Rock star

January 12, 2010 – 3:28 pm

You guys, you guys! I cleaned the kitchen, and I got a bunch of work done on NU! If I manage to run a load of laundry before bed, I will have accomplished my entire to-do list for today! And that doesn’t really ever happen. (In fact, I’m thinking maybe I should add a couple more items, just so I don’t jinx the laundry… I really need to do it, and I’m not sure I’m capable of actually accomplishing everything on my list.

The coffee-and-chocolate quantities that got me through the writing have left me a bit spazzy, and I think I’m just going to go with it. Spazzy post!

One of my pre-writing procrastination acts was to check The Fluent Self, which I’ve just started reading and kind of love. As a procrastination tool, though, it fails miserably, especially when this is the post you landed on. So instead of distracting me for half an hour or so, it helped me find my way through my resistance to working, and I wound up getting a bunch done. Oops.

And talking of Nona Umbra, my Big News is probably within a week or so of being ready to go public. Woo!

Um, the post title is “rock star” because at that moment, I felt like a rock star for getting all my crap done. Also possibly because I was dancing around the kitchen and singing while I cleaned. Dancing and singing in the kitchen is one of those things that make me feel super-hot and wish someone was around to see how adorable I am. Possibly the hotness is all in my head, though, so it might be a good thing no one ever is. (Kneading bread while Nina Simone sings the blues, though… that is plainly and undisputably hot. I should make bread soon.)

Talking of hotness, I made a decision last week to get rid of all my clothes that don’t make me feel pretty (sparing a couple comfy favorites, like my indispensable granny sweater.) I think this is an excellent idea and very good for my personal development. I also think it will leave me with maybe four or five outfits for every season. I’m just reminding myself that I’ll have money to buy clothes someday, and that if I have to wear the same four or five outfits for months at a time, at least I’ll feel pretty. Also, I have the wherewithal to make at least half a dozen awesome scarves, which should help with variety.

Okay, spazziness is being replaced by staring-into-space dimness. The fact that “Polly Come Home” just came up on my playlist isn’t helping. Love that song, love that album, but it’s not a track that fills one with get-up-and-go. Um. At all. Time to give my system something to feed off of besides pure nervous energy. Then: laundry? It just might happen…

By Virginia Ruth | Tagged | Comments (4)

Waiting in the void

January 8, 2010 – 3:00 pm

You remember, last post, how I said “I don’t like waiting in the void”? That was, um, an understatement. I really just don’t cope with it. If I can’t see some glimmer of a hint that what I’m waiting for is coming, I can’t believe that it ever will. I usually exercise my over-capable imagination to invent hints that it’s coming. If I can’t do that, I decide to stop wanting it altogether. If I can’t do that, I pretty much spaz out and act, think, and talk like a thirteen-year-old (specifically, like the thirteen-year-old that I was, a number of years ago. She was not a particularly graceful, centered, life-accepting person. Few thirteen-year-olds are.)

So this is something I need to work on. One thing I’ve learned in the last four months is that inevitably, in even the closest relationships, there will be times when you need to wait on the other person’s process. When they need to retreat into their own private space, and just work on stuff — think, grow, accept, learn, whatever. You can’t always be a part of that. Sometimes it’s because you’re involved in whatever they need to work on, sometimes just because it’s something they need to do alone. Loving them, in those times, means waiting… without necessarily knowing what’s going to show up when they finally emerge.

Can we guess how well I deal/have dealt/will likely deal with that kind of situation? Not flippin’ well, is the answer. It’s one of the hardest things I can imagine doing. I am depressingly likely to use every available hint to figure out what’s going on in their head (typical response 1), detach from the relationship (typical response 2), or start acting like a thirteen-year-old (typical response 3… and thirteen-year-old me is not the kind of person somebody else wants to deal with while processing whatever they’re processing.)

There are lots of other good reasons to improve my waiting-in-the-void skills, but that’s the one that’s been on my mind of late. So. What do I do?

No, really, I’m asking.

