i am not in a good mood at the moment. i’m not sure of the root cause, i know that the fact that my job decided not to pay me vacation time for my FMLA and shorted my paycheck did not help any. simon’s party is this weekend and once again none of the other friends with children are coming, just the parents and grandparents. granted, they all love him very much, i just, well… *shrug*
on another note, i was having a conversation with daecon the other day about wanting to come up with some writing exercises that will help me be able to come out with something more structured. i always hated the outlines that they wanted us to do in highschool and college, but i wondered if maybe there was some merrit. daecon told me that i was being overly cautious and too afraid of failure, and that the only way to get it out is to WRITE IT. just start writing…
no, no… that’s too simple. i’m practically crying because it just can’t be that easy. i tell him such, and i end up feeling stupid for that too. i’ve been feeling disjointed, like i have lost mental structure and all the thoughts in my head got stuffed into one massive junk drawer. it makes me think of the mentats that frank herbert wrote about and the years of mental training they would go through to utilize their brains, organize them, corrolate data with them. i’m sure there is some school of psychology out there that has started or suggested something of that kind of schooling.
i know there is a Dr. Levine who is a child psychologist specializing in education. he talks about the different types of control functions of the brain, how there can be deficiencies and what sorts of exercises help build them, or work around them. i had not finished reading the book when it was loaned out to a woman at work whom said she was having trouble with her son. she ended up leaving under unhappy circumstances and i haven’t gotten my book back. “A Mind at a Time” is the name. i’ll have to get another copy.
but back to my other thought, in the near future, whomever deems to torture themselves with reading my weblog may be subjected to rambling thoughts and verbal images, disjointed scenes of stories, schizophrenic rants, all of which live in the furtile imagination that i have kept locked somewhere deep inside me.
atlanta, also known as hotlanta. its a steamy sprawling city in the middle of a rural state. inside the city limits you have a strange mix of big city indulgence and tolerance with small town, rural southern conservatism. my drive in gives me time at traffic lights to sit at watch the people around me. ever since a journalism/creative writing teacher gave me the advice;
“a good way to find inspiration is sit in a park and watch the people go by. imagine who they are and where they are going and write it down”
i haven’t been able to watch people and think otherwise. i long for some way to get my thoughts down permanently.
-a man walking down the cooling streets of atlanta as the sun sets behind the sky-scapers. his clothes are thread-bare, and a military issue backpack is tattered and worn. he looks old and worn himself, with sun-leathered skin and grey hair. he walks with a slump to his shoulders, looking at the ground. he pauses for a moment to pick change up off the side-walk. it doesn’t matter what denomination, every little bit counts.
-a black man, with peppered white through his hair. he’s obviously middle-classed, with a nice burgandy polo-shirt and slacks, penny-loafer shoes. he has two white corrogated signs tied together that he wears as he walks down the street professing “GAY MARRAIGE IS AGAINST GOD’S WILL!!” as he carries his briefcase along. i notice he walks with a swish.
-a woman in short shorts, sneakers and a sports bra jogs along behind him.
-a woman dressed for work wearing pany-hose and sneakers. she carries a briefcase over her shoulder and dress shoes in her hand.
last night, as i was packing up and leaving to go home, i was thinking about what sort of slipper type shoes i would like to wear around the office. you see, i like to tuck my legs up underneath me, and having shoes on makes that very uncomfortable. i don’t want any large fluffy animal/cartoon type slippers, that’s not really me. i have some over-sized purple sock-slippers. they are nice and comforatble, not a good thing to walk around the office in, though…
so then i thought “hey, ballet slippers would be neat” and a memory came to me. it was a memory of being around 6 or 7 years old and wanting my very own pair of ballerina slippers. i had been saving all my allowance and change in a beat up old coffee can. i FINALLY had enough and mom took me to the dance store to pick them out. i remember the look of inward groaning on the clerk’s face when i dumped the whole thing out on the counter and started counting. quarters, dimes, nickels, pennies, LOTS of pennies… my mother explained how excited i was and that i’d been saving for SOOO long, the lady smiled and started to help me count. it must have been near closing time because i remember the sun was low through high windows and the place being dimly lit.
this must have been the first time i’ve thought about that in a decade, i’ve been meaning to call my mother to find out if she remember’s it well, or if its another fabrication of my overly fertile imagination. i do not think that it is.
ok, so here’s the deal, i’m not sure if i want to:
a) make a completely different front page to link everything together
or
b) use this page with some mods to link all the other information together
i’m probably going to do my own thing, whatever you say, but having ideas and opinions always helps me decide what i DON’T want.