If I go in at the regular time (i.e. leaving home right at 7am), I can accomplish a lot of my writing and photo stuff before classes.

If I go in for 10, I won’t have time to accomplish anything except teaching and tutoring and regular working stuff – I’m booked through the evening.

But I would get to sleep in…., which is awesome, especially since we’re hoping to do or first workout class tomorrow night.

…However, I might get stress-y about the potential of showing up late for some reason, if I wait for 10…

So, I’m guessing I will schedule myself for the regular wake-up and get ready times, but just take my time doing them, as I find necessary… if I show up half an hour later than usual, due to increased traffic on the roads, that’s okay – I’ll still have enough time at that point to do my personal work before I have a class.

Good plan.

Yep.

…

Yeah, I’m definitely planning to leave at the same time as usual. 😛

Haha… I’m quite glad I can laugh at myself with this; laughter is good medicine. 🙂

Post-a-day 2019

Girl Rising

Tonight, I finally watched a film recommended to me by a couple of high school senior girls, called “Girl Rising“.

Before it even was finished, I found myself rather wanting to find a way to get myself funded to go over somewhere where teachers are needed, and to teach children (girls especially) everything I possibly can.

And I am now somewhat worried that I might actually end up doing something radical… like just that… or even finding a way to find a girls boarding school here somewhere, to bring girls who otherwise can’t afford anything, let alone education, and that will be this school I have considered and discussed so much in recent years, the one I have though about founding…

That seems even more absurd than my just going somewhere… somehow…

P.S. I recommend the film.

Post-a-day 2019

This weather

It is cold – it is cold – it is cold – it is cold….

No, no… I feel warm, I feel warm, I feel warm.

……..

Relevant tonight, with or near/freezing weather, but also a rough version of the miniature conversation that would happen between a friend and me all the time in Fall, Winter, and Spring while I lived in Japan. 😛

It regularly was so cold, that we just had to tell ourselves that we were warm, in hopes of it helping somehow – brain psychology and all that jazz, you know.

At the very least, however, it made us laugh just about every time, and that was definitely good. 😀

Post-a-day 2019