It's Only A Paper Rose

It sounds like a humblebrag, but really it's not - I haven't been doing reflective New Year's posts the past few years, in large part because my life is going pretty darn well. It's not that overall-positive years aren't worth reflecting on, but it feels a little like tempting fate - if I outline all the ways my life has gone well and how fortunate I've been, perhaps the deities of misfortune will see it and remember that they haven't got round to me yet. Silly, yes, but a very real feeling nonetheless. And that's not even taking into account the fact that many of my friends haven't been half so lucky, and probably aren't super into the idea of listening to me go on about my awesome life.

But I want to state, for the record, that - a couple of smaller-scale failures and misfortunes aside - I have been happy, and I'm well aware of how fortunate I am. I'm lucky enough to have two jobs that provide ample opportunities for both growth and rewarding moments. I'm lucky enough to have the kind of fiscal support that makes self-employment enjoyably challenging rather than stressful. I'm lucky enough to have a community of people who generally like me - as osprey_archer was mentioning, when you've never been a particularly popular person, it's surprising how great it is to walk into a place and have people be genuinely happy to see you. I'm lucky enough to have a supportive spouse I adore and live in a city I love in a country that remains a great experiment - inconclusive as yet, but worth fighting for nonetheless. I'm lucky enough to be in excellent physical health, in easily the best shape of my life. Most of all, perhaps, I'm lucky enough to have many interests and the time, opportunities, and supportive environment to explore them. And for all of this, I'm grateful.

I've never really been a big one for resolutions, but a post someone made on Facebook caught my eye, suggesting that, rather than make a general goal like "lose weight" or "read more", your resolutions be in the form of nine specific things: three things to read, three things to learn, and three things to do. So I think I'll break with my (non)tradition and set those goals.

To read:
--Yoga Sequencing. I don't feel I'm doing too badly just winging it, but I know I have so much room for improvement on this front.
--The Master & Margarita. I've heard from several people how excellent this book is, and I've been putting it off largely because I haven't felt I'd have the context for it. So I may need to brush up on Russian history first, but I will get to it this year. (It's not even that long a book!)
--Gentleman Jole & The Red Queen. I've been putting this one off because I know I'm going to love it and I know I can only read it for the first time once - but really, that's kind of a silly reason to not read it. Life is uncertain!

To learn:
--Some new massage techniques. This is rather vague, but it's going to happen regardless - I need to do some continuing education in preparation for my license renewal this year, so what I learn is probably going to depend on what opportunities I can find that fit into my schedule.
--To play "Same Old Lang Syne" on the piano. Simplistic? Maybe, but it'll take me a good amount of study to get there, so there's a fair amount of work implied here.
--More Swedish - specifically, more spoken Swedish. I'd like to get my spoken understanding up to where my written understanding currently is: enough that I can follow the gist of most conversations.

To do:
--Recruit some friends for karaoke. I've missed singing, and would like to do it more. Bonus if we can make it a semi-regular thing.
--Buy a house. Brian and I have been dip-toe-squealing about this for two years now, but this spring we're going to get pre-approved and start looking in earnest.
--Take guitar lessons at the Old Town School of Folk Music. I've been saying I want to do this since before we moved to Chicago. And I hear one of my friends is interested in doing the same, so I think I'll coordinate with her and see if we can't do it together.

Hello, book friends! I have presents to wrap and cards to write, as soon as I'm back from teaching this morning's class. So let's get this done!

What I've just finished reading

The Price of Meat, by K.J. Charles. Absolutely what it says on the tin - a Victorian style penny dreadful/horror story. I get the feeling Charles is playing with a setting that may feature in some of her future work - the liberty of Alsatia, a lawless area in the midst of London where criminals flee as a last resort, ruled by iron-fisted blackguards who dole out food from positively Swiftian sources, certainly holds a lot of potential for horror. (Point of note for anyone who hadn't figured as much from the clear Sweeney Todd references: this is definitely not a novella to read while you're having lunch.) If this particular story has a weakness it's that Johanna seems largely unchanged by her experience; she's a pretty pragmatic and levelheaded sort to begin with, so her katabasis into this criminal underworld and subsequent shock and horror is definitely effective, but I feel like we could've used another scene between her and Bella to really see how it's haunted her. That said, the detective inspector's arc was surprisingly touching and effective.

