Caught in Contemplation

I haven't written much, lately. This was pointed out to me recently and because I am as I am, left me thinking "Hm. That's true. I wonder why..."

A lot of this is because the state of my brain lately can best be described as weddingweddingweddingOH.THERE IS SOMEONE ELSE IN THIS CONVERSATION.I SHOULD PAY ATTENTION TO THEMweddingweddingweddingwedding...

I'm not convinced that anyone really wants to read about that.

(Having said that, it's equally possible that people aren't interested in my ramblings of self-reflection

I'm very very grateful to the people who nod graciously and listen to me rant about such things as the cost of catering, how excited I am that I managed to find a site to order paper for my invitations for a moderately extortionary price instead of a price that says "well, gee, if I want to actually, you know, invite people to this thing, I'll have to live on ramen for the next six months," how much work it all is and how I keep telling myself it will get better but in reality it probably won't... The people I asked to keep me (relatively) sane during this process... you're doing a really good job and thank you so much for being patient with me. If I start to veer too much toward Bridezilla land, feel free to slap me.

I have a feeling my general state will be "trying to do too much" from now until October. Granted, that's a pretty general state for me, but it is now more true than ever. I have begun answering questions lately with "oh, I'm not thinking about that yet. That's on July's to-do list. I am not allowed to think about July's to-do list until I have accomplished everything on June's to-do list."

(No, I don't tend toward a Type A personality, why do you ask?)

All rants and temporary cases of sticker-shock and wedding-induced anxiety aside, I am enjoying the process. I feel good about every decision we've made and I'm beginning to have faith that one way or another, things will come together into a lovely event.

There's nothing like a wedding to make one think about all of the lives I've been a part of, and all of the people who have been a part of mine. It's pretty amazing, really, though it makes narrowing the guest list really a challenge. I'm not in the habit of ranking people in terms of their roles in my life -- my views on such things are more big-picture oriented than that -- and yet, planning a wedding and creating a guestlist tends to encourage that sort of thought. It's surprising me, at the end of the day, how much of the decision process isn't rational. It's almost entirely driven on emotions and instincts and... some days it makes my logic-driven brain very worried.

I'll spare you a full description of the neurotic cycle.

I'm pretty sure I'll get to the end of 2009 and wonder where the year went. It's flying by so far and only seems to be passing faster and faster each day.

I do not have either the time or the mental presence, tonight, to write down all that I want to say about London and Wales and Brussels.

My trip was, on paper, incredible and full and exciting and delightful. I saw shows in the West End (after dreaming of it for ten years or maybe more). I had delightful French wines and Belgian chocolates and wandered down ancient streets taking pictures of grand old architecture. I visited a very old department store in London that is famous for its printed fabrics. I had proper afternoon tea. I ate the best pub food I've ever had with a creamy dark ale in a rugby pub in Cardiff.

I took a train through the Heart of Wales which I'd chosen for the beauty of the line and found myself in a single, tightly packed carriage, squashed between a window and a charming, chatty Welsh foursome on holiday who were tremendously kind and warm and genuine and had cut fat slices of homemade corned beef pie and poured cups of wine (and later vodka) for Sam and me before we had any chance of playing at the social nicety of polite refusal.

I rode a steam powered train through a vibrant green valley on a perfect summer day and took a beautiful hike to the bottom of a waterfall (and back to the top, of course)... and another along the coastal cliffs of the Cardigan Bay.

I visited Brussels and took time to enjoy the atmosphere and a slightly less frenetic pace of life than the one I generally tend to follow as I ate chocolates and sipped cappucinos. Sam and I visited a men's clothing shop and found that, at least in Belgium, the formal vest or waistcoat is not just something one finds in the window of formalwear shops one vists to rent tuxedos. The store had many, in a delightful range of colors and patterns... Sam found The One, in fancy dress terms, that he will wear for our wedding.

( And then there was the part where Europe was complicated )

ETA: Comments now and in the future shall be screened on public entries to protect the privacy of those wishing to write.

Nationals was the weekend before last. Steve and I danced well, I think... overall the dancing is getting better -- ours and, sadly, everyone else's.

We got cut at the quarterfinal in prechamp, frustrating after placing seventh last year. We could have danced better, I think, but we also had the misfortune of having our heat stacked against us. The first group to dance the quarterfinal (ours) was much, much stronger than the second group. And as professional as judges can be, ballroom dancing is always an exercise in subjective comparison judging. So, amidst a week heat, we look pretty good. Amidst a strong heat, we look much weaker than we actually are.

