1. Play with Alexei
2. Bake that peach pie
3. Practice my Spanish
4. Take photographs
5. Go for a hike
6. See a movie on ‘Bargain Tuesday’ at the theater (Hmm, Kismat Konnection, a musical. Honestly I’d much rather see Mamma Mia!)
7. Clean my room (again)
8. Do the laundry
9. Wash my hair
10. Hang out with my old friend Jenn
11. Sort through my closet and throw out the never-wears
12. Play the guitar
13. Play the piano
14. Go to Apple Store and get a new battery for my laptop. And then, window shop to distract myself from the hole in my wallet.
15. Cook dinner for my parents
16. Write a poem
17. Write another chapter or two in my novel
18. Go swimming
19. Take a bath instead of a shower
20. Write a new song
21. Go to an open mike with Tien
22. Plan a day trip
23. Update my clips portfolio
24. Build a new website – with a health focus?
25. Make a new friend
26. Meditate
27. Finally start learning how to knit
28. Work out on the treadmill and exercise bike
29. Apply to at least three jobs
30. Find out where I can sign up for another community chorus
31. Record a song
32. Get through a good part of my Netflix list
33. Take a Pilates class at my old classmate Cate’s studio
34. Clip Alexei’s claws
35. Update and organize trip photos on iPhoto and Flickr
36. Give Alexei a bath
37. Catch up on my bills
38. Make new lj userpics

BTW, I just got through an entire hour of sitting under the hair dryer without reading a book, magazine, or website, woohoo|

portions cross-posted in zie_artists_way

As part of an exercise to jump-start me into heightened creativity, I am not supposed to read for an entire week. To some of you this may not seem like such a big deal, but to me, a voracious reader, who has had a long and passionate love affair with the written word, this feels like torture.

I learned how to read at a very early age, and I have comforted myself to sleep at night for most of my life with a book. Many a night in my childhood, my mother would knock on the door, long after I should've been asleep on a school night and find me in the pale light from the lamp on my nightstand sprinting through a novel. "Are you up?" she'd ask. "No," I'd lie, rushing to shut the lamp off and slip my book under my pillow.

Not reading feels like punishment to me. As a writer, not reading feels like it's stunting my growth. I read for ideas--an interesting article sometimes works its way into an editorial or short story I've written. I read for inspiration--falling in love again with the beauty of a perfectly crafted stream of words in a master storyteller's novel is the fastest way to get me jumping back into the latest story I'm writing.

I read to learn where a story's strengths and weaknesses are, and in turn, discover strengths and weaknesses in my own writing. Oh no, what dreck--I can surely do better!

At the same time, I recognize that reading is often a crutch for me. At times, I swallow myself in an amazing story instead of challenging myself to attempt to work on my own amazing world of characters and plot.

I read to ignore the loneliness I feel finding myself alone on yet another long night--instead of reaching out to my old friends or stepping out of my comfort zone to go out and make new ones.

I read to drown out the steady beat in my brain that tells me to create, to fight the limits of my music ability and just tease the keys of the piano or noodle around on the guitar.

I read to fight the voices that tell me to get out of my routine, to buck up against the inertia that keeps me in a bad relationship or repair the good ones gone sour or hold myself accountable when the going gets tough.

Yes, reading is my drug of choice. And the thought of going through the withdrawal for an entire week makes me want to pull out my hair. Anyone have ideas for fun and stimulating things to do when I don't have my head stuck in a book?

IMG_3783.JPG,
originally uploaded by laverick.

I'm not sure how but somehow I managed to write four articles in the last 48 hours. Now why would i do something insane like that, I ask myself? Maybe because I feel like I have something to prove. Mainly that I have to learn to get "I can't" out of my mental vocabulary.

Or maybe I was trying to teach myself how to pace things so I wasn't rushing to do everything at the last minute as usual.

Still, I wasn't intending to push my body like this.

When I suggested four article ideas to my editor, I was thinking she'd say she wanted two of them for last week and two for this week. Or maybe she would toss out one or two of the ideas for not being particularly pertinent to my beat. Instead she said she liked all of the ideas, but because of the early holiday deadline, she was pushing all four until this week.