I don’t think it’s realistic to ask myself to overcome this weakness… certainly not in the short term. With these big, endemic problems, telling yourself you’re going to eliminate them entirely is a recipe for failure and guilt. Even if you’re able to conquer them for a while, they’re usually the first things to come back in times of extreme stress, and then you have the despair of feeling like you’ve lost all the progress you made.

No, what I need are strategies. Concrete, graspable strategies for when I feel that panic coming on and find myself slipping into typical responses 1, 2, or 3. I need a variety of them, because different things work at different times — sometimes you need something active, extraverted, or productive, sometimes passive, private, or self-indulgent.

I don’t know that I’m really asking for suggestions here — though if you have any, bring ‘em on! But I don’t expect that what works for you will necessarily work for me, and there’s also a lot of value in having strategies I’ve worked out for myself. Mostly I’m putting this here as an expression of intent: I will look for strategies, both by thinking through possibilities and by being alert to inspirations.

I mentioned in the last post that I have one already. And I’m going to tell you about it, even though I’m a little afraid it will make some people think I’m crazy. This is specifically for when I get into that “I will never find a partner” panic (one I’m particularly prone to.) It is this: I’m knitting my wedding veil.

I’m a little shy to admit this here. Planning for a wedding when there’s no actual partner in sight… there are a lot of girls who do that, and I’m not entirely comfortable being lumped with some of them. I’m fairly disgusted by the whole wedding industry, and by the state of legal marriage in this country. But I do think a committed, lifelong partnership is a powerful, beautiful, and life-giving thing when it works, and I very much hope to create one. And I think a community celebration and affirmation of that partnership is important and exciting and inspiring, especially when the details of the celebration accord with the partners’ values. All of which is to say that whether or not I decide to get legally married, and at whatever point in the relationship I decide to do this, I do hope to have some kind of wedding ceremony. And I think I can promise that it will be a little weird and awesome. And I am knitting a veil to wear for it. (If you think that a knitted wedding veil sounds ugly, you haven’t seen knitted lace.)

I decided to do this sometime over the summer, and I decided I wanted to start it while I was single. I found the right yarn over Christmas vacation and I started knitting it on New Year’s Day. I’m using the process as an affirmation: I do believe that I will find a partner, and I’m working on something concrete in expectation of it. I am not allowed to attach to the idea of any particular person while I’m working on it (a big part of the reason I wanted to start it while single)… it’s a focusing tool, to keep my eyes on the larger dream. It’s using the time of waiting, of hoping, of not-knowing, to create something beautiful. If the wedding thing never happens, I will still have something beautiful, and I will find some use for it that is special and full-of-meaning and will probably make me cry.

So that’s one strategy, for one specific waited-for object. I’ll let you know as I find more.

By Virginia Ruth | Tagged , | Comments (0)

birds and paper bags

January 5, 2010 – 8:17 pm

So there’s this Fiona Apple song — possibly my favorite of her songs, for how often it seems to accord with my own thoughts. It’s about craving and reaching and not getting and finding that you were reaching for the wrong thing anyway and what the hell? All of which happens to me a lot.

It’s this thing that happens, when you want, you feel like you need, and then you attach to the first thing that appears to have any resemblance to what you’re wanting. That specific object becomes the entire focus of your desire, and even if it’s getting closer and looking less and less like the thing you actually want, you hang on to it, you convince yourself that it is that thing, or that maybe it’s what you really wanted after all, even though it’s nothing like what you were originally looking for.

Of course there are times when you get something different than you asked for, and it is what you wanted and needed in ways you never would have guessed. I’m not talking about that. I’m talking about clinging to the substitute, the paper bag, ignoring your nagging doubts and reshaping your entire mental landscape if necessary, because you’re so afraid that what you really want will never actually come.

I’ve done it so many times. With regard to boys, certainly — almost chronically. Also with regard to jobs, and pretty much any other substantial life circumstance that involves depending on someone else for fulfillment of a need. I don’t like waiting in the void. For all my vivid imagination, I find it really hard to believe that something I can’t see right now might be coming my way.