Pity, that.

At least we left with dancing that we felt good about, with moments we really really loved, and with a clear sense of our goals (even if they mean we have a lot to work on).

I'm also proud of us for making the time to practice amid very busy lives and complicated schedules. We don't practice as much as I'd like, in a perfect world, and we certainly don't practice rounds as much as I'd like, but it's always good to have something to shoot for. Hopefully we'll be able to start Thursday rounds again once or twice a month now that tax season is coming to a close.

In other news, I put down a deposit for a wedding gown, and I'm thinking about invitations and finalizing a guest list and starting to gear up for full force wedding planning. (Things are happening in fits and starts, but I'm easily distracted by more pressing deadlines). Though that really should wait for another month or so until the present insanity has passed.

To Do lists are becoming very good friends.

A year ago, when I had to be up early for work every morning, Sam got into the habit of making me tea to help me wake up. This is awesome on many levels, starting with it helps me get up at a reasonable hour (especially important when the demands of work were dragging me out of bed on little sleep and under lots of stress that only made my body want to sleep more). That and I thought then (and still think now) that it's a nice way of making me feel taken care of.

Then we moved in together and he has to get up for work somewhere on the order of hours earlier than I do and while I would still appreciate the thought of a steaming mug of tea, I think I'd prefer sleeping to actually getting up on his schedule just to drink some tea.

So, we have a new way of making this work for us. It took a while to get there, but the rhythm seems to have settled on his leaving my thermos (which, I might add is adorably decorated to look like a penguin who we have proceeded to name Chester) filled with warm tea on my desk... or in my backpack on days like today with a little sticky note attached about what sort of tea he happens to be carrying. The notes make me smile every time I read them. As does the personality Chester seems to be developing day by day.

I am glad for the playfulness that seems to have reinserted itself into our relationship recently. (For other things too, of course, but play is not always so easy to find and very very important to me).

A friend of mine wrote to me once about the value of girlfriends -- that in some ways, the deepest friendships among women need to be with other women.

I think it's taken me five years to recognize the truth in that. Not in an absolute sense as I took it (and perhaps as it was intended) at the time, but in a broader sense, a sense that understands that there is a kind of friendship among women that I have never had with men but that I am finding is actually necessary for my mental health.

I had some of my girlfriends over for a girls night on Wednesday. The invitation had been for tea and movies and crafting... and at some point, we did all have tea and chocolate and some crafting got done, I think, for everyone who turned up except me, but mostly we chattered about nothing and everything, about communication, men, love, romance, geeks... what we love about our lives, where our lives are difficult, the advantages and disadvantages of the Little White Lie...

We looked at pictures and we ate warm sweet potato pie with whipped cream that we spiked with ginger liqueur.

It was one of the most fulfilling evenings I've had in a while. As people left, I felt warm and glowy and loved and supported and understood. I felt lucky to have people I could gripe and vent to who wouldn't judge me or try to solve the problem, but would commiserate and offer advice. Somehow, offering advice has a way of being a lot different than solving a problem. It might result in a solved problem, if applied, but the implicit "take-it-or-leave-it" offered with advice is rather liberating.

I spent the next afternoon discussing the politics and wild world of yarn stalking (interesting because yarn businesses are so very dominantly run by and for women) and male and female jealousy with another friend. It was a wonderful discussion... I left because the time grew late enough that work called for both my friend and myself.

I am rediscovering the importance of both time for myself and time for my friends. This goes along with a realization that alone time and down time is a need and that one can actually accumulate a "me time" debt much in the way one accumulates a sleep debt. It is possible to continue functioning for quite a while without getting enough alone time, but the result is similar to long periods of being underslept. I have felt moodier, more anxious, more emotional, more reactive and generally prickly and cranky. I'm feeling a great deal better after having spent hours organizing my yarn stash and having visits with emotionally present and supportive friends and being holed up in my office (which is much tidier than it was!).

It's been nice to spend some time as a "being" and not a "doing." I need to remember to do that more often.

I crashed last week.