Okay, i thought, I have a little over a week to do this, I can start making my calls now. But...it was the week of the 4th of July. Everyone took as much of the week off as possible. My own dentist office closed early Wednesday afternoon and wouldn't be open again until Monday. My dentist, also a town official who I was hoping to interview for one of the stories, didn't bother to show up for my Wednesday cleaning.

So, in the end, I wasn't able to reach most of my sources until either yesterday or today. I had planned to write one of the articles Sunday (of the woman I was able to interview last week) but I was too fatigued and in pain from a weekend of yard work to do it. In between phone call interviews for the other stories and interruptions from my sweet and needy cat, I wrote article #1 Monday.

Monday night, I was feeling disappointed with myself for wasting a couple hours not working nor resting up from a day scrunched at the computer. So when I should have been relaxing for bed, i wrote up most of article #2.

It went pretty fast, and reading it this morning, I was pleasantly surprised by how well it came out. Of course, I had to tinker and fine tune it for a while. After more interviews, I started with the intention of writing article #3, but found myself writing all of article #4. And once that was done, I already knew I was ready to complete #3, so here we are.

My back and forearms are aching something fierce. My neck is pinched and burning. My head is dizzy and I haven't eaten anything in almost 5 hours, which makes me shaky and cross-eyed.

Yet, I feel really proud of myself that I accomplished this mean (for me) feat. And with room to spare (and time to tinker some more). Now, I have to kick my butt off this computer and go get the rest and relaxation my body and mind so desperately need right now. And so, I leave you with the above--a photo of the potter, Susan Gerr, I did one of my articles on.

I have been a business columnist for a small weekly paper. I have been an assistant editor of an on-line technical magazine. As a workforce analyst, I co-wrote a book-length industry trade report. I have been a freelance writer for years, writing editorials, human interest articles, entertainment reviews, and other nonfiction (and unpublished fiction as well). But today, I looked in the paper and saw one of the articles I wrote last week, and I feel like I can finally say I am a reporter at last.

It's a pretty cool feeling.

This week has been quite a bit busier than usual. I started my first week reporting for the local weekly for my hometown. It was a little strange showing up for story number one, the launch of an expansion of a nursing home, to find so many familiar faces of people I saw on a regular basis when I was growing up.

Behind me sat my former minister. Of course everyone had to come up and say hi to him, including the parents of an old friend of mine and the teammate of my brothers, other familiar faces from church and current town council members, and even the Comptroller of the state. I'm glad I didn't turn my head and say hello to good ol' Rev. Miller because I heard far more interesting news and gossip being the fly on the wall than if he knew I was there and why I was there.

After the ceremony, I was looking around and trying to decide whether to leave or try to get another interview when someone yelled my name and asked, "What are you doing here??" I looked up and saw a very familiar face who came toward me with a warm hug. I am embarrassed to admit I mistook her for another old family friend with the same first name at first because her hair was cut the same way now. But after she told me how each of her five kids was doing, I realized there was only one person she could be: the mother of one of the best friends of my oldest brother growing up. The last time I had seen her was several years earlier when I was mostly home-bound but she gave me a volunteering opportunity an hour or so a week with this playgroup she headed.

We caught up and headed to our cars. When I got home, I realized that I should have asked her husband more about the experience of his mother who lived at the nursing home, so I called them up and spoke to him a few minutes. I'm glad I took that time because a few hours later when I was writing up the article and going through the list of names of people who spoke at the event, I realized my good ol' family friend is also on the Board of Trustees that oversees the nursing home. And my former minister? A "Corporator" for the health network that runs the nursing home. What a small world. Well, a small town anyway, but we already knew that.

My second story took me to the home of a man who served during World War II and was honored by a trip for selected veterans to see the WWII Memorial in D.C. He was very nice, though he didn't have too much to share about his brief time in the Navy. He had an interesting life story, however, and he was quite the handsome lad in his youth!

So besides writing those stories up, I also had to wake up really early one morning to get my thyroid all checked out by the endocrinologist. I had several nights of terrible sleep and nightmares, and remain clueless about the source of my relatively recent (over the last few months) development of skin "rashes". I'm tired and sorely in need of...doing absolutely nothing at all for a while...

Yet, I am feeling pretty up about life these days. It's nice to feel productive and appreciated again.