What I'm currently reading

Ancillary Sword, by Ann Leckie. For all of Breq's broadening of experience, the scope of this volume is turning out to be somewhat more limited than I expected; the relatively domestic issues with Citizen Fosyf and her daughter Raughd and their systemic mistreatment of plantation workers, while certainly handled well, seems a little more like a filler Star Trek episode. Not a bad one! There's definitely a lot of good points here about social inequality, appearance vs. reality of social mobility, and what happens when a culture is conquered by a larger/more powerful one but refuses to be absorbed. (asakiyume, I can see why you liked this one so much.) Just, from where I'm at now (roughly 2/3rds through), it feels like we're going to have a Lesson of the Week and then wrap this up with a more or less reset to the status quo. I suspect it'll be a little more than that, at least; we still have the major arc of Anaander Mianaai and her feuding selves to resolve. And I wouldn't be surprised at all if Leckie manages to make this (relative) microcosm of a story symbolic of the greater conflict; the personal *is* political, etc.

Also, I want to extend special props to Leckie's cleverness with Raughd in particular. Given that 90% of the book is written as a translation of a language where gender isn't specified, we've gotten used at this point to looking for clues either in-text (some characters are referred to as having facial hair, for instance) or in behavioral coding (Awn, while never set as a specific gender, codes heavily female through her caring for her crew and the people of the planet she's assigned to occupy). I was entertained at how Raughd's effete behavior, abuse of power, and utilization of social advantage to cover up cruelty all coded heavily as masculine...only to find out later, with characters speaking a different language, that Raughd was in fact female. Women can be just as abusive as men, provided the right proclivities, socialization, and opportunities!

What I plan to read next

Completely unsure! But then, I'm not sure if I'm going to have any time to read over the next few weeks, haha.

It is, indeed, a chilly fall day, and I am cozy on the couch with cats, one or the other of which has been occupying my lap pretty much continuously. A big fuzzy blanket and the sun coming through the front windows also contributes to my cozy-ness...which I will shortly be discarding, because two of my favorite teachers are doing a Harry Potter themed yoga class at noon. There will be dueling! (Actually partnered yoga sequences.) With wands! (Actually glowsticks.) I just wish I had some appropriately-colored yoga clothes...hrm. I suppose I do have a set of blue leggings. Maybe I can wear some silver jewelry. (Yes, I'm a Ravenclaw. Given the opportunity of learn-a-situation-by-jumping-in versus learn-by-researching-and-assessing, I will pick the research-and-assess route every time. But I have lots of Gryffindor friends who'll be happy to jump in and save whatever needs saving while I'm busy figuring out what the ideal outcome is and how best to make it happen.)

Brian is back from his latest trip. He's been doing a lot of travel for business over the past couple of months, most recently to London; while he enjoyed that trip especially (he'd been there once as a poor college student and loved it but hadn't been back in over a decade) he's glad to be home. At my request, he brought me a British paperback of My Cousin Rachel, because fall is prime Daphne du Maurier reading season. He also snagged a pretty excellent bottle of non-export Scotch at the duty free shop; we're going to have to have some friends over to enjoy it.

Friday was my first piano lesson, where I learned all the things I've been doing wrong body-mechanics-wise. Luckily, working in two other fields where postural awareness is a big deal, I'm not finding it too difficult to make changes; as with most musical basics, it's now just a matter of doing it enough times that it becomes muscle memory rather than yet another thing to juggle consciously. I'm also seriously considering getting a music theory cheat poster to hang on the wall in the second bedroom, at least until I've gotten more of the basics down. It's like the periodic table...all the scales and chord progressions and modes and everything are connected, and if you know how the connections work, you can work your way from one to any other without hesitation, and it gives you a vocabulary to describe what's going on musically in any given song. But my understanding is still very much on the fringes.

I'm not doing anything this weekend, but for Halloween night Brian and I have reservations at The Catcade - they're building a big blanket fort and showing The Nightmare Before Christmas, with drinks and cats. Sounds pretty perfect to me.

And off I go to yoga. Here's hoping we all have lovely cozy fall days ahead.

"Take this paper, and write down all the regrets you have from the past year. Then we'll burn them and start with a clean slate."

My friend hands me a torn scrap of foolscap, and I pull my purple pen from my purse, considering. The other party guests banter with each other, covering up the inherent vulnerability of the moment by proposing outrageous stories or asking whether such-and-such mundane thing counts as a regret.

