Job #3

Tomorrow is a big day for me. I start my massage therapy practice. I haven’t worked for myself as a massage therapist in 7 years. With three clients booked, my hands are going to be sore tomorrow night. I am nervous with anticipation to see if I can sell my own skills as well as I sell for other people. Wish me luck..... please.

stop

I am up rather late tonight. It is 12:30. Normally that isn’t late, it is bed time. Tonight I went to bed at 7:30pm as I have had no more than 3 hours of sleep a night for a few nights in a row. Time to get caught up. So here I am, in that dreaded middle of the night space, where I am reading without my glasses and trying to make my eyes tiered enough to go back to my slumber which was so rudely disturbed with period cramps. This is two months in a row of killer vomit/ diarrhea inducing cramps. I can’t help but wonder if it is at all related to the NHS (National Health Service) letter I received in the mail saying my cervical screening results were “borderline” for the second time in a row. That is a half a year (and 2 tests) of irregular cell growth. My thoughts go back to Thailand. To the year of mysterious bleeding. It is a lot to think about at this time of the night. The time when your insides are doing their own thing and your head is screaming “GO BACK TO BED”.

The place for a personal rant is a blog... bitch

I have just started a writing course. It is a creative non-fiction course which basically means that it is personal essays with lessons/ morals and a story tellers embellishments woven delicately into each piece. It is like blogging but the pieces are longer. One of the members of my class went off on a personal rant for our first assignment. It was full of hate towards fat people and housewives. It wasn’t really an essay but rather a full on rant of everything this person hated. It was introduced by the most clichéd segway. The punctuation was off and the sentence structure was more like a diary entry that no one was supposed to read. Part of the class is to critique our peers. I read this piece a few times and finally said to D that I give up. I either have to say nothing or I have to be prepared to launch into someone for the fact that they were insulting huge groups of people and couldn’t even put a sentence together. I opted for saying nothing. Well, not really because I am saying it here instead. I opted out of the fight. My husband reminding me of my purpose. So I will enjoy the class and not make this person my mission. Then I will write on my blog about what a fucking cunt they are.

Flying on a misty morning

The mist is hanging in the air so thickly that clichéd words like “curtain” and “rolling” and “foreboding” come to mind. Meanwhile I bike up the hill to my osteopath appointment. My body is tiered. My mind more so. I am horizontal. A hand on my sacrum, a hand under my lower back. When my appointment is over, I sail down the hills without peddling. The wind blows my hair out of my face and I imagine it to be flowing behind my head like a cartoon… like water. Instead just the sides flow. My head stops the wind from actually doing anything to the rest of it but in my imagination I can fly. I enter my apartment. There is so much to do. Cleaning that needs to be done, business things that need doing. I see the regal burgundy sheets calling my name. Clothing hits the floor in piles as I walk towards their beckoning call. Just a few more hours.

Tell me about yourself

I just started a writing class. The first day was the same as first days everywhere. What is your name? Tell us a little bit about yourself. You hum and haw about how to sound cool without sounding pretentious. Some people don’t care and they go way over the edge with their qualifications and some say “housewife and mom” and leave it at that. Like being a housewife and mom isn’t the hardest job in the world. The second step: List 5 topics you have been gagging to write. So there they were, all posted like good students for each other to contemplate. I read through the list of what people were hoping to purge and there were a lot of parental losses, illness thoughts and relationships to the physical self. One of my classmates wants to write about “fat lazy couch potatoes”. On my list: “Being fat… unabashed”.

Alone

I have become somewhat of a hermit in the last few weeks. The thought of having to be anything for the outside world has been enough to keep me indoors in my spare time. I don’t drive so I have a hard time accessing a forest. That is where I long to be. It has been a month since I have been near trees. Today, however, on my blustery ride back from the market, I saw glimpses of yellow popping up from the square down the road from where I live. After dumping off the groceries I picked up my camera, walked back to the square and laid on the soaking wet ground. Freezing water penetrated my clothing. Sunlight poked through the clouds. Suddenly I was alone in the city.