So I took a few days off from life in general. Not completely... I still managed a dance lesson on Sunday and something that vaguely resembled a practice (or at the least, a coordination session for a performance to take place on Friday) tonight... and mostly a lot of watching Upstairs Downstairs and drinking Mochas and having a fabulous Valentine's dinner with etler on Saturday (among other things. etler and I went to the SF Symphony on Friday for a performance of Scherezade. It was one of the most incredible symphonic performances I've been to... something about those Russian composers. They might be a bit emo, but when they're good, they're INCREDIBLE).

Okay, even when taking "down time," I stay busy. It's my way.

But other than that, I've been sleeping a lot and knitting a lot (I finished a pair of socks and proceeded to promptly start on another. I am a sock knitting fiend!) and trying to connect a bit with friends and trying to remind myself to take life one thing at a time because trying to take on six or seven or twenty things all at once leads to a me that collapses in exhaustion.

I feel a lot better, now, and have felt very glad to have friends listen to me rant about how frustrated I was and how I really just needed some reassurance and validation because although I would like to be able to give and give and love and nurture all the time, I do have limits.

I'm also glad that etler and I finally got around to planning a short vacation just for us. I've been buried for the last three months months, and will soon be buried again and I forget, sometimes, how important it is to still make time to be really present with my partner (especially, but also friends and acquaintances). And apparently, I'm not terribly good at it when I'm at home (only in the evenings, and often late), surrounded by projects and invitations and opportunities. I suppose it's why my mother used to need time at the lake (and why I did, too). I think it's become habit that the only way I can let go of the to do lists is to physically remove myself from them.

A break will be good. Soon, soon. And work and dance and life to keep me busy in between.

I should be in bed right now, but I'm not.

The last few weeks have been hard because I'm beginning to discover that I'd gotten sort of used to being able to bring about the reality that I wanted and saw for myself by dreaming hard and working harder. I'm coming to discover that sometimes, when that reality involves other people, no amount of dreaming or hard work will make them come along with me (at least not at the pace I'd like) and so the best I can do is work hard at being patient and encouraging. I'm not very good at being patient. I wish, sometimes, that they made patience pills. I could certainly use a few.

I believe, despite my total lack of patience and strong desire to control my own destiny, that things unfold as they are meant to. Which means that most of the twists in life lead to unexpected doorways and new paths ... and that there are many, many ways to create the change one hopes to see in the world, therefore it is better to marry oneself to the change and to the goals than to the precise roadmap for getting there.

(For instance, my overarching life goal has been to help LD kids, especially ones with dyslexia, because that was the particular learning disability that I grew up observing and knowing and seeing how hard it made life... and how hard it made life in ways that it really didn't have to).

I've thought a lot of ways were the "right" ways to go about making the kind of change that I wanted to see or at least help start, and rejected them one by one. It starts to wear, after a while, to keep rejecting pathways because they wander into dead ends... even though the journey was probably useful. Those are the times that I need to remember the dream... and maybe give myself permission to flounder or drift, a little, and do something else and let the ideas and opportunities come together in such a way that a clear path emerges.

I know, intellectually, that everyone (or most people, anyway) needs to feel validated -- like who they are or what they do or which lives they touch and how they touch them is in some way important. I imagine we all want our choices to feel like good ones, which is why we argue so passionately about things like religion and politics. I wish people in general were better at validating their own existences and choices without having to invalidate those of others. Even when that kind of invalidation isn't intentional.

I wish I could make it not hurt when I see those kinds of invalidation happening to me and I know it isn't intentional from the people responsible. I think, sometimes, that if I were a better person, I could rise above it, that I could really, wholly accept the good intentions and ignore the sting. But maybe "better person" isn't a productive way of looking at it. Perhaps feeling the sting means I'm human; perhaps it means I have some growing to do. I hope it means I still have some growing to do, in a way... as much as I sometimes wish I had things "all figured out," I think I'd be very bored if I actually did.

This is a distillation of a number of very intense and difficult feelings. But, there is little perspective when there is little distance and so I am separating my thoughts and my emotions, briefly, in the hopes that adding a bit of distance between the two will give me some useful perspective.

I am, at the end of the day, very, very lucky. I have a beautiful life full of amazing people and I think I would do well to remember that more often.

Goodnight.

I performed with Can Can at the SF Edwardian (Gorey) Ball on Friday and Sunday. Saw many a beautiful costume, lots of wonderful creations and performances from many many artists. My first attendance at the event, and really cool to be there as a performer, especially in a community where everyone has their own unique set of skills. Much mutual admiration society backstage and appreciation for fabulous costumes and talent and individuality.

