Life after fairy tales

"I grew up out of that strange, dreamy childhood of mine and went into the world of reality. I met with experiences that bruised my spirit - but they never harmed my ideal world. That was always mine to retreat into at will. I learned that that world and the real world clashed hopelessly and irreconcilably; and I learned to keep them apart so that the former might remain for me unspoiled. I learned to meet other people on their own ground since there seemed to be no meeting place on mine. I learned to hide the thoughts and dreams and fancies that had no place in the strife and clash of the market place. I found that it was useless to look for kindred souls in the multitude; one might stumble on such here and there, but as a rule it seemed to me that the majority of people lived for the things of time and sense alone and could not understand my other life. So I piped and danced to other people's piping - and held fast to my own soul as best I could."
-L.M. Montgomery

"Once, when I was younger, I thought I could be someone else. I'd move to Casablanca, open a bar, and I'd meet Ingrid Bergman. Or more realistically - whether actually more realistic or not - I'd tune in on a better life, something more suited to my true self. Toward that end, I had to undergo training. I read The Greening of America, and I saw Easy Rider three times. But like a boat with a twisted rudder, I kept coming back to the same place. I wasn't anywhere. I was myself, waiting on the shore for me to return."
-Haruki Mirakami

I have the cutest nephews ever, not braggin, just sayin.

"I'm the girl who is lost in space, the girl who is disappearing always, forever fading away and receding farther and farther into the background. Just like the Cheshire cat, someday I will suddenly leave, but the artificial warmth of my smile, that phony, clownish curve, the kind you see on miserably sad people and villains in Disney movies, will remain behind as an ironic remnant. I am the girl you see in the photograph from some party someplace or some picnic in the park, the one who is in fact soon to be gone. When you look at the picture again, I want to assure you, I will no longer be there. I will be erased from history, like a traitor in the Soviet Union. Because with every day that goes by, I feel myself becoming more and more invisible..."

–Prozac Nation

"And then there are my friends, and they have their own lives. While they like to talk everything through, to analyze and hypothesize, what I really need, what I'm really looking for, is not something I can articulate. It's nonverbal: I need love. I need the thing that happens when your brain shuts off and your heart turns on.

And I know it's around me somewhere, but I just can't feel it." - Elizabeth Wurtzel

"Maybe that's what it all comes down to. Love, not as a surge of passion, but as a choice to commit to something, someone, no matter what obstacles or temptations stand in the way. And maybe making that choice, again and again, day in and day out, year after year, says more about love than never having a choice to make at all." –Emily Giffin

 

I found three of my old journals while I have been home, and I am looking forward to going through and reading them. Perhaps redicovering just how annoying I was as a tween-teen.

The Environmental Working Group wrote the Meat Eater's Guide to Climate Change and Health. It concluded that if every American avoided eating cheese and meat one day a week, emissions would be lowered as much as they would be by removing 7.6 million cars from the roads. This is the kind of incremental shift I urge you to specialize in during 2012, Sagittarius -- whether it's in your contribution to alleviating the environmental crisis or your approach to dealing with more personal problems. Commit yourself to making little changes that will add up to major improvements over the long haul.

This horoscope is most definetly referring to my unhealthy, unactive lifestyle. Which I plan on making major improvements upon in the coming year. I have always sworn that I would not become one of those women who let themselves go as they get older. Yet, that is what I have become. I am now the heaviest I have ever been (I don't care to disclose the actual numbers), I smoke, and I havent had a consistent workout routine since I moved to Arizona. This has got to stop. Seriously.

 Food makes me happy, but fitting into my jeans comfortably makes me more happy.

That's a pretty good depiction of me.

I am currently in love with the photos in this blog. They are from Dina Goldstein's "Fallen Princess" series.

 Since I love fairy tales, but beleive that they have such an impact on young girls who end up in believing in "happily ever after", I think these photos really capture a realistic interpretation of life after fairy tales.