I write a few lines, mostly small things; slowly, they begin to imply a theme of something larger that I can't yet articulate. I write a few more, circling around the issue: I regret not taking some of the opportunities my mother offered to grow closer. I regret not reaching out to my friends when I needed emotional support. I regret letting my certainty that I already knew the answers cloud my ability to learn new things.

Finally, I've outlined the shape enough to identify what it is my brain's been hiding from me: carefully, in clear letters, I print "I regret all the times my pride has kept me from connecting with the world."

Then I circle it and underline it twice, as if to emphasize its importance to the oncoming flames.

--

"Even from the time Ambrosia was little, she knew her self-worth."

I am twelve years old, and my mother has told this story many times. Still, my back straightens a little.

"When she was a toddler, I would take her to the playpark in our neighborhood, and she would want to stay longer. So I would tell her, 'Okay, I'm going home without you,' and pretend to leave. And she would keep on swinging, or playing on the jungle gym, until I turned right back around and scooped her up."

At this age, in the nadir of middle school, I am just now beginning to be aware that my greater-than-average self-confidence has been a handicap to my social acceptance. Eight years of teasing, of ostracism both subtle and blatant, of outright violence on a few memorable occasions, are finally starting to penetrate. I am slowly realizing that, contrary to the "just be yourself!" messages of a thousand thousand afterschool specials and middle-grade novels, my defiance of social dictates - my refusal to wear 'normal' clothes, to care about my presentation, to keep my opinions to myself in class - are exacting a very real toll on my ability to get on with my classmates.

Until this point, I've taken pride in not caring about the shallow and superficial things most people in my age group care about, in marching to the beat of my own drum. But the constant shaming wears on me, as it is meant to do; we are social creatures, exquisitely attuned to the slights of others. It will be some years yet before I start to appreciate the value of building my personality through careful negotiation with social norms, of bearing superficial markers indicating belonging to a particular class or cohort. And it will be many more years of careful observation and learning - often by saying precisely the wrong thing - until I learn the subtle arts of getting along in a community, of deferring to others' knowledge even when I'm convinced of my own correctness, of influencing group opinion in small ways, of quietly building social currency against the day when my integrity will demand that I take a stand.

--

This morning, cocooned in blankets and absent any driving motivation to get out of bed early, I sank into the sort of brightly-lit, highly-detailed dream that often seems to visit me at such hours. I was visiting a mall storefront that turned out to be a beautifully decorated Jewish temple, run by a particularly Orthodox sect. For some reason I had a pressing need to wash my hands, and I remember asking a stern-browed woman if I might do so; she looked displeased at the notion, but apparently my need was great enough to overcome her reservations.

I proceeded to the back of the space, where there were several sinks, and started washing my hands at one of them, only to realize from the horrified faces of those around me that not only was I using entirely the wrong sink, but that I was trespassing upon the men's side of the temple, as well as likely violating several other rules I didn't even know. I take such pride in knowing the social tenets in any given situation, in acting carefully to ensure the comfort and approbation of others; the realization that I was in a situation where I was socially illiterate sends a wave of shame, pure and unadulterated as few non-dream emotions are, swamping my chest and my cheeks. Strong as it is, it burns indelibly into my memory the dream that might otherwise have faded in the light of day.


--

"Are you feeling inspired?" I ask my client, once she's taken a few breaths of her aromatherapy oils. We had been laughing at the silliness of naming a scent blend "Inspiration", as if achieving so notoriously elusive a state could be as simple as taking a few breaths.

"Oh, absolutely!" she answers, tongue planted firmly in cheek. "Now I can go home and finish all those half-done songs I have filling my notebooks!"

We spend a few moments bonding over the difficulties of musicianship, and the specific frustration of unfinished artistic efforts. She admits that she finishes perhaps one in ten songs that she starts; I, having not even been brave enough to start ten, feel simultaneously relieved and humbled.

I've long known that my difficulties in finishing anything artistic stem from my perfectionism; so long as a song or a story lives only as an idea in my mind, it will always be perfect, spared the trauma of birth and the inevitable marring of being shaped by imperfect hands. But, with pride much on my mind of late, I begin to consider how much of that perfectionism stems from pride. Completion means sharing, and sharing means risk - of judgment, of failure, of losing my sense of specialness. If I could let go of that need to feel special, set apart, would that help me to take artistic risks? Would it be easier to share something imperfect and true if I didn't tie my self-worth to my pride?