The on stage acts were amazing, too. The Vau de Vire Society VooDoo Dolls were one of the most creative and interesting contortion acts I've seen -- central "witch" with two voodoo dolls, who bent and twisted the dolls to cause the two contortionists to contort. The aerialists were beautiful and made me want to go to circus school... I'm sure it would involve a lot of bruising and sore upper body muscles, but oh, to fly... how wonderful that would be! (Reminds me of the time I wanted to learn theatre arts -- ballroom with all sorts of neat lifts and things. Someday, someday).

Unrelatedly, next year, I'm going all-out, costume-wise. And hopefully going in full costume on a night when I'm not performing. Because that would be awesome.

Also, discussions with threadwalker at an impromptu lunch/erranding (which was super handy as I manage to actually accomplish a couple of things that I'd been meaning to do for a while and just sort of neglected)/wanderings yesterday made me realize that I really, really miss teaching. Must remember to start looking for summer teaching jobs at community and state colleges. After all, I spent a good deal of energy earning my Master's. Time to start putting it to good use, I think.

Rethinking life dreams some as I'm becoming a bit disenchanted with the reality of being a research scientist and beginning to feel that research science isn't necessarily the way to make the difference to the world that I really hope to make. Some of it is "grass is greener," but other is realizing that while I love science and all that is to be learned and understood about us and the world, I'm not sure I can really live doing only that (plus hobbies) for the rest of my adult life. I have too many interests, too many loves and too many things I want to pursue and enjoy and share.

The older I get, the more like my mother I realize I am. Which, given that my mother was awesome and a master of many trades, is not such a bad thing to be.

We found a wedding photographer today.

I think I'd found her online through a Facebook ad or something like that, after etler and I had agreed that having good wedding photography was important to us, and, as we don't want to have both a photographer and videographer, we wanted photos to tell the story of our day.

( Wedding Babble... )

Also, wedding related: I am so so so glad to have friends who have had weddings recently, done bits and pieces of planning themselves, are in various stages of planning... so that we can share all kinds of thoughts and advice and so on. Glad for discussions with a friend of mine who's getting married soon who also has the tricky question of how to honor and remember a dead loved one who's been such a part of oneself and one's life ... without making the wedding a wake.

Discovering that there is a lot to think about. (I don't believe that there will ever come another day in my life that I give this much attention and planning to. Famous last words, I suppose, but that is quite beside the point). Really really a lot. Which is a lot of work, but also a lot of fun. Glad to have people to share it with.

I've been away from blogging for far too long. I want to record everything that's been happening lately. Hopefully I'll find time to make notes of some of it.

I skipped all of the New Years parties to which I was invited last night in favor of spending a quiet night at home drinking champagne and finishing up a few knitting projects and watching old movies with etler.

Some of this is because I'm still at the tail end of a cold and some was my shy, inner introvert standing up emphatically and insisting that she really just needed a break from EVERYTHING.

2008 has been a big year. ( (and I ramble a lot about it, so be warned...) )

I knit a lot. I learned a lot. I studied a lot. I reflected on the fact that I have wonderful, wonderful people in my life who haven't seen nearly as much of me as I'm sure they'd like (or I'd like) because we've all been busy and we've all had these Major Life Things happening. I've met wonderful new people who I want to be closer to and kept close to and deepened friendships with "old" people. I'm trying to adjust to the ebb and flow of life as it happens, of closeness between people, of the times where you see a lot of people or see them rarely but deeply and intensely against the times where you disappear into the solace of your own company or the cocoon of a relationship.

My hope, for 2009, is that I will make the time to keep friendships close and nurture new ones, live, laugh, love, learn, end it as I ended 2008: older, wiser, and happy and appreciative for the many gifts and blessings I have.

I have started and not finished at least four entries in the past couple of weeks. One was about traditions, prompted by a general feeling that mine (which I didn't even know I had) were pretty badly violated when I spent Thanksgiving in Wisconsin with etler's family. Not that the day wasn't nice... I knit an entire armwarmer, I enjoyed a lovely fire and yummy wine in good company and it was capped off with a nice meal. But it wasn't familiar and I wasn't quite prepared for it to be so not-familiar.

