Wide Awake Now

I have a feeling that something big is just around the bend. Is it just my imagination or lack there of? Did we create a rift in the time space continuum relaying our emotions to the vast beyond? Or all we all just drunk on this thing called life?

There has been an unsettling feeling stirring within me for over a month now and it is the most uncomfortable place I've have been in a very long time. There was a time that I believed that my father was a God and faultless, I though my mother had all the answers, that my friends would always be my friends, my family would live within a block of each other, and that my grandparents would live forever.

I used to believe that bullies were just bullies, that cheerleaders were all flakes, that blonds should be stopped, and that the dark was a scary place to be without a candle. I use to think that being smart was unobtainable, that reading was not possible, and that the past could not hurt me. I use to think that I had a rock for a heart, and a trash bin for a soul.

I know better now.

I use to sit for hours on end just dreaming of how it was going to be and why it had to be the way it is. I find myself these days trying to remember what it *was* like and worry less about what is going to be. I use to believe that we are all black or white, good or bad, sinners or heaven sent... I now know that we are not... not black or white, not good or bad, not sinners or heaven sent. I now know that we are all just us, human, alive, and making our way through the metal jungle with at time the stealth moves of a stalking feline and other times with the clout of a sloth... and other times we are standing still not moving an inch, waiting…yes waiting for those that are not there yet, waiting for those that will walk with us a mile and share in our joys, sadness, tears, and triumphs.

I now see that a smile can cure a cut, and a kiss can make things better. I see that we are all part of a common ground, doing our best to remove the walls of clay that are no longer needed, replacing them with that grand old slamming screen door; and not once shouting “stop the slamming”. We swing it open wild and free, letting it slam against our soul's allowing the wind to carry the echo to those that have yet to find the front porch.

For those of you that are still waiting, I thank you. I see that porch light on, it has been a long trek, but your echo is guiding me well ensuring that my steps are rich and sure. I was lost in a fog for what seemed a lifetime, but that fog is lifting and I see the hand outstretched.
I was asleep for so long.

Jade 2003

I'm wide awake now.

How's that for rambling ?

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!

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.