That last thought startles me with the truth it implies, and I almost miss a stroke in the massage.

--

"You can spend your life trying to fit yourself into a box. But you'll always be too much for some people. For others, you'll never be enough. But the great joy is that, if you let yourself, you'll always be exactly enough for you."

Something in the yoga teacher's voice catches me, which seems odd - I've been ruminating of late on how the doctrine of self-exceptionalism has been harmful in my life, and on the surface her message reads very much as a variation on the "just be yourself!" mantra.

You'll always be exactly enough for you.

It occurs to me, as my brain slowly slots the puzzle pieces together, that perhaps the problem isn't pride, per se - it's what I'm proud of. All my life I've been told that I'm talented, intelligent, exceptional; all my life I've been secretly terrified that I'm going to seriously screw up and prove everybody wrong, prove that I really am that weird girl who deserved to be bullied and ostracized, disappoint everyone who had such faith in me. I've accomplished a few things, it's true, and I'm proud of them, but I think I've been even more proud of how they reaffirmed my belief in my own exceptionalism.

And yet...in order for me to be exceptional, it logically follows that others have to be unexceptional. And I've long since rejected the idea of talent as a zero-sum game; I strongly dislike the idea that because one person doesn't measure up to another on one arbitrary scale, that means they don't have something to contribute on another axis. I wonder how much of the fear and misery I can forestall by refusing comparison, by practicing humility with regards to others, by working on being enough for me.

I wonder if, freed of its shackles of fear and embracing its gift of imperfect life, my art might someday take wing, finally able to share itself with the world, to help forge those tenuous connections we so desperately need.

Recently a friend told me how she took the Myers-Briggs Personality Inventory for the first time in years, and rather than wanting to argue with all of the questions, she breezed through it relatively quickly and found the result helpful rather than aggravating; she attributed this to being older and knowing herself better. I tried something similar this morning, and discovered it was easier for me as well; what was interesting, though, was all the times I had to stop and think about whether I was answering a particular way out of habit, or because I actually functioned that way now. Growing up I was a dedicated improviser, but after some bad experiences screwing up work and social things I learned to carefully keep my schedule and projects organized. And yet I was still surprised at how differently I answered the planning- and organization-based questions, compared to the last time I took the test as a teenager. Similarly, in the questions about external vs. internal attention, I realized that I put much more focus on other people and the outside world than I used to, instead of spending most of my time inside my head.

As a result, instead of the ENFP that I used to firmly roll, the latest test I took pegged me as an ESFJ. I was especially entertained that the description on the website I used congratulated me on my social perception and compared me to a cheerleader or quarterback; if you had asked 18-year-old me to pick a self-descriptor, "socially aware" would have been one of the last items on the list. But at the same time, I've made a distinct effort to grow that part of my personality, because I got tired of being blindsided by people's shifting moods and alliances. (I'm still blindsided on occasion - human beings are complicated! - but I feel like I have a much better grounding in how we all interact than I used to.)

I have mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, I feel like the skills I've developed in the past several years are valuable, and I'm glad I have them. On the other...sometimes I miss the more imaginative, more self-reflective me. It's gotten noticeably harder for me to write introspective blog posts lately, and I can't tell if that's because the self-examination part has gotten tougher, or because my life is so much fuller lately that it's tough to find the time. I spend less time reading and writing, less time thinking about the world as it could be and more figuring out how to deal with the world as it is. Again, I don't think this is necessarily negative, but I'm concerned about going too far in this direction. Scary global events and news stories used to bother me a lot less; now that I'm more invested in the here-and-now, it's difficult not to feel concerned and helpless.

I suppose there's nothing stopping me from refocusing on creativity and idealism; doing so isn't going to mean that I automatically lose all the organizational and social intelligence I've cultivated. But it feels like that's tougher to do. I want to say it's because it's a more abstract focus and I'm not sure how to go about it; to a degree, I think that's what I've been telling myself my entire life. But now that I really think about it, I suspect the focus on practical matters has been at least partially a coping mechanism; a way to keep myself safe from rejection and failure. Which would explain why it's so difficult to imagine letting go of it. And makes the whole "news stories make me feel more helpless now" part more than a bit ironic. No system is without its dangers, it seems.