After spending the previous day helping the V-Man lay the rest of the brick walkway in front of his house, I was very sore whenever I moved and I walked in the fog of the heavily fatigued. All I wanted to do was lay down and rest but of course rest is not in the V-Man’s vocabulary. We had a comparably light day, however, and I was looking forward to a day of not having to leave the house, until he said, “Do you think we can find time to make it to the Apple store today?”

Internally, I rolled my eyes. What on earth could he possibly want to look at now? We’d looked at the iPhone countless times and knew, as cool as we thought it was, neither of us were ever going to get one, especially while it was still tied to one particular phone carrier. We’d marveled over the iPod Touch, but he was waiting for the price to drop. He’d spent hours studying monitors, frequently dragging me along with him, but he couldn’t make up his mind about which make and model he was going to get. And he’d been debating whether to get himself a Shuffle. But he talked about it so off-hand that I figured it was just another thing he’d put on the back-burner.

When we walked in the Apple store, we looked around at a couple things and then walked up to the Shuffles. We had considered the colors before and narrowed it down to either silver or red. “It looks a little more cranberry in person,” I said, observing the latter.

“But you still like it, right?” he asked.

“Sure,” I agreed.

“I think I need a Shuffle, what do you think?” he asked. I nodded.

“I think I need one, and I think the Sexy Sweets needs one too,” he said. I laughed and rolled my eyes. My teaching job had ended for the summer, I’d just got a few summer clothes a couple days earlier, and I wasn’t about to spend any money on something I hadn’t even thought of getting for myself.

The V-Man got in line to get his Shuffle, which surprised me a bit. Usually he has to deliberate for quite some time before making a purchase, even when he knew he was going to get it. But there he was at the register. “I’d like two shuffles. One silver one and one red one.”

I stared at him in amazement. “What did you just do??”

“Well I need one for working on the yard,” he said, playing it cool. “And the Sexy Sweets needs one too if she’s going to be working in the yard beside me. Or when she’s riding the bike.”

“Baby!” I said. I couldn't stop grinning in astonishment. “Wow, thank you. You are so sweet.”

He just smiled.

Still not quite believing what happened, I watched as he handed over his debit card. “I can’t believe you’re so sneaky,” I whispered. A man not known for romantic gestures had suddenly thrown me completely for a loop.

I glanced over at him shyly, feeling as if maybe I didn’t really know him as well as I thought I did. As if maybe, just maybe, the man I started to fall in love with a year and a half ago was really somewhere underneath there after all.

New Hair,
originally uploaded by laverick.

Saturday, I stood in the mist in between bouts of rain, working up a sweat in the dense, humid air, and for the first time in 30 years of my life walked back inside with my hair absolutely frizz free. To those naturally blessed with smooth, straight hair always, you might be saying, so what? But I, who have spent my life fighting frizz and curls, ran my fingers through my tangle-free hair this morning and wondered, is this some sort of magic spell I have woken up to? ( Well, it sure feels like it. )

Well, I didn't end up going to Cape Cod this past weekend after all. While I am disappointed that I will still have to say that I have never been to the Cape, it just wasn't meant to be quite yet. I felt like I was needed here this weekend, and so I stayed. The good news though is that in 11 days I will be in Orlando, Florida for a week, and then I will get to spend time with a really good friend at the end of that week in Tampa.

The other great news is that I wrote a complete song over the weekend--music and lyrics. It's a quirky composition, and the lyrics hit home, so it was fun to write. And I'm really pleased that I can finally feel like I am making new music again, not just playing around with old stuff. I'd written partial lyrics and bits and pieces of music, but I really hadn't written a complete song in over a year and a half. Not since I've been with the V-Man.

I hate to be cliche, but I have found that most often my music pours out of me the most when I am feeling tortured emotionally. I have written some happy love songs, and optimism pervades most of my music. And there are usually multiple layers to my lyrics, so that a love song usually isn't simply just a love song; it might be about finding yourself, about learning to stand up and be heard, or whatever. But I tend to be most prolific when I am heartbroken or angry or terribly confused about something or someone. I guess I am most introspective when I am feeling these kind of emotions; when I'm happy or at peace, I'm not usually trying to analyze or dissect myself.

