lemonade out of stress

So... any tips on how to, like, make lemonade out of stress? Turn boo-stress to eustress? Ha. I am going to need some help here. Two of my three stress relief valves (my lover and my best friend) are gone for the next ten days, and the third (my mom) will be gone for about five of them. I don't even know what it means to be self-contained anymore. Once I started letting it--I mean, me--all hang out it's just kept hanging. I have become a person who revels in the company of others. I don't regret this. But man. Without physical access to my VIPs I'm going to be kind of floundering for the next week or so. This is the time to be self-soothing. I am needing to work on picking the pace up with that. WITHOUT repeated visits to Taco Bell and dark, angsty teenage-style scribblings. Although Taco Bell is delicious (I will stand by this) and at least my scribblings wouldn't be about friendlessness and lovelessness and hopelessness. Just, you know, stupid grown up things like money and jobs and wedding planning. We can find a compromise here.

not waiting well

WHY is today THIS Wednesday? I'd so much rather it be NEXT Wednesday. Or hell, the Wednesday after that! I'm exhausting myself with pique.

tatoos and cellulite

Every time I go to a waterpark I come home with a few new stereotypes to add to my arsenal.

to the right

Today I parted my hair a little to the right of center, wondering why I always go to the left. Oh yes, it's because of that streak of silver right there, growing out of an old scar and getting a head start (ha) on the rest of my scalp.

I beat a train across town on my bike this morning. We rode parallel for three miles. I did a bit of flying.

This was the weekend of wedding registries. I kept staying up til 1:00 looking up product reviews. Boom, Kohl's. Boom. With money being what it is (where is it??) I do hope this registry thing will actually work for us. I would like it if you buy me soft towels.

On Friday evening my family had a bonfire and an almost-three year old kept wriggling all over me in the grass and making me laugh. The part before he's mine and it's still cute and endearing to hear the 'hey April, hey April, hey April!' is a savory one.

Also this weekend while I was at the grocery store the produce stocker stopped me and asked to take a picture of my shirt, because he thought it was hilarious. It is hilarious. And I don't know, I'd never had a stranger want to take my picture before and something about it made my back straighter.

It is a GRAY day today. I wouldn't mind that if it weren't for the fact that S's band is playing at a waterpark this evening and I scored a free ticket to come along. I guess you can never quite always line up the brilliantly hot days with the rare times they'd be appropriate. I'll try not to complain. They'll play rain or whine. I mean, rain or shine.

warming up

I get a pleased and plump feeling when I discover a pattern about myself, a coherence between what I'd in the past just been brushing off as my random flailings.
My newest realization is that I need some time to feel overwhelmed and incapable of a new task before I get to it. This has happened over and over with all the wedding planning bustle. At the first mention of something like designing invitations, planning ceremony details, creating a gift registry, I'd clam up and feel completely incapable of producing something I like or ever measuring up to scratch. But the fun thing is that if I give myself plenty of time and lots of opportunity to google and ask questions and think through these tasks, well. I find myself always rising to the occasion. I don't think I'll ever be able to skip that interim step, though. The days or weeks of a buzzing sort of panic and feeling of I COULDN'T POSSIBLY seem a permanent part of me. And it's a shame for people like my mom and S who get front row seats to the 'I CAN'T DO THIS I DON'T EVEN KNOW WHAT I WANT' show. But I sort of like my warm-up period. And I like that it has an end.

WILD GEESE

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting--
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.


~Mary Oliver

excuses

I'm using a doctor's appointment as an excuse to sleep in tomorrow and my sunburnt lips as an excuse to layer on and then chew off strawberry lip balm. And using the formatting wedding invitations as an excuse to spend much of my morning... wait, what?!

894 miles later

I'm bleary and puffy and my blue color shows so much more vivid when I'm home. But oh, there's nothing like a weekend at a lakehouse with my childhood friends to make me think that perhaps humans are all meant to live so near bodies of water and also, to make me think with a bit of wonderment that I really did have fantastic taste when I was a kid.

I'm not just saying that because they threw me a surprise bridal shower on the deck overlooking the lake Saturday afternoon.

And of course one rather weighty other reminder I got this weekend... of the growing strength and burning warmth of the tether connecting me and S, and the way it's begun to feel so WEIRD to be in my own separate orbit, if only for three days. I think I'm pretty sure we're meant to go on adventures together. From here on out.

I'm not just saying that because if he'd have been with me on the long drive home when my eyes began to droop and smart I could have let him take the wheel. I'm not just saying that.

whew

My themes this week have been good posture, wishing it wasn't so goddamn hard to grow up, denial, and colored pencils. I expect my themes for this upcoming weekend to be more like Finger Lakes, good food and wine, laughter, and singing loudly at the top of my voice in my car. (WHEW.)

aw heck

As in, aw heck, there's gotta be a better way to spend my time than lighting a fire under someone's ass and immediately fighting wildly to put it out.

making me happy right now

HUMMUS! AND CAFFEINE!!

little bits of fluff

S told me a few weeks ago that one of the reasons he wants to marry me is that I leave little bits of fluff behind me wherever I go. I do think this might be the most charming thing I've ever heard.

on a day like this

I'm glad that my toenails are painted bright pink.