the deocrated sisters

Most of the time you have a choice in your emotional response. When you wake up, if you think it is going to be a good day, you make it so. The opposite applies. Most of us, myself included, tend to wait and see what the day will bring. That is what determines our outlook for our day. It is something that is concluded instead of decided. Last year, when I took a hard look at my physical self, I decided to give myself the least amount of negative feedback as possible. When it would sneak in without warning, I would try to address it and let it go as soon as I could. This has been working rather well for me. I have had very little jibing from the stands as well. In the past few days I have been trying to rid myself of clothing that doesn’t fit. I have to do this at least once every few years. My sizes range from 20-30 in woman’s pant sizes. There comes a point when I am on the far reaches of the spectrum where I look at the smaller or larger sizes and decide it is okay to give them away because by the time I am that size again, the fashion will have changed many times over. This time, however, it was bras that needed going. I am never really sure what my true bra size is. I do all the chart measuring and apparently I am everything from a 46 FF to a 40 JJ. I wear a 40 G because they don’t have 38 Gs around these parts but the under band feels loose. I have promised myself to be properly measured in London sometime this year. The whole process is similar to getting a pap smear as far as vulnerability goes. Lots of naked poking and prodding with a hold-your-breath result.

Today, while going through my bras, I found a 36 DDD. I remember when my boobs were that small. I was called “Cleave” by a dear friend. I thought they were still big and now I see them as so small. When I look in the mirror, I feel very similar to how I did then. My cellulite is still there, my curves are still round, my ass is still big, and my boobs do me proud. I am so much larger than I was only a few years ago. It is fun to remember how my body felt then. It is even better than I don’t long for it. I look at my self differently now and choose not to struggle with the notions of beauty but instead I give away what I was and decorate what I am.

mess

The tulips are bowing towards to the table cloth and I can’t help but feel their wilted elegance is wasted in this mess we call home. I struggle with wanting the place to be clean and tidy as representation of my clean and tidy mind and find that neither is true. I fully admit to have a dirty mind, I just wish it wasn’t a mess as well. Instead of cleaning the room, I chose to sit here and look at the mess while drinking some Australian wine that goes down far to easily. I plan out my to-do list for tomorrow and on it reads such semantics as doing the dishes, cleaning the toilet, doing the measurements for my wedding dress and going for a swim. Tomorrow is my day off. I am alone for the day and have found myself spending copious amounts of this alone time tidying up and not getting outside, not taking photos, not using my body. I am jealous of people who have partners who advocate a tidy space. Neither my man or I can manage to keep our space that way for longer than a few days. He is worse than I… but I knew that going in.

To-Do lists and Love Notes

An old friend of mine and I have been reunited through Facebook, or Crackbook as my brother likes to call it. She writes a list of goals, dreams, aspirations that corresponds with how old she is. It just so happens that her birthday is right in line with New Years. I was inspired by this because I am a to-do list goddess. You will find lists all over my house of partially crossed off goals and sub lists. I rely on them to get me through my day. Without them I could very easily not get anything done besides watching make-out scenes from The L Word. I digress, as I love doing. So my list is making an appearance in the side bar. Hopefully I will be periodically crossing them off. Here are a couple of to-do lists that I found in my recent documentation scrounge for my immigration meeting last week. What I love about lists like this is that I remember making them. The one with “apply” on it was because I was trying to see if I was spelling it correctly. D managed to get in some feedback that I never saw until this week. Something I am enjoying is the way that romance plays out in my relationship. We don’t do long letters of adoration. We do little notes that may never be found.

Falling in love

I am not pregnant with a baby but I walked away from the most intense period pains I have had in years being pregnant with love. There are times when you look at your spouse and you realize your gift completely. Recently, after a hard fall and winter, the ice has broken around my heart and I have fallen hard for the man I have married. I have spent most of my life taking care of other people. What an incredible thing it is to have someone love you that way. I never realized the value in what I was giving. Through the last few months I have. I understand what I have given to other people because I have received it myself. Unconditional love in desperate times.

Home: Rainy Day

I try not to make resolutions for the New Year but a friend of mine inspired me with a goal list that is as long as you are in years. So, this is my 31st year and I had to write 31 goals. Not too easy after the first 10. Some of them are abstract. Some are duties I feel I should have done as part of every day life and some are health related. Then the thought occurred to me. If I am pregnant, which I considering I might be, the list will change dramatically.

wonked horizon

Happy New Year