( Babble about traumatic holiday memories )

( Continuing on the Holiday Theme, there was babble about gifting... )

( And then there was talk of Dickens and the Can Can Troupe which has absorbed many a weekend in the past month and a half or so )

Today, I'm thinking about love and relationships and how they work when one is by nature a Seeker and prone to dwelling on how to build and maintain the perfect, Ideal Relationship (which, of course, my wiser self knows doesn't exist). ( Musings on what has surprised me and what I have learned about relationships in the past year or so... ) Sometimes I forget how well he really does see and know me. I want to chastise myself for forgetting... but then, if I never forgot, I am not sure I'd be so deeply appreciative when reminded.

It's come up more than once, lately, in casual conversation and blog entries and other forums for meandering thoughts that we grow up and learn and live in a world of deadlines, and that maybe some attributes of that world make the transition to adult life just that much harder.

I miss being a kid, sometimes, because what I was supposed to be doing at any given time and what was supposed to be done at the end of any given day was completely unambiguous. Even in college, that was true. There was a bit more wiggle room around what had to be done at the end of every single day -- instead it was the end of every second or third day or every week, but the hard and fast and abundantly clear deadlines remained. In grad school they extend further, to the end of every semester, if that and in some vague sense, the end of every year. It's hard to make a map for a future you can't quite see and predict a realistic amount to accomplish.

I probably also managed my time better, doing much more in a day than I do (or at least, feel I do) now... and not because I didn't have the internet or because I had more energy. I did more in a day because I didn't stop to think about how long any given task would take. I went busily from one task to the next, either as the bells at school or the times of my dance classes and play rehearsals and work schedule permitted. And I still found time to maintain a website with mostly hand-coded HTML and write and draw... in High School, I carried a sketchbook with me and was content to work on a drawing for 5 or 10 minutes at a time, trusting that the drawing would be finished when it was done... it didn't have a deadline. These days, when I find myself with that last 5 minutes before I have to be heading out the door or arriving at practice or rehearsal or whatever I often find myself deliberately wasting them -- playing games on my iPhone, checking email for the 60th time, anything to kill the minutes between me and my next activity.

I think I'd get more done if I viewed things in terms of what I can do in any given period of time (and was less hard on myself for not quite finishing every last bit) instead of what that time is to short to accomplish. I've been better about this in the last couple of weeks, in some ways -- I seem to thrive on overcommitment; to have many projects in the air and many responsibilities to many people has a way of focusing me. So, I joined a can can troupe and got more serious about my dancing and set some real goals for my science (with a real reward structure for meeting them)... and decided, while I'm at it, to list some items on Etsy because, you know, the worst that happens is that over the course of 4 long months they don't sell and I have them to give as gifts. And the best that happens is that they do, and I find out that people actually like the stuff that I make and I invest more of myself in making more things.

Choosing not to do something because I'm afraid I might fail is not the kind of decision that I want to be making. "What if?" is not one of the lingering questions I want to spend my life with.

In one conversation with an old friend we discussed the unreasonable and irrational deadlines that we begin to set in our personal lives -- be engaged by 27, married by 30, first kid a year later, second two years after that. 2 kids and own our own home by 35. I'm making up the numbers, but I've seen the overarching life plans figure into the decisions of more than one friend and acquaintance. Or worse, when the deadlines pass and find that our lives are nothing like the lives we've planned, we feel like failures, no matter how happy we are with our life as it is. (This is me and grad school. No matter how many times I repeat to myself that I am where I am because my mother died and this forced a detour into doing a Master's Thesis and a Master's is absolutely not nothing, I feel very behind. I wanted to be close to finishing by now; instead I'm two years away at best).

Of course, with all the other projects, I'm not as productive in the lab as I probably could be if I spent all my time working on being a scientist. Some days, when I should be working, I don't, because I am busy working on the things that belong to my "outside interests" and I feel terribly guilty about that. I'm working on letting go of the guilt.

Sometimes, I think my greatest challenge will be to accept that balance is very like a swaying walk along a precipice, a journey and a process and not a destination. I've become so accustomed to a mentality of goal-setting and deadlines finished or imperfect-bug-good-enough-to-be-abandoned projects that it feels like sometimes, everything in life becomes a destination. At least, I seem to err on the side of thinking along those lines.

Friend A posts a picture of a spider eating a dead bird to Twitter.

etler responds by posting a similar picture and point by point account of a praying mantis eating a hummingbird.

I google this to see whether either of these is a hoax and find video of a praying mantis killing and eating a mouse, which I proceed to post to Twitter.

Discussion ensues about whether the praying mantis catching and eating a bird or a mouse is squickier...

