Month: August 2020

Today

Two things tonight: trash and holes.

First:

Today, I got to experience a delightful little bit of small town life. No one put out the trash this morning, so, once I was up and finished with tutoring, I handled it myself. There were still trash bins all down the street, and, when I had been doing the running for my workout, I discovered that some really reeked… suggesting that they still had trash in them. In fact, it smelled outside period, because of trash. So, I cleaned out the trash cans throughout the house, added their trash to the kitchen bag, and stuck it in the trash bin. I hugged the bin out to the curb, and headed back inside, out a clean kitchen bag and cleaned the trash can lid, and then washed my hands.

Suddenly, the doorbell rang. After a pause of contemplating the possibilities and likelihoods, I went and opened the door. An older, grayed and balding yet able-bodied man stood on the doorstep. “I hate to have to say it, but the trash man’s already come today.”

His southeast Texas small town accent only increased the endearment of the whole act. Only in small towns, communities that care openly about one another, does this happen. The other week, my mom said that the fat layer on my arms was due to my having been in the boonies for so long – it was just part of living out here. I laughed really hard at the joke, and told her later how grateful I was again and again at her having given me that silly way to look at the unpleasant situation of having gotten fat where I didn’t want it. That was, nonetheless, one of the drawbacks of small town life. This week, I got to have a positive of small town life, and enjoy the super sweet neighborly kindness that this guy gave freely to me. Just lovely. 🙂

Second:

I talked with my old high school boyfriend this afternoon. We have remained friends these past many years, despite the oh-so-different paths our lives have followed. We don’t talk often, but, when we do, we have to be cut off by some activity of some sort, or else we talk for hours. And we do it with ease. We weren’t just a dating couple in high school. We were really good friends for years first.

Talking today, I noticed how there is a piece of me – un trou – that is filled only by him. It sits just behind my ribs, from the center to the right a few inches or so, and it has a bit of depth to it, though not uniform. I could feel it so incredibly clearly today, I am surprised that I hadn’t fully identified its existence before. It had just been one of those subconscious knowings, I suppose, until today. But now I see and feel how that one spot is filled only by J——–, and it makes my heart, somehow, feel more full. By the knowledge of his absence, he somehow goes everywhere with me, whether I realize or pay attention to it or not. It was a kind of fun realization to have.

While we spoke, I could feel an intangible heat stretching inside my ribs, expanding to fill, at least in part, his space within my being.

Whenever I see him next, I can definitely see myself hugging and hanging tightly around his neck for quite a while – he is so important to me. But it is truly out of love through friendship, not romantic love. Frankly, we are so not interested in one another on a day-to-day or dating level – that’s a hard pass for the both of us. But, just because we are not romantically for one another, doesn’t mean that we cannot improve the foundation of our relationship, and stick with that: friendship.

Anyway, I’m losing focus, both visually and mentally, actually. So, I’m going to end here and do my stretches and reading so I can go to sleep now. Goodnight!!

Post-a-day 2020

Perseids

Tonight, while awaiting the arrival of my aunt and uncle, finally coming home from their ten-week vacation, I received a message from my aunt, asking if my cousin and I were still awake. It was 10:56 when the message arrived. I called her in response, and she asked if we wanted to go see about seeing the Perseids meteor shower with them. Ten minutes later, we were on the road to meet them in a dark place surrounded by trees. It was supposed to be only fifteen minutes away, but my cousin wanted to drive, and he drove ten to fifteen miles per hour under the speed limit for some reason… and he almost ran us off the road more than once… I’m not so sure his eyesight is okay…

Anyway, we arrived to the parking lot in the median on the highway, and we lay down on some sleeping bags that my aunt had set out on the ground in front of their vehicle. The temperature had been 79°F at the house, but it was down to 74°F st this particular spot, but still with high humidity, so there was moisture around. When I lay down, my arms were wet within a minute, due to the dew on the sleeping bag.

The sky was gorgeous. I’m not sure I have ever been able to sit and see the sky like I saw it tonight, so dark and deep with stars and planets – the more of them that are visible, the more of a depth that is added to the sky… it really feels like we are in a galaxy, looking up at a sky like that… I’m not sure I have ever felt so much a part of something so much bigger than just the little world around me (literally)… it was glorious. I put my hands behind my head, and I basked in the depths of the galaxy around and above me…

So, we chatted and watched, and we all saw some meteors – my aunt kept stressing because she was always looking the wrong way at first. Eventually, though, we all saw multiple meteors. My aunt did a toast to the Perseid meteors, using the $15 whisky they had in the back of the car, and we all saluted the Perseids with a sip or so. She had tried many a times to see the Perseid shower throughout her life, and she had, at last, seen some of it.

