Derby Days Past

 There will be no wide brimmed hats donned with such care and grace.  Not this year.  Thanks ever so much mass spreaders.   At the very least, I am still able to enjoy a beautifully glazed bourbon cake.  Oh how I miss being in the South for these events.  The regalia, the food, the mint julips, muddled ever so perfectly.     

Sleep

What a dreamy idea, yet when there is breathe in my body, and a thought in my head how can I sleep? 

Would I not be robbing you and myself of the opportunity to suffer through my spelling errors, my wit, charm, shameless sexual advances on my not so innocent husband?

If I slept now would any of you know of the deep unhealthy feelings I hold for all of you, or would I just be a faded memory, or worse yet a used tissue in the hand of father fate? 

If I slept and did not share with you the random evil that has become such an important part of our very normal *cough* lives would I not be giving into to the bible thumping head hunters that would have us eating whole grain foods, and brushing after every meal?

Should we allow this sadness to take place our should we rage against the night? Should we just sit idly by and no longer post, leaving the walls of our home barren and uncorrupted?  

I say nay! I say we band together and vow to paint the walls red with passion, the trimmings yellow with a zzzzsnap embracing all that Mirage has endowed us with. I want us to haul in purple rugs to give a comfort that reminds us of Razi, and a fluorescent green lamp shade that screams Evil thread 666 jesteR lives all night as we suck the marrow from life rendering it our whore now and always.

Ok enough from me...

 I love you buh bye... silly buttons!

Hair Today, Gone Tomorrow

I finally had a chance to talk to my brother today.  He' doing his best to sound, jovial but I can hear the truth of it all it in his voice.  He is struggling again with his anxiety and his depression.  Under it all, under all the jokes, he's just so sad.  I understand that, he said his ex girlfriend is still abusing the drugs and doing the "save me" routine.  She's always been tis way.  It's what drew him to her in the first place.  He's got a saviour complex a mile wide. He craves it like a drug, but as time slowly slips away he becomes tired and less drawn to a weak female.  She's supposed to start rehab in a couple of weeks.  I hope for his and my nephew's sake, it takes this time. 

I tried to remind him that her pain is hers alone to fix.  She had the ability to heal, but she has to want to do it.  He can no longer ride in on his white horse to fix it all.  He cannot keep ding all the same enabling behaviours.  I'll be making some finger food , snacks and such and have them sent over in the afternoon to him.  Just to give him a bit of breathing room.  

The verdict is still out on my hair, I've been foolish enough to allow my stress levels to climb to such a point that it's falling at an alarming rate once again.  It hasn't been this bad in years.  I've only got a few strands of white here and there.  I wish that it would just go all white for me.  Going natural would rock.  It's been 6 months since I went ahead and bleached it all to bright white.  I still shampo it with a dark purple shampoo, it takes the brassy/yellow tone out.  I haven't yet decided what colour I want to throw onto it next.  Maybe I'll just go back to my mahogany red.  If only it would grow as fast as my waistline does then I'd really be pleased. 

Reflection On Time 2

 Barbie, you have really mulled this over. I know you said that you'd rather claw out your own eyeballs than go back to any reunion. But what if, just play along Barbie. What if for those few short hours in time, you get to go back. To be who you were, the same kid with the same attitude?

Would you? Could you?

You see I am the shy quiet girl (figuratively for you, but literally in my high school) who sat in the drama class and never said much of anything and spent a lot of time looking at the floor. I didn't disappear..I chose to live, to come out of my shell and grow.

I am also the girl who started a family. Perhaps too soon and it has not only aged me, but has given me insight and strength. With those added insights and strength, I found a unique set of  tools and hopefulness to teach the family that I created early on, not to walk down the same road that I have.

You never really get to go home again. The buildings are there, the structure's the same, but nothing else seems familiar. 

But if you give yourself permission, permission to just be who you are. Permission to not care about the "cliques" to not notice who was the popular kid and who were the nerds. Permission to mix and mingle and perhaps get to know that one person you have always wanted to talk to, but wouldn't, couldn't or were far too shy to. You might have fun and for a split second go back in time, so that those who didn't know you then, who never knew you were alive or didn't care that you were will leave that reunion with your name on their lips and your memory etched in their mind. And then you will have touched the world.

Just a thought. 

Reflecting On Time

I kind of whipped this up while I was sitting at work and thought I'd share it. It'll explain why I'll likely be in a really weird mood the next few weeks. 

Perception is an odd thing, especially when it involves something as abstract as time. A day can drag on and "last forever" while weeks, months and years can seem to disappear in a flash.

I like many of you possibly have; quite a few years ago, subjected myself to one of the most spectacular examples of this phenomenon: my high school reunion. My graduating class had about four hundred and thirty people in it. I wouldn't say I really knew a lot of them, but I could probably have picked about two thirds of them out of a police lineup by the time I graduated. In the months and years that followed, I lost contact with... well, just about all of them. I never saw them around town for the brief time I returned home and then moved out to the sprawling metropolis of York Region into the USA.

It wasn't quite a "small town", with right around 12,000 or so folks living in the area at that time, but people sure lived like it was. It was everything you'd imagine a large rural high school to be, right down to the cheerleader sex scandals and hockey heroes who always managed to be in the wrong place at the wrong time after the last school bells rang. Some went to college, others went to work, still others started a family right away... or worked on raising the family they already had started.

There was always that bittersweet mixture of joy and tragedy, opportunity and wasted days, youth and death. I remember the honor student who had a few beers and fled the local cops for fear of getting busted. He wrapped his car around a tree and died on the scene. There's always that tinge of the tragic around youth. It's never quite the carefree time that is romanticized in music or movies or TV. Everyone had their scars and trials and burdens to bear, but most came out of it okay. At least, they came out as okay as an seventeen-year old kid could at the time.

We made it through, got our diplomas, hung out at parties for a few weeks afterward and went our separate ways. I think of all that I've personally been through in those many years away and how it's shaped me. I've made decisions and paid the consequences. I have some fantastic memories and bitter regrets. I look in the mirror now and I don't see the baby-faced teenager who walked off to college with a baby in one arm full of hopes and dreams of being a profiler. Sometimes I stand and stare at my reflection for just a few seconds and think of how it's all different now.

Now I can say I got to go home again. I got to walk into a big room with mid-80's music playing loudly and shake hands and exchange laughs with people I never really knew to begin with. I got to also see some people I did know pretty well then. I looked into their eyes and searched for who they used to be... and it wasn't there. None of us were really who we were, or who we were going to be; because that's how time works. All the hours and days and months and years just kept adding up, and it was all there on display for me to see. I got to see how the homecoming queen aged, I heard how the quiet girl in my politics class just disappeared one day, and for some strange reason, it hurt me. I got to see the question in so many hearts, "How did this happen? I wasn't supposed to be there, like this, at this time. I was supposed to be someone else."

We'll all be different from who we were. Just not whom we thought we'd be.

That's time.

Utter Randomness

Why is your sky blue?  Mine is black. Black as night.  Just a depthless void filled with invisible stars that are overpowered by the synthetic night-life.

Tiny ice crystals fall from the sky to create a shimmering image that is soon destroyed by snowplows and salt trucks.  Maybe we're better off staying home in the winter.  Few things are more beautiful than a parking lot covered in a white coat.

Okay, I'm just about done.  Thanks for playing.

Shards

 My story is filled with a million broken pieces.  Terrible choices, less than well thought out plans, and some of the ugliest of truths.  Yet it also contains major comebacks, deep unabiding love, pockets of deep rich belly laughter, a learned peace in my soul, and a fire in my belly.  I do not know what tomorrow will bring, but I am ready for it.