But fortunately there have been exceptions, when I just can't ignore that catchy tune being born inside my head. Most often, this comes at night when I am trying to go to sleep, and I'm forced to repeat the tune over and over so I don't forget it before morning when I can play it and write it down. Because of this, I decided I needed a digital voice recorder, which I got finally for Christmas. It hooks right onto my iPod, and I can just hum or sing quietly into it, and it picks my voice up clear as day. It was amazing for helping me to keep the unique rhythms of this particular tune fresh in my head.

Since I wasn't home this weekend, and didn't have my guitar with me, I kept practicing the tune and revising it with the recorder. Then while outside watering the flowers, before I knew it, another completely different idea for a song popped into my head, and I rushed inside to record it real quick. I haven't given myself time to play around with that yet, but it's not lost to me this time, so I can go back to it whenever I choose.

Summer vacation has officially begun for me--my job as a reading instructor for an after-school program ended for the year yesterday. We had a party for the kids, which they thoroughly enjoyed. The program head brought them cupcakes and their latest prizes which they'd earned over the last couple months. I also found a cute, reading-level-appropriate book for them at the store the other day, so I gave that to them as a parting gift, along with some sour bears candy long ago promised for the last day of class.

It was a good year. I had a small class, four students who were quite bright, relatively well-behaved and sincerely interested in doing their best. I was beaming after they took their post-test last week, and I saw how amazingly well they did. I hope that is at least in some part a testament to my improvement as a teacher this year.

Now that the summer is here, I have many goals for myself. One is to finish my novel. Another is just to promise myself to write something, anything, every day. I'm allowing myself to count writing here in lj as part of that goal. So you will probably be seeing more of me here again...I'll try to be an entertaining read at least occasionally. ;)

I recently was hired to start being a regular freelance writer for our small, regional weekly paper. My beat is my hometown, which is kind of cool, and I'll write a minimum of 1 article a week. I also hope to continue writing for the monthly magazine I've been freelancing for in the next state over; I'm not sure if this is all too ambitious for my health, but I'll start slow and see how it goes.

This weekend I am supposed to go to Cape Cod. For the first time ever that I can recall, and yes, I have lived in New England almost all of my life. I swear there are a couple more of us out there, but it is extremely odd, I think, for a New England-er to never have been to the Cape. It's not that I never wanted to go. The ocean, the lighthouses, P-town--it all sounded so beautiful and fun. I just never have had the opportunity, my family never took trips there, my friends never all decided to go for a weekend. I'm looking forward to it, and I promise to take plenty of photos.

me&Alexei.jpg,
originally uploaded by laverick.

When it is time to rest my weary head at the end of the day, I lie on my side and gently curl myself into the fetal position. This is my one time of the day where my body feels some relief from itself. From the burning numbness down my arm into the tips of my fingers. From the jabbing pain around my shoulder blades and at my tailbone. From the ceaseless tension and tightness from the top of my head to the tops of my shoulders.

Before I discovered the careful blend of medication that now gets me to sleep at night, bedtime was sheer torture. Endless hours would be spent tossing and turning never finding a position where I could escape the pain. I’d try to focus on a healing thought, repeat the prayer “Please” but all I could focus on was the buzzing and twitching in my legs. Now, thank God, most nights I can fall asleep within a couple of hours, after some reading immersed in my heating pad.

The best nights are when I fall asleep with the furry little body of my cat Alexei nestled in the curve of my legs helping to keep me warm. And the best mornings begin like this morning did, with a long, luxurious cuddle with Alexei. Nothing gets me in a better mood to start the day than a snuggle with the cat. How can I be cranky after an hour of a purring love-fest?

I open my eyes and find him curled up behind my legs, or tucked in the curve of my stomach. I reach down and rub behind his ears or under his chin, and he rolls into my hand with a content sigh. He changes position and falls back to sleep as I watch in amusement. As I stroke his fur, slowly, he begins to awaken.

First, Alexei’s purring engine revs up. His eyes open a slit, and he affectionately licks my fingers. Then, he commences with a full bath. He stretches. I follow suit. At last, he stands and begins pawing the blanket, kneading bread, rumbling with purrs under my hand. Occasionally, like a Pointer dog, he lifts a sole bended paw. Finally, the ritual complete, he leaps from the bed with a meow, ready for me to follow. It’s time to start the day!