It's the first real cold morning of winter (15 degrees in Farenheit, -9 in Celsius, At Least Three Layers And All The Winter Accessories in Ambrosia), and I decided to skip yoga class before work because I'm having a hard time convincing myself to go out before it's absolutely necessary. So now that I have two whole hours free, I thought I might wave to my LJ friends and reassure them I made it into the new year just fine.

Biggest laugh of the morning: Women Having A Terrible Time At Parties In Western Art History. "maybe if i keep covering more of my face with my hands/he’ll forget i’m here/and go away"...oh man. Vivid memories of working circulation in my college library, and certain patrons who thought they'd try to chat up the cute girl behind the desk.

It's been a quiet first week of the year. Our holiday plans fell through somewhat - we'd intended to go to a dance/concert with some friends, but they had an emergency and had to cancel. Since we already had tickets, and I had an outfit all picked out, we decided to go anyway; people-watching was fun, but ultimately we just weren't feeling it and decided to hop a train home before the rush. And really, that was okay; we got back and sipped some leftover sparking wine and went to bed. I guess this is officially The Year We Are Old.

Since then we've mostly been hanging out at home, partly due to holiday budgetary hangover and partly due to Brian having come down with a cold (Brian, dismayed: "I was working nights all month and barely left the house! Where did I get a cold?") I managed to fight it off successfully with a combination of Emergen-C and taking it easy for a few days, but given that next week he's going to be commuting to/from a client site in the suburbs, I think our plans to take down Christmas decorations are getting delayed a week.

Other than that, though, things are good. I have a longer and more thoughtful post percolating on finances, long-term goals, social/generational trends, and luck, but the upshot is, we're finally at a point financially where we're able to seriously save for a home of our own. I've honestly doubted for a long time we'd ever reach that point, since the places we wanted to live (i.e. urban environments with good transit and lots of restaurants/attractions) tend to be quite pricey, and historically we're more prone to want to enjoy our money than sock it away; but thanks to hard work, good social connections, and some excellent luck, it's looking like we may be able to start seriously house-hunting (or, more likely, condo-hunting) in a couple of years. We'll see how it works out - make plans and the gods laugh, after all. Still, it's a nice place to be.

I don't have any New Year's resolutions as such; most of my goals are continuous (keep up with yoga/healthier food choices to keep my mood issues in check, keep an eye out for new career opportunities, keep learning new things to avoid getting stuck in a rut, et cetera). But a theme that's been coming up in my life lately has been practicing gratitude without anxiety or entitlement. I have a lot of friends who did not have a great 2015, often due to factors entirely beyond their control; I know that someday that might be me (in cases involving death of a loved one, someday it will be me, unless I die first). And I also know a lot of people - including me, sometimes - who have trouble appreciating when things go well because all they can focus on is how temporary it is, and how things are bound to go wrong eventually. So I've been working on holding that sense of gratitude, and the vulnerability it entails, and being gentle with the part of me that wants to get caught up in worrying about the future. Similarly, there's the part of me that's terrified of becoming an entitled white person, who subconsciously believes they're owed their privilege and success simply because they've always had it; it's partly why I get so uncomfortable in the suburbs, where there's a high percentage of people with that mindset. So I'm trying to be gentle with that part of me as well, acknowledging its existence and reassuring it through various means (staying socially aware, donating when I can and without feeling guilty for not giving more, practicing compassion towards others even when they're doing things I disagree with or find inconvenient). It's a tough balance to strike, and man, is it difficult to practice self-love towards the parts of your personality you don't like. But it feels like important work, so I'm going to keep at it.

Lots going on in my life of late, though none of it has struck me as being particularly of interest to the world at large, which is why I've been a bit quiet on this front.