My uncle told us a story of how, though he regularly lay in his truck bed in the driveway when he was a teen, watching the stars (and, my aunt added, listening to Peter Frampton [on his eight-track, he added]), there was one night that, with the sky dark-dark, and everyone had come for a watermelon smash at his home, a comet suddenly appeared, making the sky look bright as daytime while it passed. It freaked him out, apparently. That was in the 70s at some point. (I intend to look it up later.)

My aunt had never heard the story. And that is not very common at all.

Then, after work fumbling with her phone for a while, my aunt finally got the great version of “Baby, I Love Your Way” playing on her phone, and we all felt the time-warp nostalgia of my uncle’s nights in his pickup in the 70s. She had the volume low, too, so it really was like how it would have been back in that day.

While we were lying there after the song, my aunt said to me, “Hannah, you’re gonna have to remember this for me. Because I’m not remembering things too well these days.” I chuckled, and told her that I even would tell my cousin, her daughter, so that she, too, could help my aunt to remember this memory.

It certainly was a good one to have and to remember. 🙂

…..

Then, of course, we came home, and no one went right to bed. Dishes had to be washed (because my cousin hadn’t done it throughout the day), sheets had to be found (because my aunt didn’t like that my cousin was putting his junk on her nice sheets in the guest bedroom), and food and certain other things had to be unpacked from their vehicle. That, along with the general need for us to hang around and talk with one another, despite the fact that it was way late. We never found the sheets, but we did find something else my cousin had been looking for for a couple days so far. Finally, around 2:30/2:45, people went to bed. I had already showered and was doing stretches on my bed (i.e. the massage table), since they had finally stopped rummaging through the room for those sheets, at long last. Good thing no one is getting up early tomorrow… oh, wait… we all are. ::face palm and goodnight!

Post-a-day 2020

He is back

Tonight, my cousin – who is back in town again at last – and I played a kind of duet. I played piano chords, and he played the fretless banjo that he made from cherry tree, a gourd, and a roadkill deer hide, and we both sang. It was “You’ll Be Back” by Lin-Manuel Miranda, from Hamilton. It was spectacular, and totally fun for the both of us.

And it was only one piece from a whole delightful chunk of music for the two of us tonight, all for which I am extremely grateful. 🙂

Happy eyes watched me bounce around with delight and freedom, as we listened to the track of “You’ll Be Back”, and warmed ears heard our self-produced music the whole rest of the time, feeling the passion and love through our notes and words. I even played one of my own songs for my cousin to hear for the first time, and it was basically no big deal to me, in terms of nerves – it was awesomely easy for me to do.

Man…

This late-night / early-morning hangout was a solid one, for sure. 🙂

Thank you… gratitude, dearest World… gratitude… 🙂

Post-a-day 2020

Power

BOOOOM!!!

And then all the lights go out.

And the air that had not yet been turned down from 80°F from during the day cuts off.

We had just arrived home, close to 2:30 in the morning, and I was in the middle of folding towels, so I could put the sheets on the bed, so we could go to bed. We hadn’t planned on being back until tomorrow afternoon (technically this afternoon, but whatever). But he wanted to go ahead and drive back tonight, after we finished around midnight. And so, we did. Now, it is growing harder to breathe by the minute, it is uncomfortably warm, and it is practically impossible to use the bathroom safely.

I managed to call out to Siri to give us light, and then turned on my phone flashlight to find some candles and matches in the living room (which are now dripping wax all over the cardboard we set under them on the floor – glad we did that! Whew!). I worked for a while in efforts to report the outage, but the system is idiotic. Fortunately, it was reported somehow anyway, despite its having been at 2:30 in the morning. Estimated recovery time is 5:00 in the morning, just another hour and a half from now.

One comment on the stupidity of the outage reporting: They all want you to do it online… when there is no internet, due to the power outage. Also – okay, a second comment – you cant report to outage unless you have the right company and the right user number or ID or whatever… I don’t live here, but am house sitting here. I have no idea what power company they use, nor what their user ID is. However, I know that just after 2:30am on this street, something exploded and then all the power went out, and it doesn’t look like anyone on the street has power right now. Geez… stupid systems suck big time.

Anyway, I’m off not to shower and not to have a normal night of rest, but o continue my bedtime routine stuff, and see if I can manage to sleep at all until we have air flow again.

I feel so spoiled with all of this talk. However, here’s the thing: We pay for a service that declares reliability. Therefore, we expect it to be reliable. And it hasn’t been reliable. And we’re exhausted, and I just wanted a shower and a bit of cool air, so I could pass the **** out until I had to get up to tutor in the morning.

Ugh…

Anyway… turns out that it is three and a half streets with no power right now.

Post-a-day 2020

Admit the problem

Well, it is semi-official: My arms are fat. Meaning a noticeable chunk of them is fat, not that they are entirely made of fat or anything.