I’m interviewing for a job this afternoon, which is why this is on my mind. My inclination is to think, “Must get this job at all costs,” and not devote a scrap of thought to whether it will actually be the kind of thing I need right now. I’m combating this by thinking carefully about what I actually do need right now, and coming up with a list of questions to ask that will help me ascertain whether this job is a good fit. I hear tell that some people do that kind of thing as a matter of course — curious, eh?

I have a whole other strategy for combating this tendency with regard to relationships. I’ve just started implementing it, and time will tell whether it’s effective. I haven’t decided yet whether to blog about it, though the fact that I’m mentioning it at all suggests that I’m leaning toward ‘yes.’ Don’t you love hearing about things I may or may not talk about in the future? I know I do. My hint-to-payoff rate is down around 5%, I think. Still, it’s a new year. I may reform.

By Virginia Ruth | Tagged | Comments (1)

I am trying to come up with a title that isn’t “planes, trains, and automobiles.” With only partial success.

January 4, 2010 – 12:36 pm

After a lively text-message conversation with a friend of mine who was stranded in New York last night, along with a bajillion other people, I’m thinking again about trains. Trains are such lovely things. My brother and I rode Amtrak home from DC last summer, and oh the space! The big windows! The fun of walking up and down the corridors when you got tired of sitting! The glamour of stopping in different cities all through the night!

Okay, you probably have to have a slightly romantic disposition to really enjoy that last one, and also have to be okay with sporadic, interrupted sleep. But seriously, trains rule. I was going to write several paragraphs about how good it would be for the economy, the environment, and the mental health of the citizens for a better rail infrastructure to be built. But actually, those are only guesses and assumptions on my part, so I’ll leave the policy blogging to people who care to do the research. Me, I have traveled between Atlanta and DC three different ways, and I like trains the best. Let’s compare, shall we?

Airplane: The whole experience is made up of lines and waits, divided into segments from 30 minutes to 2 hours. I don’t mind waiting, I’m a reader and a knitter, but having to move from place to place, wait a little while, move somewhere else, wait a little more, move somewhere else, wait in line… it’s not conducive to relaxing downtime activity. I actually enjoy the being-in-the-air part; I find takeoff pretty thrilling, and I love me some cloudscapes. But that’s such a short piece of the whole experience, and the rest of it is dreadful and nerve-jangling. And it still takes up at least half the day.

Car: There’s a lot I love about a solo road trip. Music. Mountains. Lots and lots of time to think. I usually solve two or three personal problems, do some crying, talk to God if I believe in God at that particular time, get captivated by a few moments of stunning beauty. If I’m not undergoing some kind of personal evolution (this seems rare), then I get some great work done on my stories. I like being encapsulated in my own little world, and I like the sense of total freedom and possibility: knowing I could change my mind at any second and drive somewhere I didn’t plan to be. It’s good stuff. On the other hand, eleven hours is too long. My favorite distance for a solo road trip is four or five hours. So the car is preferred if it’s a shorter trip, or if I have a companion (“companion” is here defined as “someone who likes singing along to the same music I do, or someone who I can have long long conversations with forever”… not just any warm body in the passenger seat will do), or about once a year, because there’s a discipline to the long solo trip that’s also valuable. Just not something I want to do every six months.

Train: A lot of the features of plane travel, but with such important differences! The whole getting on and off process is simpler and more humane. My seat is bigger, my compartment is bigger, and my whole sphere of existence during travel is many times bigger. I can get settled into my travel-space, and then I have hours stretching before me to dispose of as I like. (Assuming that what I like is a sedentary, self-contained activity, which it generally is.) When I get bored or my legs get restless, I can take a walk — all the way up and down the length of the train if I feel like it, passing between cars, practicing keeping my balance, looking at other passengers and imagining that someone is going to be found dead at the next stop and a little Belgian with a waxed moustache will appear to solve the murder. Both trains and planes, once in motion, are like small worlds to themselves, but train-world is charmingly and pleasantly small, whereas plane world is crampingly and claustrophobically small. And you have a lot more time to settle in and immerse yourself in train-world. It feels like actually being somewhere, instead of getting systematically jerked from wait to wait until you arrive somewhere.