Thanksgiving was delightful; thanks to our friend Kat, we ended up hosting a Friendsgiving, pretty evenly split between people we knew and people she knew who didn't have family plans for the holiday. It was a good crowd, full of friendly and intelligent people; thanks to Kat and Brian's cooking, the food was also excellent. In the wake of it, I've been ruminating on why I enjoy Friendsgivings more than the traditional family-oriented sort; I think it has to do with my Pacific Northwesterner roots, as well as being sort of the black-sheep offshoot of the family (the two are not unrelated - most folks in Alaska live there in part because they're not close to their extended families). Don't get me wrong, my extended family are nice enough folks, but we have basically nothing in common, and with a couple of exceptions, none of them have shown any real interest in getting to know me and my life (or, in fairness, vice versa). So I tend to think of traditionally family-oriented holidays/events (weddings, funerals, etc.) with a sense of obligation rather than joy - and after the drama bomb my aunt set off over my (non)invitation to my cousin's wedding, I feel no qualms about skipping them. But even though many of them have drama stories of their own, I'm nonetheless fascinated by and slightly jealous of my friends with large tight-knit families; it must be nice to feel actively wanted rather than merely tolerated in that context.

My massage therapy career is going well, and growing - in fits and starts, as all growth seems to happen. (The week before Thanksgiving was especially crazy; I'm not sure what happened, but between clinic and private clients I went from maybe eight hours of active hands-on work per week to twenty-five. And of course that was just after I'd promised myself I'd go to yoga more regularly. I was So Tired.) One of my coworkers who lives nearby and I have set up a standing date on Tuesdays to get together and practice new techniques, so that'll help with (informal) continuing education, which should in turn help me maintain my enthusiasm. Milestones I have hit: graduation, licensure, professional organization membership (and associated insurance), acquiring a couple of regular clients at the clinic job, acquiring second occasional fill-in gig (which took basically no effort on my part - hurrah good word of mouth!), acquiring (and rebooking!) a few private clients, averaging at this point about one a week. Milestones I have yet to hit: any kind of formal continuing education, my first Yelp review, averaging more than one private client per week, making enough from private clients to need to report the income on my taxes, heh. (IRS rules say net income has to be over $400 before you need to report it; given that I'm still firmly in the negatives even with my relatively minimal startup costs, I'm not concerned for this year.) On the docket for next year: figuring out CE requirements/opportunities, registering as an LLC, possibly finding an accountant who specializes in small business.

And that's all the news around here, pretty much. Tomorrow is Brian's work Christmas party (still to do: dye hair to match purse and boots, try on outfit to make sure it works as well as I think it will, find necklace to match bracelet), and this weekend we're hosting thewronghands and her posse. Here's to pleasantly-busy-but-not-overbooked times!

It's been a nice holiday. What with not having many social contacts in the area, along with post-Christmas brokitude and some pretty severe cold/snow, we decided that a quiet observation at home was in order. But it was lovely nonetheless. Last night, I made one of my favorite incredibly rich meals, so Brian got a holiday off from cooking. When midnight rolled around, we had champagne cocktails and lay down on the hardwood floor by the fire (Brian: "I think 2014 might have to be the Year of Rugs") and recounted our many blessings for the past year. Today, we slept in before braving the (continuing) snow and taking the bus down to a nifty little Jewish deli in Lakeview for lunch, and after getting back I cleaned the bathroom and had a nice bath with one of the fancy bath bombs from my Christmas stocking. Now there's lemon pudding cakes in the oven, and when they come out we'll have the rest of the bubbly with them and watch Sherlock. {That part was written a few hours ago. The lemon pudding cakes were amazing, and so was the show. For a story about a protagonist who's completely clueless about human relationships, it's so incredibly smart about interactions and the power dynamics inherent therein.}

I don't have a lot of resolutions per se. I did tweet my wish for 2014: "Wishing us all new and better opportunities, and new and better guts to stand up and say 'I'll do it.'" I admit it's a bit of a selfish wish, given my plans for the upcoming month/year, but it's nonetheless true - I don't want to be the only one making scary plans and doing scary things!

About those plans...one of the biggest changes that's going to be happening is that I'll be making a concerted effort to raise my public profile somewhat. I don't know by how much, since popularity is a difficult thing to predict, but I'm hoping to make inroads in author communities and the like - I've met a lot of cool author-y people online, but even aside from that, name recognition is a good thing, and can often translate into sales. I've already re-Twitterpated myself (and even attracted a few followers, thanks to a few interactions with the ever-hilarious Chuck Wendig), and I'll be starting a writing blog this week, probably on Wordpress.