I couldn’t quite figure it out at first, and I wondered if it was that I was getting bulky from the workouts lately, my arm muscles growing too large or disproportionately in some way (though I doubted that I was that strong, it seemed more likely than the alternative). But, after flexing everything I could in my arms, I have found that a whole layer up top will not flex but will wrinkle like cellulite when prompted (read “squeezed”).

I can’t tell if I’m utterly distraught or just disappointed or annoyed, or if I haven’t even begun to react to it yet, because it is so terrible to me.

I’m leaning towards the lattermost, actually.

It’s kind of funny to me how my arms would make me automatically happy, whenever I saw them or saw their reflection in a mirror or something… but now, one of my greatest tiny delights in my everyday has disappeared…

I suppose that the socially acceptable lesson here is to learn to love myself no matter what, to appreciate and love my body at any stage or state of life. And I value such a view. However, it is exactly the fact that I have not valued and loved my body lately that I am in this current situation. If I had respected my body for the beautiful thing that it is, I would not have been so terrible to it, filling it with minimally nutritious (if at all) foods, and hardly doing enough exercise as it deserves to be well kept. So, while I do love my body, I have zero intentions of keeping the arms as they currently are. The fat has got to go – it will be on the fast breath train out of here, beginning tonight, when I sleep. (In case you didn’t know, that’s technically how we release fat from our bodies, is through breathing, once all the breakdowns happen inside our cells.) Tomorrow begins my return to fully taking care of my body both in terms of food and in terms of physical activity.

I know myself. I have been doubting this whole food regime I first took on last summer for the past seven months. I wanted to get back on it, but I just couldn’t get myself to do so. I needed a solid reason, not just one in my head, one with no genuine foundation. Now I have a foundation: eat as I have been eating, and, despite the exercise, I will not have the body and arms I want to have. Theory tested and proven now. Goodbye, not super-healthy foods!

And phew! Thank goodness for that.

🙂

Post-a-day 2020

So much to say

I sometimes feel that I have so much to say that it would take more time and effort to share it than I am willing to put forth. Which then brings up the question of whether it is eve worth saying in the first place… at times, my answer is a yes, and, at others, a no. Even still, though, the yes content is a lot.

So, perhaps that is why I want to write books and books and books – it is the best way to share a lot.

Huh…

I’m going to think on all of that for a while now, and see what I can determine regarding my writing and sharing and what I feel I am here to do in this world…, I’m beginning to feel a stronger than ever connection between the three, and it somehow seems to be the answer to my everyday question of what to do with myself right now…

Post-a-day 2020

Gratitude

I shared the song specifically with a sixth person today. She is the one who helped me when I was ready to be helped out of the abuse situation, when my eyes finally could see just enough clear light to be able to take a much- and long-desired step forward, out of the gray cast of clouds that had taken over my space for so many months. And she loved me freely the whole way through the end, which made all the difference in the world. I still remember how, when I opened the front door to her, close to midnight that night, I had been terrified…, but, when I saw her face, that she was smiling with true love, I felt everything melt away – it was going to be okay. I was going to be okay.

And it all was. And I was and am.

She and I laughed so much that night. I also cried a whole bunch, both from sorrow and annoyance and from laughter. I remember how she took a photo of me at one point, my eyes swollen and red and puffy, yet so full of light, you could see how free and full of life I felt myself being again. I think she took the photo to document that light having returned to me. I suppose, in many ways, that is an extremely beautiful photo.

🙂

So, she helped me through such a hard time of moving away from, essentially, evil. And then, years down the road, we don’t even communicate with one another anymore. I guess her having gotten a boyfriend turned fiancé turned husband played a rather large role in that. I’ve been okay without her in my daily life these past several years. However, I have always valued her love and her role in my life during that time of true need – I think I always will be grateful to her for that.

And so, when I wrote this song yesterday, she was someone who didn’t even have to come to mind – she was already there. I contemplated whether I actually wanted to share the song with her or not, and, after sleeping on it, I knew it was okay to do. (I had sent her a message yesterday to see if I still had her correct number. When she replied today, I took it as a sign to send her the song.)

I thanked her for her love and help in my time of need, and said how it was invaluable to have someone care for me and be with me after my having been alone in abuse for so long. And I sent the song. I’m not even sure I said that I wrote it, actually… but she understood that I had written it, I think.

Okay, I just checked. I did tell her that I wrote it and that I wanted to share it with her.

Anyway, after I’d sent it all to her, it occurred to me how unreal such messages must be to the average person – I mean, who sends messages like that and so totally out of the blue and short and direct like I did? I don’t know many people who do anything of the sort. I know honest people, open people, but that directness and the unexpectedness of the message, with no real lead-in… no, I don’t know those people.

