5x5 Challenge : Day 9 | FAIL

I'm sorry, friends. I did not take a single photo today. Not a one. As the minutes ticked by this past hour I thought about taking five photos of the same thing, five photos of five things that fall under the same umbrella, five photos of me? 

Alas, I took none and that is how it will stay. And here's something I want to ask, anyway: if we're being challenged to notice and pay attention, see the small and the beautiful, shouldn't we NOT be taking photos? Shouldn't we be looking through actual eyes rather than the limited/limiting eye of a camera. Call me a luddite, but isn't part of what we should all be doing is putting our devices down and snapping heartfelt memory shots instead? 

I mean this sincerely. And I'm also trying to justify my slackerness to avoid being on the hook for a dinner for four, which is the penalty for any one of us who drops the ball by not posting daily during this Challenge. Well, ladies, Bon appetit! 

5x5 Challenge : Day 8 | Back to work

"You are seen. You are heard. And if you weren't here the world would be different."

 - Elena Brower

I suppose it could be said that this single quote sums up my experience at Wanderlust this weekend. But I suppose that would be an oversimplification. I suppose all summations are overly simplified versions of the thing they're meant to describe. But it is accurate to say that this quote makes me feel simply amazing. 

Do you feel it, too? Can you read those words and feel them to your core? Can you listen to the message of these words without judgement - of yourself or the person saying them to you? I heard myself judging right after I felt amazing. I'm thankful that the feeling came before the judging and now I'm wondering how I can stop at the feeling... to let it in and around and out and be, just be amazing.

Kind of like these two creatures. Amazing. 

#nightlight

Day off : Pause for the Cause

Some trendy phrases are worth saying for the simple fact that they're fun to say. "Pause for the cause" is one of them. 

I'm taking the day off today because I'm at Wanderlust. This is my pause and I am my cause. I'll still be here tomorrow but I think I'll have my bearings and will remember to take some photos. At least five.  

5x5 Challenge : Day 7 | It's actually pretty easy being green...

I spent some time in our yard today. In doing so I realized that I haven't done so in quite a while. How is that possible? I live here. I live on top of our yard. How is it that I have not walked the perimeter or explored the contours in what feels like weeks? Weeks!? 

I suppose it's because I always do the same thing in our yard: I tend the garden. I walk the diagonal line from the back door to the raised beds, extra long garden hose in hand, and I water and weed and tend like a good gardener does. 

But then what? What - I'm all tuckered out from holding the hose? I'm too spent to check out the other acre of land around me? 

No, I suspect it has more to do with the fact that it's usually a tiny miracle that I've carved out enough time to water the garden (rarely in peace, most often fighting Dash for the hose and repeatedly telling him I do not want to be sprayed today) and when I finish, I quickly move on to the next thing I remembered I needed to do. Sadly, walking around in our yard just looking at stuff isn't on that list.

But today Ryan took the kids to "throw rocks in the lake" (this is an actual activity) and I watered the garden on my own. And I whacked some weeds and cleaned up the sand table toys and threw some sticks into the firepit. Then I just started walking around. The grass was freshly mowed, which made it infinitely more enticing to me, and the breeze and temperature were perfect for outside meandering. No overbearing sun. No annoying mosquitos. It was pretty perfect. 

And so amazingly green. Like, woah. SO GREEN. Everything is green right now. Emerald and jade and lime and forest... every hue nature has to offer is on display, right here in my frickin' yard. 

So I was feeling pretty lucky as I walked over to my favorite corner, which is outlined on two sides by cedar trees. It's shady and smells delicious. My blissful gaze stopped when I spotted... no, it couldn't be... I would have known about this... would've seen them last summer... unless I wasn't walking around our yard often enough...

Raspberry bushes! Right there on the edge of the little forest that forms the boundary line between our yard and that of our neighbor. Of course, the berries are green. For now.

Even this is a delightful shade of green. #septic

5x5 Challenge : Day 6 | HAPPY PLACE

Here is a bathroom. It's not my bathroom, but I do intend to take a shower there one day. It's so pretty. I feel like I'm in a fancy hotel when I'm in this bathroom. The kind of hotel that you're pretty sure you could live in. Yes, you'd miss having a kitchen and the constantly changing neighbors would start to really annoy you, but the bathroom amenities make you so happy that you could probably get over all of the troublesome stuff. Pretty, well-organized spaces make me happy. 

My hairbrush makes me happy, too. It's bright yellow with a big oval-shaped head and a smooth rubber grip. I apparently don't clean it out as often as I thought I did. Can you spot the lint? My brush used to belong to my sister but she left it at my mom and dad's house when we were all there for Christmas and I asked her if I could keep it. That's how much I liked it. I'm still talking about a hairbrush.

Step 1. 

Step 2. 

It's that easy. Just chop it in half. Et voila! You're half as needy as you were a few weeks ago! Isn't science grand?

And since this post turned out to be a bit of a caption-fest, can we just talk about the name of this toothpaste? This is something else that makes me happy -- or at least makes me smile. And then I'm smiling, so that sets off all of those happy hormones they talk about and before you know it my toothpaste is making me happy. Science.

5x5 Challenge : Day 5 | BEST GUESS

I've always found it pretty funny that I go to a hair salon every 12 weeks or so to get chemicals and foils stuck in my hair, which temporarily makes me look like this:

So hot. 

And then, like a bruise that gets super deep purple before it fades to yellowish green and then disappears completely, the foils and chemicals get washed away and all that's left is a happy blond. 

That's me. The happy blond. 