 

"I can’t quite shake this feeling that we live in a world gone wrong, that there are all these feelings you’re not supposed to have because there’s no reason to anymore. But still they’re there, stuck somewhere, a flaw that evolution hasn’t managed to eliminate yet, like tonsils or an appendix. Deceit and treachery in both romantic and political relationships is nothing new, but at one time, it was bad, callous, and cold to hurt somebody. Now it’s just the way things go, part of the growth process. Really nothing is surprising. After a while, meaning and implication detach themselves from everything.  Pretty soon, it seems unreasonable to be bothered or outraged by much of anything because, well, what did you expect?"  -Prozac Nation

"That's the problem with reality, that's the fallacy of therapy: It assumes that you will have a series of revelations, or even just one little one, and that these various truths will come to you and will change your life completely. It assumes that insight alone is a transformative force. But the truth is, it doesn't work that way. In real life, every day you might come to some new conclusion about yourself and about the reasoning behind your behavior, and you can tell yourself that this knowledge will make all the difference. But in all likelihood, you're going to keep on doing the same old things. You'll still be the same person. You'll still cling to your destructive, debilitating habits because you emotional tie to them is so strong that the stupid things you are really the only things you've got that keep you centered and connected. They are the only things about you that make you you."
-Elizabeth Wurtzel (Prozac Nation)               

To see more of Dina Goldstein's work visit http://www.dinagoldstein.com/

Sing a mumble-gumble song

Harvey Ball was a commercial artist who dreamed up the iconic image of the smiley face. He whipped it out in ten minutes one day in 1963. Unfortunately for him, he didn't trademark or copyright his creation, and as a result made only $45 from it, even as it became an archetypal image used millions of times all over the world. Keep his story in the back of your mind during the coming weeks, Sagittarius. I have a feeling you will be coming up with some innovative moves or original stuff, and I would be sad if you didn't get proper credit and recognition for your work.

http://freewillastrology.com/horoscopes/

I need to make some Christmas cookies.

I'm tempted to abandon this blog right here and instead devote the next 2500 words or less to the pantyhose with the droopy crotch I wore today, but alas….I won’t.



 Each time, you come out of it a little stronger, and at some point you realize that there are more flavors of pain than coffee. There's the little empty pain of leaving something behind - gradutaing, taking the next step forward, walking out of something familiar and safe into the unknown. There's the big, whirling pain of life upending all of your plans and expecations. There's the sharp little pains of failure, and the more obscure aches of successes that didn't give you what you thought they would. There are the vicious, stabbing pains of hopes being torn up. The sweet little pains of finding others, giving them your love, and taking joy in their life they grow and learn. There's the steady pain of empathy that you shrug off so you can stand beside a wounded friend and help them bear their burdens.

In her book Women Who Run with the Wolves, Clarissa Pinkola Estes suggests that we all need to periodically go cheerfully and enthusiastically out of our minds. Make sure, she says, that at least one part of you always remains untamed, uncategorizable, and unsubjugated by routine. Be adamant in your determination to stay intimately connected to all that's inexplicable and mysterious about your life.

At the same time, though, Estes believes you need to keep your unusual urges clear and ordered. Discipline your wildness, in other words, and don't let it degenerate into careless disorder.

I figure if someday I can make a really slamming cake I would be able to open my hippy given gift giving. I mean...how many picture frames/cards/bottles can I get for one person before the charm wears off and I just look cheap?

 However, I have a fear that my cake making skills might fail. I might get to the ingredient buying, but my hobbies tend to be short lived. Not to mention the fact that I have been envious of all cakes I’ve ever encountered in a shop window, and resentful of every sheer coated cake I might see in a shop window. It is intimidating since I would most-likely dip my finger into the newly coated frosting, lick it, and dip it again.

Should a new hobby make you lose sleep? Give you the sweats? Cause you to curse (more than usual)?

And if you're very, very lucky, there are a very few blazing hot little pains you feel when you realized that you are standing in a moment of utter perfection, an instant of triumph, or happiness, or mirth which at the same time cannot possibly last - and yet will remain with you for life.

Everyone is down on pain, because they forget something important about it: Pain is for the living. Only the dead don't feel it.

"Draw a crazy picture,
Write a nutty poem,
Sing a mumble-gumble song,
Whistle through your comb.
Do a loony-goony dance
'Cross the kitchen floor,
Put something silly in the world
That ain't been there before."

  -Shel Silverstein

I'm loved. I'm secure. I'm productive. I get hugs from children. I walk barefooted on my cold cold floors.

Pain is a part of life. Sometimes it's a big part, and sometimes it isn't, but either way, it's a part of the big puzzle, the deep music, the great game. Pain does two things: It teaches you, tells you that you're alive. Then it passes away and leaves you changed. It leaves you wiser, sometimes. Sometimes it leaves you stronger. Either way, pain leaves its mark, and everything important that will ever happen to you in life is going to involve it in one degree or another." - Jim Butcher