All of which is to say that I'm trying to decide what to do with my Dreamwidth/LiveJournal accounts. So far I've been fine with keeping them 99.9% public, as I tend to curate my friends carefully, pick low-drama folks to hang out with, and generally be obscure enough that even when I weigh in on a hot-button topic, it doesn't attract a lot of attention. But that may not be the case in the future. And there's a lot of history here - more than a decade, now, including many bits of myself and my growth process that I'm...not ashamed of, precisely, but that could easily be taken out of context. It doesn't help that I'm planning on writing in a controversial genre/about some controversial topics, and while I'll do my best (as always) to be fair and diplomatic on the subjects, that doesn't mean I won't piss some people off.

I've been thinking for a while about exercising LiveJournal's (and, I assume, Dreamwidth's) "change all your past posts to friends-only" feature, but resisted it so far largely because I know at least a few of my friends read this because they see the links through Facebook or an RSS reader, and if I were to only make posts under friends-lock the only people who would see it would be the ones who check LJ/DW regularly. Which - let's face it - is an increasingly small number.

I'm still deciding what the writing blog should focus on. If I make it a personal blog like this one, chances are that I'll stop posting here almost entirely. If I decide to focus on a few specific subjects (feminism, sexuality, the role of porn in Western society, and the cultural experience of sexually proactive women all seem likely topics, given my interests and the subject matter of my writing), I may keep this blog up separately for more personal journal-style posts. But either way, chances are I'll be going exclusively friends-only, here. So if you'd like to keep up here, and aren't already signed on my friends list on either site, let me know.

I'd forgotten how dazzling the snow-covered world is when the sun comes out. When I flicked the blinds open this morning I'm pretty certain I yelped as the light stilettoed its way into my dark-adapted retinas.

Yesterday was our first real snowstorm. Nothing life-stopping, just a few inches; it snowed steadily if not heavily for most of the day and into the night. (Brian called it "movie snow" - thick enough to be noticeable, but not so heavy as to obscure the shot, and not windy enough to muss the actors' careful coifs.) Much to my pleasant surprise, driving in it was not nearly so miserable as I'd anticipated. Most folk around here seem to understand the concept of "drive slowly and carefully when it's snowing and the roads are slick". The only part that made me raise my eyebrow was when, while turning left at a six-way intersection, the woman behind us started leaning on her horn when we didn't turn against the light. In a slick, unsalted intersection. While our path was still blocked by a string of gridlocked cars. Brian (who was driving and could see her in the rear view mirror) said she was yelling and screaming and about to have a coronary when we ended up waiting for another 90-second light cycle. I shrugged and thought maybe she was late for a job interview or her mother's deathbed or something, but we saw her not a minute later pulling into the Costco parking lot. (Maybe her mother was dying at Costco?) I guess that ninety seconds of her life must've been incredibly important to her. Maybe she's an transdimensional traveller and could see that we were literally ruining every single one of her futures by causing her to arrive at 12:45:28 instead of 12:44:02? Who knows. But I'm sure glad I don't live inside her head.

Nevertheless, we got a couple of errands done, including some new clothes for Brian, new wiper blades for the car (hurrah, Costco!), and an adjustment on Brian's 12-string (hurrah, Chicago Music Exchange!). And once we got home, I finally managed to clear the last of the boxes out of the living room...just in time to fill it with the Christmas tree and the boxes of decorations! Heh. Still, there's something rather appropriate-feeling about putting up the tree on the day of the first real snowfall. Now to find time to decorate...

Last week was busy, but fun. I dyed my hair red (see new icon) and bought a pretty silk chiffon skirt and wore both to Brian's new company's Christmas party, which is a pretty good-size event. I got to meet and befriend an out-of-town friend's girlfriend, who is super-awesome - intelligent and kind-hearted and also gorgeous; I can totally see why my friend is so into her, and it's awesome to see her so happy. And I got to see a couple of art museums around town, including the local Mexican Museum of Folk Art and the Art Institute's display of Food and Art, which included the originals of both Norman Rockwell's Freedom From Want and Edward Hopper's Nighthawks. (Seeing the latter in person was especially entertaining, as I'd seen roughly eighty billion Photoshopped versions but never spent much time looking at the original.)

Social meetings continue apace. I've managed to tentatively befriend one girl near my age who moved here from South Carolina; she's planning to bring her boyfriend over for dinner come January when she's back from touring with her current theater group and visiting family over Christmas. And I met another at the Evening with Paul and Storm and Patrick Rothfuss; we're meeting up at the Christkindlmarket tonight at 6. Hurrah for making friends somewhat faster than I did in Arizona. Or at least, signs pointing in that direction.