And why does being blond make me happy? Oh, I don't know for sure. I think it has something to do with the fact that I was blond as a kid. I loved the magical science behind my hair getting even lighter and happier as the summer wore on - all by itself, just by being outside. 

That's probably why.

5x5 Challenge : Day 4 BITTERsweet

I love cereal. I think I love cereal more than I should, but I know I'll never stop. I love cereal with high protein and fiber content and low sugar. I love cereal mostly at night - in fact, I haven't eaten cereal for breakfast in at least a year. Maybe two. 

Every night after I eat cereal, I swallow a little pill. As I've mentioned here before, that pill has been getting smaller and smaller. (You may be surprised to learn, as was I, that the dosage of the pill corresponds directly to its physical size.) I went from 100 mg, which was yellow and oval, down to 50 mg, which is blue. Now I'm experimenting with 25, so I chop the little blue sucker in half. The notion that half of a pill has exactly half the amount of medication in it is positively ludicrous to me, but what do I know? I've been swallowing these pills for eight years not knowing exactly what they're made up of so why start asking questions now?

I know for sure that cereal comforts me. Cereal makes me feel like everything is normal and right and the way it's always been with no judgement as to whether it's always been good or bad. Nighttime cereal is my "goodnight" to myself. Swallowing a tiny pill afterwards is my "fingers crossed." 

Nighty night, Zoloft.

5x5 Challenge : Day 3 BIRTHDAY PARTY

The light outside right now is peach colored. It's a peachy sunset. Oh dear.

Since I started this project I hear myself pre-writing these posts in my head all day long. I tell myself to remember this moment or that thought or the other witty remark with the wholehearted intention of making these entries a little more interesting. But when I sit here with my computer on my lap, with the goodnights of my kids to their grandparents singing through the monitor, it's all gone. I have absolutely no idea what I was going to write about. 

The birthday party happened, and by all accounts (including my own) it was a success. I woke up this morning and made a conscious decision not to give a fuck. It worked like a charm. I knew that I'd done the prep work and just enough planning so that it wouldn't suck for anyone, and after feeling a little stressed about the whole thing last night I made a concerted mental shift upon waking this morning. 

When I worked at The Week there was this incredible muscle-y, tattooed and scarred man who worked in the mail room. His name was Bill. (Not to be confused with the weasel-y sexual-harrassing pig of an Editor in Chief, also named Bill.) The good Bill had been shot and stabbed and spent more than one night locked up on Riker's Island. He was as hard as they come on the outside. But man-oh-man was he the most caring, thoughtful dude on the inside. We talked often and neither of us had time for superficial shit. He knew I struggled with panic and fear and anxiety. Though he claimed to lack the psycho-babble vocab to talk about these things on an intellectual level, he gave me one my most favorite mantras for fearful times : it's not that serious. 

I wish I could say it out loud the way I hear him saying it in my mind. His deep voice would resonate through his chest cavity before making it to my ears so the words were always laced with extra gravitas and wisdom. It's not that serious. 

5x5 Challenge : Day 2 UNDER THE WIRE

Oh man. Look at all this extrinsic motivation at work, Nicci Micco. I'm literally in bed wanting nothing more than to close my eyes and sail off to sleep, yet when I saw your post on Facebook I remembered : Shit. I need to write. 

It makes me thankful. And rueful. Is that a word? I don't want to be doing this right now - particularly on my flippin' phone - but I am so glad to be doing this right now. 

As you can see, my five-minute reflections take on a different tone closer to midnight. My brain is tired and scattered and putting these words together takes an effort that I'm not aware of before the sun sets. And my tummy hurts. It's been hurting off and on for two weeks now. I should probably get that, as my mom phrased it, "resolved."

A kidney test! She says. Get your kidneys tested! But mom, the pain isn't near my kidneys. It doesn't matter! That's the first place that medicine effects. 

Ah, "that" medicine. It's Zoloft, you know. For panic attacks. I've been on the stuff for eight years and four weeks ago I began the process of coming off. From 100 milligrams to 50, and tonight, from 50 to 25. I cut the 50 mg tablet in half with my snazzy new pill cutter and swallowed the tiniest little pill. As I barely felt it go down my throat I thought, "do good things," the same as I have every night for the past eight years. But then I thought, "or do nothing at all." Maybe I've got this. 

Tomorrow will be a test. Dual birthday party for our kids - 20 children and 15 adults RSVP'd. Let's see how I handle that on 25 em gees. 

5x5 Challenge : Day 1

It feels quite strange to have pictures before words. I deal in words, traditionally, but I'll leave them be for now. The photos came to live here before these words for a very simple and annoying reason: I don't have any more room on my computer's start-up disk. Huh? Aren't computers huge these days -- or tiny with huge memory capacity? Yes, yes they are. But the problem for me is that this computer - this tool that I use to make a tiny bit of money and to express myself creatively and to waste time on Facebook - isn't really mine. Not completely. This computer is my husband's old computer. It became mine when he upgraded. But he didn't want to take all of his stuff (files? software? i have no idea) off of it so it's only half mine. 

This is not going to be a five minute rant against my husband. In the two minutes that I have left to write, I want to say, sort of publicly, that I NEED to get better at meeting my own needs. This has been a problem for me since I was a kid - second born, non-boat-rocker that I was/am. I'm tired of it. I'm sick of that being my MO, my excuse, and my failing. 

(I must interject here to say that I already finished and published this post. Except apparently I didn't. Do I re-write the post as it was, from memory, or do I live here in the present two minutes and switch gears to discuss technology-related frustrations further? Should I talk about the firey feeling in my solar plexus right now? Nah, back to the thing about the needs...)

5x5 Challenge, you challenge me to show up, for myself. 

Challenge accepted.