Tag: friends

And again…

I have written a third song, now!

What is this life I’m living (right now, anyway)???

The world is going crazy having to stay home, and I am here being extremely productive, and somehow still napping as needed, or just lying on the floor for a bit, multiple times throughout the day…, and eating a lot and often… and still getting my job done…

This has been rather good for me, I think, having to stay home and all.

It was rough at first, especially since I really want to get to know this guy I kind of just met, but I think I approached the whole ‘stay-at-home’ situation with a genuine and thorough consideration for my health and well-being, and I have acted accordingly with my self-given guidelines and encouragements, thereby helping me to be extremely sane and comfortable and confident, and also, somewhat surprisingly, very productive (more so than usual, even).

And it was really good for me to have to sit with so much discomfort around that guy for the first while – I needed to be able to get through any panic and just chill out, approach the situation as myself, and not as the crazy person that sometimes won’t shut up in my head… she’s funny, but can get way out of hand, if I indulge her.

So, yeah…, this has been very good for me.

And, as mentioned, I have written now a third song… that’s three songs in a week’s time… crazy… and in a good way… a very good way.

🙂

Post-a-day 2020

And another…

Well, another song has come into being by my hands.

And I like this one, too.

No, it is not so love-overflowing and happy and hopeful as the first, but it is still honest, and, while it hurts some, it is releasing…, cathartic, in a way…, and it offers hope.

Tomorrow morning, I will do my first of two workouts for the day, then I will start work on yet another song as part of my homework (due at 4:30pm tomorrow), then do another workout for lunch, and be delighted in the accomplishment of my one-year relationship – the only anniversary I’ve ever had – with the gym.

I am excited for tomorrow, and I am grateful for today.

God, help me to be true to myself and thereby share and create true love in the World.

Amen

Post-a-day 2020

Grazie, Prego

I have a language exchange partner.

He’s Italian.

He’s asked me to marry him.

Neither of us is looking to date (or anything of the sort with) the other – we genuinely just want friendship through language sharing, as we each improve our own abilities in the other’s native tongue.

In a way, we hardly know one another.

Yet, we chat (via messages that are mostly text and sometimes voice) and send one another photos and videos and updates basically every day… yeah, every day, I think…, so it feels like we are closer than we are.

We are honest and open with one another… in a way, it is an extremely low-risk situation for us both, you could say… I wouldn’t say yet that we are friends, but I no longer describe him as ‘my conversation exchange partner’, but as ‘my buddy’…, because he really is a buddy to me, and I hope I am to him.

We know about highs and lows in love and heartbreak for one another; we talk about finances and healthcare systems and death – so much death right now in his part of the world, but we never seem to dwell longer than is respectful; we get nerdy about grammar and explanations of turns of phrase; we share about work (we have very different jobs yet similar setups); I sent him my song before I shared it with almost anyone else (Since he isn’t great with English, he said, he could be a good testing ground for sharing it…, which he said after encouraging me through my nerves of wanting to make the instrument side of things go well, but being worried at my skill level…)…, and he knew what and whom it was about, without a doubt (It was not about him, of course, but someone in my life here.).

(“Comunque si. Sei cotta!😂,” he said after reading the lyrics. Anyway, yes. You are cooked. (A phrase which here means, “Out of your wits in a crush on this guy”) 😛

And, what’s extra fun is that our time difference and lifestyles actually line up perfectly that when I’m getting up and going to bed happen to be perfect times for him to be messing around, messaging me… so we have two good chunks of time every day to be in communication with one another.

And it really is fun… honest and fun.

I think meeting this buddy of mine has been one of the most valuable parts of this year so far.

And I am extremely grateful.

Post-a-day 2020

Singing Sunday

Well, I accomplished a lot today, I believe.