Haha

Just myself. 😀

Anyway, I’m glad I sent it to her and expressed gratitude to her. And I think she appreciated it, too. 🙂

Post-a-day 2020

Música

I started watching the recordings for another five-day songwriting workshop that a family friend is doing this week. I watched the first video at 11:00 this morning, and glanced st the homework front he next two days before joining the noon live video for today. I’ve done one of these workshops before – that’s what got me those first several songs earlier this summer – so I wasn’t too worried about participating today without having finished the other videos yet. I just followed the guidelines from Monday’s video, and from the snippets I’d watched of Tuesday and Wednesday for the homework for each, and I was ready for today.

While the basic process is rather the same, the approach and specifics were different this time around, so I embraced the opportunity for something new. We were told to find a specific song for inspiration, after doing some topic-finding and lyric-writing work; a song that held a comparable space to the one we wanted our own song to hold.

My song? “When There Was Me And You”, as sung by Vanessa Hudgens in High School Musical. And the topic I had chosen and the lyrics I was writing that had this song somehow be appropriate for portraying the write musical feeling? Overcoming emotional and sexual abuse. Kind of an odd combination, don’tchya say?

Nonetheless, it all turned out beautifully. Hours later, after many, many breaks to go do other things and to allow stuff to sit or to mull, I had a completed song, recorded and shared with the world of my social media friends. And, what’s more, I went back to the piano just about ten minutes ago, and I played through the song again – and I remembered how it all went, and I loved the sang (two very good and rather important signs of song completion).

I sent off the audio recording to my small list of private listeners – you could call them the in club of my music-writing – got a bit of feedback (positive – woohoo!), and then shared the video recording of my playing and singing online. We only were supposed to select five people to hear our songs so far as part of our homework tonight… I had forgotten about that until just now… guess I did much more than five… haha… that’s silly.

Anyway, I shared it with four people privately, and I am planning to play it live for a student of mine tomorrow morning, so I guess that handles the five intentional shares, as well as an open share with my somewhat large but private world on social media.

Well… this has felt really, really good today. I even screamed just before showering a bit ago, I was so filled with excitement and energy that I needed to release in order to begin to relax for the night. It was a very, very good and satisfying scream. Man… these songs just feel right. I’ve been wanting to write novels, yet, when I set myself to work for only a few hours on a song, one just kind of evolves like the chia seeds in the chia pet commercials (“Ch-ch-ch-chia!”). Perhaps today was an opportunity for me to see how ideas that get in the way of a different story I want to use for writing my novel, those ideas can go into a song – they can be heard that way. Then, I can go back to writing my novel’s story, no longer with the former distraction of a different story asking to be told. Today’s song topic was definitely one of those ideas…

Hmm… interesting.

Anyway, I’m off to read some young adult fun and then pass out hardcore (Please…).

P.S. My song doesn’t sound almost anything like Vanessa Hudgens’ song, by the way – it started with the same foundation of chords, but quickly developed into a very different song. If I hadn’t told you they were connected, you likely never would have noticed. 😉

Post-a-day 2020

The music in me

Na-nah-naah-na….

Na-nah-naah-na…. yeah…

Well, I have been watching the glorious High School Musical stuff over the past several days, and I am in love all over again. But it feels a bit different this time… this time, it keeps making me want to perform – to sing and dance, to play piano and share music with the world… and it has been making me want to write more songs again. I had a bout of that back in April and May, I believe it was, and then I stopped. I expressed everything that was needing to be expressed at the time through music. And it now feels like music wants to be expressed, instead of specific experiences and thoughts. Perhaps, I am filled with sentiments now that are ready to begin producing solid form through music… an artistic 3-D, let’s say.

And there just so happens to be another songwriting workshop happening this week…, so, I think I know what is on my schedule for the rest of this week, now. 🙂

Post-a-day 2020

ASK

Tonight, I came across the American Society of Karate on Facebook, the organization through which I used to take karate lessons and attend and participate in competitions. I found it through an awesome video from 1985, which was of a special bout between Bill “Superfoot” Wallace and Joe Corley. It was ten years after their original world title fight, which had been won by Bill (he was never defeated, apparently). Joe has to get himself back into better shape for the bout, but Bill was apparently a nonstop trainer, despite his competition retirement in 1980.

It was really almost magical to watch. The way Bill’s legs moved, it was almost a shadow – it’s like the brain has to do a mental pause-replay-slo-mo process in order to comprehend fully that Bill just threw a double roundhouse kick, because it happened so quickly, so flawlessly, and so nonchalantly, with no sign on the rest of his body that he had just kicked at all, let alone kicked as high as someone’s head.

And the best part, perhaps, is the fact that these guys were 38 (Joe) and 40 (Bill) years old, moving like super fit men half their ages. It was really cool. Super respect for the both of them, and absurd awe for Bill’s legs… I guess I can see the nickname still at work.

Hopefully, this link will work for accessing the video! 😀

Post-a-day 2020