DIFFERENCE

My mind's a map. A mad sea-captain drew it
Under a flowing moon until he knew it;
Winds with brass trumpets, puffy-cheeked as jugs,
And states bright-patterned like Arabian rugs.
"Here there by tygers." "Here we buried Jim."
Here is the strait where eyeless fishes swim
About their buried idol, drowned so cold
He weeps away his eyes in salt and gold.
A country like the dark side of the moon,
A cider-apple country, harsh and boon,
A country savage as a chestnut-rind,
A land of hungry sorcerers.

Your mind?

--Your mind is water through an April night,
A cherry-branch, plume feathery with its white,
A lavender as fragrant as your words,
A room where Peace and Honor talk like birds,
Sewing bright coins upon the tragic cloth
Of heavy Fate, and Mockery, like a moth,
Flutters and beats about those lovely things.
You are the soul, enchanted with its wings,
The single voice that raises up the dead
To shake the pride of angels.

I have said.

--Stephen Vincent Benet

very

I am very... there are a lot of words that could fill in that blank. Spinny, healthy, unafraid, proud, tired, completely and utterly happy. I speed-walked three miles this evening against the threat of a rainstorm (#2 of the day... #1 I caught front row seats to in my car driving home from the mechanic) and I beat the rainclouds by mere minutes and weathered out the storm in a dry auditorium listening to songs from Glee being sung by a range from very good to very enthusiastic singers raising money for autism awareness. I think I started this same smile that's still on my face right then, when they all burst into song in unison on Sweet Caroline. I haven't cracked since. Or, you crack a smile, I guess, so maybe it's I haven't stopped cracking since. Through the whole performance I was charmed, with my S up there as part of the live accompaniment, and then back at his place to toast to his patience and my pleasure and since then it's been 'you are a treat' and I've been making plans to spend tomorrow afternoon at the community pool with my best friend and some sunscreen which I hope I'll need. AND, I haven't mentioned this yet, but I think this is part of why today was so good: I made an excellent tuna melt sandwich today for lunch. And then had some cherries. I mean, FOR REAL, this life is a nice one. I am so happy, too, to have the thought in my mind that next weekend is going to be even better.

toasting

This is the summer for tan line vanity and sleevelessness.

crunch crunch crunch

Sometimes I feel like just listing things. Kombucha. Freshly baked thank you bread. Font formatting. Thunderstorms. AAA batteries. Crunch crunch crunch.

lucky girl

It is a lucky girl who can show up at her parents' house for an evening, be fed, entertained, put in a few rows of quilting stitches with her mom, and leave for home again with hugs, leftovers, fresh garden spinach, and a mended dress.

123rd summer in the bandstand

oh would you look at this!

(Pride+Vanity+Did you scroll through toward the end to see the one of me?)

ode to a suitcase (you know who you are)

I look at you, open
empty

a storybook in reverse.

You are a gateway, a portal,
a wardrobe hallway to
another
world.

I long to know the places you'll come across,
the pathways you'll roll across
or where you'll be heaved across

the back of my

(new, strong)

mate.

O, give me your plans,
suitcase of mine!

(To know that I need you is
not nearly
enough.)

O, give me your baggage claim tickets
and your passport stamps of approval!

My mouth waters and my countdown continues and

You

Remain

Mute.


*sigh*

up the incline

I was awake through much of the night last night trying very hard to visualize bedroom suites and big brown couches and a bookshelf over there right in the corner. This must have been a side effect of having napped the afternoon away. The awakeness. The floorplanning and wall adding was a side effect of my continued stumbling up the incline toward... well, I can't quite tell.

*

Ah, the unbearable happiness of a hickey on the neck of someone just home from a honeymoon.

swamp

Is there any more visceral, disgusting pleasure than clearing out a badly clogged drain? Like squeezing out pus. Much more satisfying that scrubbing the toilet.

score!

For noticing me from a moving car as I walk down the sidewalk:

fiance: 0

my 90 year old grandpa: 1

S'ok, though. I'm really proud of S for other reasons today. He's been working a new job for the past few weeks that hasn't been very easy or lucrative, but as of today he's officially on his way in the right direction. I mean, the direction that will keep us in paid rent bills. We hope.

run

I actually went running this morning... for a huffy, brief ten minutes. Funny how such a thing can feel so different from its predecessor, walking. I walk for miles and miles every day, and yet all that walking prowess barely translates to one red-faced, sweaty running mile.
I'm grateful to running because once I used to do it as a prayer, running around the outdoor track at the university late in the night with nothing in my head at all. I ran all throughout a senior year that needed an escape, a calming trip outside of myself. I ran because I was in love with someone who was not there and because I had no idea what I was going to become and because the apartment I lived in housed three girls with varying degrees of diagnosed depression, and then me.
I ran because I was heavy and slow and the running that year helped me shed twenty pounds and I then wasted it all when the summer came and I was again rootless, aimless, answering office phones 40 hours a week, and answering my restless legs and fluttering mind with melted cheese and angsty sleepovers.
So what I'm saying, I guess, is that running reminds me of that time, and it's harder than I thought. I don't think I have it in me anymore to pick running as my drug of choice. Much as I'd like to, I won't ever become a Runner. I am other things. I lift weights sometimes and I try out belly dancing and yoga and I bike and sometimes I swim laps and all the time I am a walker. Kind of miss the way midnight in February felt as I jogged around an empty, well-lit track, though.