I lay in bed, exhausted, for an extra hour and a half, after already having woken up almost two hours later than usual (!) (and I went to bed earlier than most nights); danced around my living room to the test recording of my song, to grow accustomed to it before recording it properly; stood in my open doorway, enjoying the weather, and watching people pass without even noticing me; I walked in the sun and shade on my own; I heard French(!) from some neighbors; I practiced, finalized, and recorded my song (only a video and simple audio version [versus with a good microphone, as for a CD or something], but still a finalized one!); played it for my mom (she almost teared up a bit, and really complimented it with her words along the way and afterward); painted a whole painting (from a fun and loosely-guided tutorial) on the porch, with my mom painting alongside me for a good while; I made another mala; I ate a lot of home-cooked food; I shared my song online (eek!), carefully excluding certain relevant individuals from seeing the post (okay, well, it was really just one person, but that’s beside the point); I listened to a lot of music from musicals that I hadn’t known until this weekend (Hadestown [stellar music!], 36 Questions, Heathers, Co-Op, and one whose name I am not currently recalling [only got one song so far from it and Co-Op and Heathers, but I’m liking them all so far!]); and I started to figure out the chords to a set of songs I want to learn to play on guitar.

Suffice it to say, today was a good day… emotions are very real and honest, yet very light… it is a beautiful feeling.

So, yeah… this was one of the best standard Sundays of my life… and I also stuck to my regular goal of having Sundays include painting, without even originally realizing that I was planning this particular paining event for Sunday.

With that, I go to sleep, exhausted on the other end of the day, and deeply satiated… for now. 😛

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Woohoo!!

I just ran-slash-pranced around my house, laughing and yelling cheerfully, “I wrote a song! I wrote a song! I wrote a song!… and it’s good.”

It has been a good night, I say… 😀

Song is officially recorded (though not a version to release yet), I have listened to it, and I loved listening – it’s actually good!

First time after years of preparation and training’s a charm, right?? 😛

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Who’d ‘a thunk?

It appears by, well, all accounts, that I have just written a song.

I started at about 7 PM, and finished the initial complete draft around 8:30 PM tonight.

I then cleaned up all of my materials from my task of the day, brought them upstairs where they belong, showered and started preparing myself for bed, and then pulled out my notebook and laptop so that I could type up the lyrics and put them together, organized and in an easily rearranged format.

I then did some slight rearranging, and phrase editing, and am now ready to go to sleep with a deep sense of satisfaction both in my accomplishment and in the awesomeness of the song itself.

I can hardly wait to record it and get some instrumentation figured out for it(!).

(I’m a dork, I know – always have been and always will be, and gladly so!)

I want to get to sleep as fast as possible now, so that I can wake up sooner to work on it in the morning.

Woohoo. Haha

This has really been a fun miniature adventure today and tonight… I kept wanting to write a song this week or next, and I couldn’t seem to get the right style or topic – I kept straying from the focus every time I started to write, and then didn’t like it… until a friend (? We’ll call him that, anyway.) shared a song that he had written…

When I heard the first line, I felt struggle and pain being released… by the second line, I was almost certain I knew the origins of the song, the cause for the emotions expressed within it through its music and words… and it was, somehow, so relatable, although I had never been in the same situation… it was also so vulnerable…, which made it all the more powerful.

Thinking about the song today, I thought, Man, those are Real, meaning the emotions in there…

And it struck me: What would happen if I did that, went ahead and wrote about the heavy, loud emotions going on inside of me right now?

It might be embarrassing…, but it would be honest and to the heart…, which, I think, is a huge part of what makes my friend’s song so amazing – you can feel it, deep inside.

So, let’s get deep and put it onto paper, I guess…

I pondered on it as I walked for a while, listening to musical songs, and then, upon returning home and preparing to start work on a new mala (meditation and prayer beads), I was suddenly feeling a need to write down this idea calling out to me from inside my head – I am real emotions, hear me roar and write me down poetry style(!), it was saying to me.

And so, I did.

And now I have a song. 🙂

Post-a-day 2020

Stand up, and lose the pants

Yesterday, I was oxen the glorious opportunity of seeing a friend of mine complete an online challenge…

***Small tangent: You see, everyone has been – and by everyone, I mean a lot of people, not actually everyone – doing various challenges in their homes, and, upon completion, challenging someone else (often multiple someone elses) to complete the same challenge.