Also, did I mention how fun it is to pass through different landscapes and cities? Seeing the ground from airplane-height is cool, but after a while it’s all basically the same. The earth is really a lot more interesting when you’re a little closer to it. Then you can see details, and so much of beauty is in details. (This comparative judgement only applies to flying on a clear day. If it’s cloudy, you get a close and detailed view of clouds from above, which is a sight of such perfect and unearthly beauty that I don’t understand why everybody on the plane doesn’t spend the flight with their face glued to the window like I do.)

Bottom line: trains rule, airplanes drool. Joy, can I get an amen?

By Virginia Ruth | Tagged | Comments (2)

How journalling saved my life: also, dropping the other shoe for once

January 3, 2010 – 11:22 pm

So I don’t think it came across too much, but I spent the first 33 hours of 2010 (as well as the last 3 of 2009) feeling pretty rotten. Anxious, moody, depressed, desperate. Blech. There are particular things in my life I was responding to that triggered those feelings, but we don’t need to talk about those. Absolutely nothing has changed about the circumstances, so clearly it was my relationship to them, rather than the circumstances, that was causing misery.

What happened to turn me around was the impulsive decision to read through my journal entries from the beginning of 2009 (that would be my private journal, not any posted blog… just in case you were hoping to scoot back and look to last year’s blogs for insight. They’re not that interesting.) I did it because I wanted to wallow for a little while before getting up to face the day. What I found was a jolt of insight and perspective that I hadn’t remotely expected.

If you’d asked me, before reading them, what I was thinking about and working on this time last year, I’d have thought I could tell you. And I’d have been right about the general themes (relationships, mindfulness, living with emotional intensity), but so many of the details had faded and blurred with the intervening months and all the changes they brought. I had that insight then? I was feeling this way about that person? I had completely forgotten. I’d forgotten that I was still up in the air about whether to move, and forgotten the potent reasons I decided I had to. (Good timing on that, since visiting my old house and roommates made me miss it all a lot.)

But here was the best part: in rereading, it became quite clear to me that my life right now, specifically the circumstances that have been causing me such distress, is nothing less than a dream come true. If you’d told Ginny of January 2009 about what Ginny of January 2010 is fretting about, and asked her if she still wanted to go through with it, she’d have signed up before you got through explaining the fine print. In her own blood, if necessary.

So… that kinda took the wind out of my self-pity. (There are sails in that metaphor somewhere, but they got lost. I think there’s a word for that figure of speech.) I do a lot of thinking about my life from the perspective of the past of future, and it’s fun: How will I look on this five years from now? What would I have thought of this two years ago? I just don’t usually get such a pointed and definite answer to those questions. Instantly motivated me to be a little more diligent about journalling, because seriously those old entries saved my sanity, and kept me from making one of my favorite mistakes.

Since reading those, yesterday morning, I’ve felt all kinds of bright-eyed and confident. Like I said, my circumstances are no different, but instead of being all, “oh woe, what shall I do, I cannot bear the uncertainty,” I am thinking, “this is a challenge that you were begging for– you must have thought you could handle it.” Which is nice. I’m not kidding myself that I’ll continue to feel awesome about it in perpetuity, and if I did, something wouldn’t be working (I did mention that living with emotional intensity is one of the issues at hand, yes?) But I hope I’ll be able to bear up during the low periods with a little more hope and trust than I was previously able to find.

I’ve been thinking about posting a “ten things I’m looking forward to in 2010″ list, as I mentioned before, but I just don’t know. The coming year is really, really foggy to me. I like fog, so that’s okay, but I’m not sure I can come up with ten nameable things. How about if I go with an indistinct mix of hopes, expectations, and trivial concrete plans? Okay, sounds good.