Clearly, we are an odd bunch.

Apparently, I have entered a cycle of writing posts with content once a month. And only once a month. Here's hoping I do better in the next month and the one after that.

I've had many posts that I've wanted to write, but been generally too busy to have the time to sit down and write and explore the relevant thoughts completely. There's been one post brewing in my mind for a while with tidbits about my mom and the things I want to share with her, and another with pictures and babble about Yellowstone which was an amazing park and a very weird trip and a third about yoga and a societal bias toward expecting success (to the point that we rarely celebrate it) and being hard on ourselves over failures. I'm not sure any of these will get written. For today, I want to write about the importance of rest and reflection.

A few years back, I sat at lunch with a couple of labmates arguing about whether religion, as an institution, had done any good for society. Last week, over coffee with one of the participants in the earlier discussion, the topic came up in a different way. An atheist Jew, my friend teaches religious school to sixth graders... but with the bent and bias of a Scientist -- a person who is taught to question everything. Believe what you believe, decide what you decide... but make sure you've done your homework and have a solid reason why. In talking about her lesson plans, she wanted to point out that the Jews were responsible for weekends. Which is probably overstating things a bit (maybe even more than a bit)... but, that said, she did have a point that one of the reasons that, in Western culture, at least, we view weekends as a time to not work is because of the Judeo-Christian religious tradition which insists upon taking at least one morning and often one entire day out of one's week for God, and for reflection upon what is wonderful and meaningful about life as well as how we can live our lives better. Sort of a weekly mental housecleaning.

I think it is of general social value (and I might get in trouble for saying this) that so many religions teach that it is important to take some time out to rest and to reflect. I think it is also valuable that they provide a social structure for doing so. It is so easy to spend our lives being busy, being inundated with new ideas and new projects and new experiences... and exhausting ourselves between the new and exciting and the endurance test of the daily grind. I find it challenging, with so many things I have to do and so many more I want to do, to include rest and reflection as items on my weekly "ToDo" list. It starts being that thing that I figure I can always do later, when the sewing and the knitting and the cleaning and the organizing and the nurturing of friendships and my relationship and the dancing and the data collection and data analysis and experiment planning and paper writing are all completed. Guess how often I actually get around to reflecting.

I think I was better at it when I made some time to attend religious meetings.

This isn't to say that religion is the only way to create that time and mental space. Just a convenient one. I think taking time out to reflect is important for general mental health. Like so many things, I'm sure the importance varies considerably from person to person . But I hope, in the future, not to forget its value.

Went to move my car so as to avoid a parking ticket and it won't start. Electrical stuff seems to be working just fine... lights, stereo, etc. turn on, starter clicks... but the engine won't turn.

Really, really did not need this right now. Very much hoping that whatever's wrong will be covered by my warranty.

Especially as I'm leaving around noon tomorrow for a week in Yellowstone. Not good timing to have my car hanging out at a mechanic's shop... Somehow I think it's frowned upon to say "oh, thanks for servicing my car, no I won't be picking it up until Tuesday..."

OTOH, I really would rather not leave the car just sitting dead on the street for a week.

Sigh.

ETA: Managed to jump start the car. Still skeptical, but it's possible, given my driving habits of late that the battery did just need charging. Turning the car off and on to move it every few days places a high load on the battery and not much time for the alternator to run and recharge it.

I knew we should have taken my car up to Oregon this weekend...

Surprised no one on my flist has linked to this yet:

Steampunk Picnic in Golden Gate Park! Noon on Saturday!

The part of me that would LOVE an excuse to get all dressed up and go picnic in the park and play with my Shiny New Toy wants very much to go.

However, I'm invited to another party at the same time and have tickets to see Big Bad Voodoo Daddy with the San Francisco Symphony that evening (plus a party to head to after the symphony...) so I'm not sure I'll manage it all. If I did, it would be a very, very packed day and I'm not so much about packed days, lately.

I realized, after being out with friends three days in a row last week, plus birthday things with etler on Saturday, that part of being an introvert means taking a little time to hide away from the world and just be with myself, no matter how many adventures I hope to have.

This was hilarious.

I know more than one of y'all will appreciate it. :-)

A blushing someone sent my LJ a rose this morning. Apparently I have a secret admirer now (How else does one interpret a rose sent to one's lj?). Fun!

Thank you, anonymous rose sender, for brightening my day. :-)