The ones I have seen have ranged all over the pace, including but not limited to juggling a toilet paper roll like a soccer ball, doing ten push-ups and nominating ten people to do them, doing 25 push-ups, singing a praise and worship song, chugging a beer, and doing specific hand motions to a fast song without being allowed to practice… to name one more than a few. ***End of small tangent

Today, I woke up focused and ready to complete my task, to complete this challenge with which my friend had presented me yesterday… hoping, at the very least, that I could complete it, for it was not an easy one…

Now, what was this challenge, you may wonder… I divulge:

The pants-less challenge: Either take off or put on a pair of pants, without using your hands, while holding a handstand.

Wow, right?

Of course, that’s the kind of challenge you get when you have acrobatic friends who find it funny that everyone is working from home in pajamas most days right now, and who imagine that a good chunk of everyone is at home with no pants on, since there is no one to see…

So, anyway, my friend did it with her onesie, which I found somehow hilarious, and so I elected to do the same with a onesie of my own.

Hers was a panda, and the one I selected for the task was a rainbow unicorn… equally suiting to our personalities, in a way…

It took many efforts – perhaps close to ten – for me to figure out how truly to make everything work and then actually to do what I had worked out to do… I can’t hold a handstand, – just pop up onto one and then come almost immediately back down – so I knew I would have to use a wall… behind that, though, all the rest of the strategy had to come from giving it a try and seeing what happened, finding out from trial and error a bit as to what works and what doesn’t.

Eventually, after lots of practice and a short break, I went all-out and got it(!!).

Woohoo.

Super silly, and I could hardly stop laughing, this challenge was so much fun.

I had been thinking at every challenge how unchallenging it really seemed to me to be, and how not-very-entertaining each one was…, ‘These are lame challenges,’ was a common thought from me… but not on this challenge – it was not only interesting, but kind of crazy, a tad scandalous, challenging, it made me think, and it was totally fun.

I loved it.

Feel free to give it a try in your own home – though no video is required, you might enjoy reminiscing immediately with what is likely to be some comical footage… and you might want to share it, anyway, even if you utterly fail… 😛

Wishing you loads of fun and silliness right now – laughter is, indeed, an amazing medicine. 😉

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Lazy days of love

Today, I hopped out of bed only six hours after I gotten into it, and headed to my friend’s apartment (where I’m taking care of the cat and watching over the place) to meet a technician.

The technician, named Roland, was incredibly sweet, and even a bit fun for that brief half hour of having him in my life – I hope I was able to bring light to his day as he did to mine.

After that, well, I was already at my friend’s place, and the internet now worked, so I finished watching the currently available online one-hour Cirque du Soleil special, while snuggling with the cat.

I then made a brief trip to the grocer for eggs, and then returned to more time sitting on the sofa, cat pointedly on top of me, legs intertwined with my arms and hands…

I watched the film “Moonstruck” at last – she was 40 and he was 22! – and enjoyed the artistry of it, as well as the comedy and the use of Italian.

Otherwise, I spent the majority of the day and evening just sitting there with the cat, napping off and on together – I guess we were cat napping [Can you cat nap with a cat, can you do it in a hat?]… every hour or so, I’d take a bathroom break from our lazy times on the sofa, and I would stop on the way back to see if I could do a pull-up – I had done my first ever strict pull-up this morning, dead hang, arms locked out, feet off ground, no swinging, strict, chin over bar (without lifting my chin either)… a real pull-up(!!!), and the first in my life…

So, I guess I spent today either lounging and cat napping with a cat on top of me, or in practicing pull-ups…

And, somehow, I am going to bed extremely satisfied… the cat was just as bad as I am in terms of needing that physical touch love today, and it was wonderful and wonderfully fulfilling for my soul… and the pull-up was kind of amazing, too, and also very satisfying. 🙂

A good day… a very good day.

And it is truly a blessing after my struggles last night…, I am extremely grateful for the experiences I had today… I knew I would be okay, and I was today. 🙂

Post-a-day 2020

Stop, in the name of love

When I was around eight years old, a group of neighborhood kids and I were wandering around the streets – because that was the norm back then – and we came across a garage sale at a house across the creek.

It was not often that I was allowed to venture across the creek, so this was already an especially exciting day for me.