- Working as a doula. I’m officially on my group’s roster as a postpartum doula, but I haven’t gotten any clients. If all goes well, I should get some before long, but I was saying that two months ago. Anyway, that’s an exciting new professional challenge; I’m a little nervous about my ability to be The Doula for somebody (I’ve apprenticed with others in our group, but never been with anybody by myself), but I really do think I will love it and have a lot to offer. A bonus from this year would be getting to start working, or at least training, as a birth doula. Time will tell.

- Writing! There’s a new and exciting development on the horizon, which I haven’t mentioned here because I want to wait until it’s 100% final, but… I’m excited about it. By the end of the year I expect to have finished NU Book Two, as well as progress on a couple of side projects. More about that soon!

- Doctor Who. Hush you! We all have our unreasonable passions. I assume the final David Tennant episode has aired in Britain (I also assume it was the Christmas special?), and I’ll get to see it one of these days. Obviously that will be bittersweet. I don’t talk much about my crush on the Tenth Doctor, because everybody has one, but seriously? I thought David Tennant was a beautiful man BEFORE he signed on to play my favorite fictional character of all time anywhere, and he’s been nothing but marvellous, so yeah… my love runs deep, and I’ll probably cry when he goes. But I’m also very excited to see what the new Doctor is like, and even more excited to see what Steven Moffat does with the show.

- Dating somebody. This one swings way over into the “hope” end of the hope-expectation spectrum. It also seems kind of silly if you don’t know me, because really isn’t that on a lot of people’s “hope for the new year” list? But I date, on average, one person every three years (no, really, that’s what the numbers add up to) and I don’t have three-year relationships, so being in one is kind of a rare event in my life, and when you consider I just got out of one a couple of months ago, you might think (I might think!) the next one is a couple of years off. But I’d really like that pattern to alter, for all the obvious reasons as well as some more particular ones. I feel like the lessons I most need to learn these days have a lot more to do with being in a relationship than being single (I’m really, really good at that.) I could be wrong. Guess we’ll see.

- Seeing my brother onstage at the Shakespeare Tavern. Holla! I’ve loved that place since I was in college, and it is beyond cool to me that he’s there now. This one I’m pretty sure to have fulfilled… yay for that.

- Getting to know new people. Um, vague much? But I’m really, really slow to develop new relationships, and right now I feel like there are about half-a-dozen little seedling friendships in my life. I’m really looking forward to seeing how those grow, and also to any new ones that start to germinate.

- Seeing the baby mentioned in item 2 here. Still haven’t met her. Can’t wait! That one will happen just as soon as I can convince myself I have the gas money. Oh, speaking of which…

- Becoming solvent. Currently my expenditures exceed my income, chiefly because I only work 18 hours a week. For the fall, I was okay with that, considering this a sort of unofficial postgraduate education year, but now I’m hunting out more work, and boy will it be nice when my monthly balance sheet ends in a positive number.

- New books, new movies, new music. I’m going to try to increase my exposure to all of those. I gravitate much more toward old familiar stuff in all three media, and I’d like to branch out. I may have a separate post coming on that.

- Surprises! You can call this a cheat for my last item, but seriously, I love that I don’t know what the coming year will bring. Um, except when I think of some pretty awful surprises that have sprung in years past, or could strike at any time, but let’s not dwell on those. If they come, they come. Regardless, I think it’s cool that a goodly portion of the landmark events of 2010 in the Life of Ginny are things I would never predict from where I am.

Open you the east door and let the new year in.

By Virginia Ruth | Tagged , , | Comments (0)

Taking stock

January 1, 2010 – 3:28 pm

It’s been quite a year, kids. Do we say that every year? Maybe… it’s still true, though. This time last year, I lived in a different state, I had a different job, and I was just starting to post Nona Umbra.

I’ve accomplished some big goals– moving and finishing NU Book One being top of that list. I’ve learned how to spin yarn. I’ve succeeded in a job I struggled with intensely at the start. I’ve started on the path (looks like it will be a long, slow path) to becoming a doula. In terms of practical goals, I’ve done rather well this year.