Also? For all my Alaskan upbringing, after four years of AZ, there's something a little shocking about pulling up the weather forecast and seeing the low for this evening marked as a single digit. Almost as weird as it was the first year in Arizona seeing triple-digit highs. Guess I must like extremes.

It's not unusual for it to snow in Bisbee; we're high enough in elevation that, come winter, it regularly gets below freezing at night. Sooner or later during the year, we'll get some precipitation on a cold night, and wake up to an inch or two of snow on the ground. Everyone gets pictures and makes snowmen before it melts later that day. No big deal.

It's somewhat less common to wake up to an entire foot of snow on the ground.

But this New Year's Eve, we were graced with a lovely blanket of snow. And while some of it melted during the day, there was enough of it to stick around for a few days. Even now, a week and a half later, there's patches of it on the hillsides. It's actually pretty entertaining - you can really see which parts of Bisbee get lots of sun during the day, and which stay in shade.

Unfortunately, being desert dwellers, our immune systems are not used to this kind of weather. Lo and behold, everyone in Bisbee has a case of the sniffles. It's one of those extra-nasty lingering bugs, too, that sticks around long after it should be gone. I've had it for a week now, and while I seem to be over the worst of it, the recovery is see-sawing around a lot more than I'd like. (Yesterday, despite a scratchy throat, I went out and ran errands and was generally productive. Today just walking to work was enough to give me that light-headed "you're overexerting yourself" feeling. But I still put in a good full day's worth of work. Eat that, cold virus.)

Nonetheless, New Year's was wonderful - cyrano came to visit, and brought the lovely lucia with him. We had a lovely dinner, and although our walking-about-town plans afterward were curtailed somewhat by the temperature and snow, we instead snuggled on the couch and watched Moulin Rouge. (I can report with near-100% certainty that, in addition to being beautiful, intelligent, and lovely to talk to, lucia is also deliciously soft and gives the sweetest snuggles.) I was sad to wave goodbye to them the next day, but life does get in the way of vacation. Alas.

My most recently completed project is replenishing my underwear drawer, which has been in a rather sad state for some time now. In the process, I discovered that I'm now a 34D - I guess that's the upside of having gained a fair amount of weight? I'm a little amused, though; if you told my barely-A-cup 18-year-old self that someday I'd be a D cup, I would've laughed myself sick. It certainly explained why none of my old bras seemed to fit, even aside from them being kind of raggedy and worn. Several trips to Victoria's Secret, a botched online order, a couple of returns, and a rather embarrassing amount of money later, I now have seven bras (five padded, two unpadded, in all sorts of pretty colors) and assorted matching undies, all brand-new, all extremely well-fitting, and several quite fancy. (I made the mistake of letting the salesgirl talk me into trying on one of their $50 bras as well as a $30 one...I figured it'd be nicer, but not $20 nicer. I was wrong.) I feel even more pleased than I expected about this. Wearing a poorly-fitting bra is hardly a life-ruining experience, but it is a constant low-level irritation. You get acclimated to it and eventually don't notice it anymore, but boy, you sure notice when it's gone.

Still waiting on a response from Berklee College of Music, although that's hardly surprising - they don't mail them out until the latter half of this month. I did get an email from their financial aid department, asking me to fill out the FAFSA so that, if I was accepted, they could determine what sort of awards I was eligible for. According to the government, I'm likely eligible for a $9,500 subsidized loan, which may be something to consider if they offer me a partial scholarship. It's inexpensive money (3.7% interest, which the government pays while I'm in school and for six months afterward), but on the other hand, that's between thirty and forty thousand dollars I would owe by the time I got my degree. That's a difficult financial hit to take. *And* it's less than a third of tuition alone. Sigh. I'd have to sell a lot of CDs to make that up.

In the meantime, though, I have Kalia back! I sent her back to Takamine for warranty service because the action on her lower frets was rather high, and the local guitar guy thought the neck was slightly skewed. They decided the neck was fine and she just needed a set-up and re-stringing, then sent her back. (Well, at least I got a new set of strings for my $44 in postage. Grr.) She's still a gorgeous guitar, though, and it's wonderful to have her back (...three months later), so I'm not holding any grudges. Mostly.

Speaking of which, I believe it's time I continued our getting reacquainted. If you'll pardon me...