But then, this garage sale made it even more exciting… and something in the garage sale just set me on fire(!)…

It was… a gigantic stop sign…

A true and genuine, very large stop sign…

And I wanted it so badly..

We all looked around a bit, one person, I believe, buying something on the spot, due to his or her having a dollar in her pocket, but the rest of us had no money on us – that just wasn’t the thing to carry around then…

And so, we all calculated the amount of money we would need to gather from our respective moneys, and headed back across the creek together, dispersing to the various houses.

Now, I didn’t actually live on this street, due to a somewhat complicated scenario, so I didn’t have any money waiting in a house for me per se…, but my brothers and their dad lived there, and I was spending time at their house, as was usual for me, and they had money at home.

I raced to the house, and I went to my oldest brother as fast as I could… I asked him if I could have some money… I think it was ten or fifteen dollars (not a lot, but not nothing either for the time)… he asked me why, and I quickly explained everything to him, practically begging for the money at this point…

He said we would have to go check it out, and so grabbed about twenty dollars, and we were about to head out, when it was suddenly time for me to leave – my mother was there to pick me up.

My brother said he might still go check it out, but my mom said she and I could drive over to see it, because she likes things like garage sales, anyway, just to look at things.

When she and I arrived, everyone was already back, my brother among them this time, and some of the kids were already heading back home, new treasures in hand.

I showed my mom the other small something I had wanted, as well as the stop sign… she was not convinced on the stop sign…

I was sad, but not surprised – I had known my true chance of getting it lay in my brother’s letting me get it… kind of the whole, ‘Better to beg forgiveness than to ask permission,’ idea, where my mom would have accepted a done deal, but wouldn’t make the deal herself.

And so, I believe we went home, my having a small treasure in hand, and grateful for it, but sad the opportunity that likely was never to present itself again had passed, un-seized…

Sigh……

The next time I was at my brothers’ dad’s house, upon entering my oldest brother’s room, I was struck: there against the wall, behind his speaker system, was a huge and red stop sign… very much like the one I had recently told him about…

Seriously?! I wondered and asked… he openly admitted that he knew I had wanted it, but that that was because it was cool…, and so he got it for himself…, because it really was cool.

….

So unfair, brother… so unfair.

😛

It was actually rather comical for me, as opposed to heartbreaking…, and my brother, I think, knew it would be.

For me, it was just something really cool that suddenly was available to me – it was not something that I had always wanted…, so I would be okay not having it… and I was.

Plus, as he mentioned, I still got to see it all the time, but I didn’t have to figure out how to rearrange my room to put it on the wall somewhere that looked right – for his rather bare walls, it was an easy task.

So, it was totally a cheater move…, but we both were very okay with it and found it quite funny in its irony.

I still do, decades+ later..

Haha

Ridiculous, right?

Ridiculous.

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Dreams are my reality*

These dreams feel so real, so vivid… I can almost smell in them… and yet, they are so good, I wake up from them with a seeping feeling of sadness at the loss of them – when I awaken, they end, and I return to a lesser world than the loveliness that was my world five minutes ago.

The tips of my fingers still tingle, and the sides of my arms, too, from the touch of hands and arms in loving embraces.. I can feel the residual pressure on my chest, and the hands in my back… such embraces are filled through and through with satisfying, tactile love…

And, though they are not real in terms of taking place physically, they are exactly what I most need and want, and my mind allows them to be real, so far as my brain is concerned… we already know that watching something being done activated the same parts of the brain as actually doing that something… my mind knows I want this physical expression of love in my life right now, especially considering my current experience of physical isolation, and so it helps to take care of me, to give me what I most want and need… to love me…

And so, tonight again, I suspect, I shall have some more such dreams, and I will encourage myself to be glad of it – it is a beautiful blessing for my mind and brain to take care of me, and I want to respect their efforts with appreciation and gratitude, and to let go easily of my letdown upon waking and discovering that my world has suddenly transformed from exactly what I wanted…

But then…, what I want truly is possible…, so perhaps, one day, it will be my physical reality, and not just in my head anymore.

Now… that would be amazing…

Fingers crossed(!!!).

*Bonus points for knowing the song and singing along!!

Post-a-day 2020