In terms of metaphysical goals, I feel like I’m more or less where I started the year. I am, maybe, a little bolder. A little more ready to speak my mind. A little more attuned to, and accepting of, my emotional ups and downs. But only a little. I feel like I spent a good portion of the year in a false state– living as if I were somebody else. I’ve done that before, and it disturbs me that I was able to slip into it so easily. It disturbs me that I half-knew what was going on, but didn’t face up to it.

Well, I suppose that’s what the new year is for. I make my resolutions as they come up, so I don’t have a list to be trotted out today. KG mentioned, a few days ago, that she likes to make a list of ten favorite moments from the past year, and ten things she’s looking forward to in the coming one. That’s much more my style. So here it goes…

Ten moments from 2009:

- Snow and coffee with Joy. This was in January, my last visit to Pittsburgh before moving south. One afternoon we decided to go to a coffee shop. She always walks there, and I said I was game, so up we went. It was snowing, and I was carrying my bag complete with laptop, and I didn’t realize how far away it was. The walk felt like forever, and I was maybe just a bit annoyed that it was so much longer than I expected (especially as my bag bore down on first my left shoulder, then my right.) Sitting in the coffee shop was nice, though, and I charmed the barista (who’s apparently a grouchy fellow as a rule) by singing along to the oldies that were playing overhead, quite unconsciously. The walk home was longer and colder and getting dark, and we could only laugh while our feet went numb… but there was apple cider and bourbon once we got home, and there’s nothing quite so nice as thawing out after a long cold walk with a good friend.

- Snow canoeing with Gretchen, Marc, and Cole. I don’t remember when the snowfall was, but sometime in early 2009, right? Anyway, we had this half-canoe that Gretchen and Cole had dug out of the river. For most of the year it was the base for our living room table, but when it snowed we let it find its hidden potential as a bobsled. What can I say? Trudging it slowly up the hill, running alongside it and then leaping in, frantic careening and laughing as we tried to steer… all four of us are slightly insane in quite different ways, and we had some serious madcap fun. Snow canoeing pretty much sums it up.

- The boy on the hill. There was this tall rocky outcrop overlooking the river, and one day, early in the year, I went to sit on it and do some journalling. I’d been there for a little while when a boy came down the path by the river. He kept looking up to where I sat, as he came closer. When he had reached the base of the little cliff where I sat, he disappeared, and I heard crashing and scrambling as he clambered up to the top. There was lots of room, so he stood several feet off, looking out at the river. He was around thirteen, didn’t seem to want to talk or interact with me, just saw a rock formation and wanted to climb up it. Since I believe that all right-minded people feel the instinctive desire to climb on rocks, I liked him. He stood, I sat, in friendly silence for several minutes, then he clambered back down and went on his way. Just before the path turned, taking him out of sight, he turned around, caught my eye, and waved at me. It was one of those rare, sweet human encounters, feeling bonded but separate, that really only happen with perfect strangers.

- Driving to Atlanta with Dan for the first time. I’d gone to pick him up in Chicago, and the trip started with the miraculous feat of fitting all his possessions into the car. It was a great note of triumph to send ourselves off with. It was April, and the drive took us through gorgeous mountains with pale yellow-green on dark pine-green and splashes of purple and white… we put my entire collection of Barenaked Ladies songs on shuffle and sang along. (One fun thing about road-trip singalongs with Dan is that we’re both pretty flexible about which line of harmony we sing, but both feel that we should be singing different ones. Occasionally this gives rise to some confusion, as we keep swapping in and out of lines to accommodate each other.) It was a long but fun drive, and the perfect start to this whole moving-to-Atlanta venture.

- Wine on the porch with Aaron. We’ve fast-forwarded to August now. My then-boyfriend was out of town, and I felt like having a long conversation with somebody over a bottle of wine. I said so on my facebook status, and a few hours later Aaron volunteered. He brought the wine, we sat out on my postage-stamp-sized porch, and talked until the wee hours of the morning. We talked about religion and relationships, as well as many more trivial things. Neither of us knew, at that time, that each of our respective relationships was heading for disaster, but that talk set the groundwork for a comforting friendship during a painful month in both of our lives. It also reminded me how much I love that kind of conversation, the kind that rambles over territory old and new, deep and shallow, so easily and freely that you have no idea how much time is passing. It had been a long, long time since I’d had one of those, and I didn’t know until then how much I missed them.

- Seeing Nigredo for the first time. I’d known about Josh’s band for years, but never gotten to go see them, due to the inconvenient fact of living in another state. Then, when I moved back, my life quickly found its center of gravity elsewhere, and I didn’t do half the things I’d been planning to… including going to one of their shows. The timing on this one was perfect, though… it was in October, during one of the Top Five Shittiest Weeks of 2009. I went there with all my uncertainty and unhappiness and confusion, and I really didn’t know what to expect. But they started playing, and within moments I was taken completely out of my own thoughts and moved elsewhere. Somewhere good. It’s hard to say more about that without going into my odd and evolving relationship with music, which would take a while and be pretty incoherent right now, but suffice it to say that it was exactly what I needed. And I’ve pretty much been following them around town ever since.

- Returning to dancing. This one takes place over a series of evenings, and is more a movement than a moment, but one of the many things I did after the breakup, which I’d meant to do before, was take up contra dancing again. I’ve already written about that a little here, but let me just add: contra dancing is joyful, it’s communal, it’s troublesome, it’s uplifting. Spinning so fast my glasses flew off… laughing with my partner as we persistently failed to distinguish right from left… feeling my heart beat faster and my feet lift higher as the band kicked it up halfway through the song… it’s good, good fun.

- Returning to the river. When I went home for Christmas, there was a very short list of people I had to see, and one of them was the river. Rivers and oceans fill my soul in a way that nothing else does. After a lovely breakfast visit with Marc and Cole, I went down to spend some time with the river in the backyard, and while it wasn’t particularly different from any of my other river-moments, it was much more precious now that I’m not living there any more. The water was high and brown and surging, after all the snow. I climbed out on a log and watched its shapes, crests and hollows, streams and eddies. I watched flotsam and jetsam falling over the dam. I stared at the sparkles of sun on froth until they got blindingly bright. I felt whole in the way that I only really feel whole when I am alone with a body of water. And it was good.

That’s the list. You didn’t count wrong– the other two go in my private journal. I might post my “ten things I’m looking forward to in 2010 ” later… or, knowing me, I might not. Looking over all this, I guess 2009 wasn’t so bad. Doesn’t mean I’m sorry to see it go, though. Open you the west door and turn the old year go…

By Virginia Ruth | Tagged | Comments (1)

in which my heart bleeds for an imaginary T-Rex

December 21, 2009 – 8:01 pm

One of my favorite internet time-killers is reading Dinosaur Comics, hitting the “random” button for a new strip until my internal monologue starts to sound like T-Rex (at which point it is time to STOP). I say this, only so you’ll know that Dinosaur Comics ordinarily makes me very happy and I love it and the problem I’ve just had is entirely about me and not at all about the comic.

So. I was browsing the comic, as I do, and I came across this strip for the first time. And here’s the important part: it made me feel a little sad.

Go read the strip, or the rest of this won’t make any sense to you. I can almost promise that it won’t make you sad, because, and this is the main point of this whole post: Seriously there must be something wrong with me. Let’s review. This is a comic about talking dinosaurs. A silly comic about talking dinosaurs. And in this silly comic, the silliest of the talking dinosaurs tells a story about something that would have been a little sad if it had actually happened to him, but he was only pretending that it had happened. He wasn’t sad about it. Even if he had been, he’s a cartoon dinosaur, so what do I care? But no… it was the thought of the person that a freakin’ cartoon dinosaur was pretending to be that made me sad. Something a little wrong with me? Maybe?

I’m pretty sure I was born with my empathy dial turned up to eleven. My upbringing certainly bears some responsibility as well — my parents made it safe for me to be tenderhearted — but I know lots of people who grew up in warm, loving, gentle homes who would not feel little pangs of sorrow at the thought of this meta-fictional dinosaur who got stood up by his friends on his birthday. There are worse qualities to have in excess, but it’s still a little ridiculous.

By Virginia Ruth | Tagged | Comments (3)

In unrelated news, I was late for a babysitting job yesterday.

December 8, 2009 – 11:31 am

I don’t want to make any promises, because I seem to be even worse at following through on promises than I am at following through on unspoken intentions… but I’ve been reading through Nona Umbra again, which is undeniably the first step toward starting to write it again. So… that’s good, right?

You know what I think would be great? A plug-in for Google Maps that would make it add five or ten minutes to the estimated travel time it gives me. Automatically, every time, just tack on a little extra. Because seriously, I think I have a mental illness. I see “travel time 20 minutes” and I think, “Great! I can stop doing whatever I’m doing 20 minutes before I need to be wherever I need to be!” I have been alive for over a quarter of a century, and still my brain has not grasped the idea that things like putting on shoes, gathering my accessories, and walking to the car take discrete, non-zero amounts of time. So if someone at Google would help me compensate for this handicap, my life would run a bit more smoothly.

By Virginia Ruth | Tagged , | Comments (2)

site-y technical-y stuff

December 3, 2009 – 7:24 pm

Notice anything different?

Ya, so I spent most of my afternoon on various site-updating stuff, particularly the new banner. Like it? I also updated the text on the “About” and “Nona Umbra” pages, to reflect my current disgraceful on-hiatus status. I may yet do some work on the color scheme of the site in general, since it was made to match the Nona Umbra banner and doesn’t look so nice on some of the other pages… but I’ve done all the color-tweaking I care to do in one day, so it’ll have to wait.

I do have a question for y’all, though: would you like to be able to comment on individual pages? I’m thinking mostly of the chapter pages. Then comments would be associated directly with the chapter, and people who come along afterward wouldn’t have to find the blog post that links to it in order to comment.

I say this as if people actually comment more than once in a blue moon. You know what they say… act successful, and success will come to you. (Do they say that? Surely that’s a saying some business guru chump has come up with. Anyway.) Seriously, seeing that people are reading and care about my story is a great motivation for me to write more. Just sayin…

By Virginia Ruth | Tagged | Comments (1)

Domestic bliss

December 2, 2009 – 8:33 pm

Often, when I tell people I’ve moved in with my brother, they get this kinda skeptical look and say, “How’s that going?” It was especially pronounced at my cousin’s wedding this fall, when all the extended family asked, at one time or another, how we were doing, with a tone that implied, “Are you ready to kill each other yet?”

Whatever, dudes. My brother is one of the funnest and easiest roommates I’ve ever had, and I knew he would be. Just to show how swimmingly things usually go around here, this has been our evening so far:

- Dan gets up and starts putzing around the kitchen.

- I get up to fetch chips and dip, and ask what he’s making. Answer: Swedish meatballs. Score!

- The music he’s playing changes gear abruptly. I ponder for a minute, then deduce that he’s letting it play through his iTunes library, and we’ve just moved from Gorillaz to the Grassroots.

- We talk about how awesome it is that Creed Bratton is on The Office.

- I’m reading Dinosaur Comics, and Batman is mentioned, and I think fleetingly, “I haven’t seen Batman Begins in a while, I should do that soon.”

- Dan asks if I want to watch something while we eat. I say, “Yeah, what.” He goes over to the DVD case, ponders, and says, “I’ve been wanting to watch Batman Begins again…”

- He brings me in a plate of Swedish meatballs and a glass of water, and he knows to give me a small serving and no ice in my water.

I dunno. It’s just nice.

By Virginia Ruth | Tagged | Comments (0)