It really tyes the room together…

I could SO make that.

I could SO make that…

“I could be rich if someone paid me for every thought of “I could make that.”

If I had actually made it, I could be rich.

It’s a lose-lose here in Wendy World.”

 

This is my current Facebook status.  I tend to work my damn-dest(?) to avoid cliche’ phrases when I write.  I have noticed this about myself quite often lately.

For instance, while typing the above status, I almost typed:

“If I had a penny for everytime…”

AND

“On the other hand”

Instead, I “Steered Clear” (See?  The cliche’ monster almost got me again!).  Ahem, Instead I pulled away from the programmed thought and put some extra thought into it and came up with a little diddy that I am quite proud of.  (Obviously, since I’ve shared it here on my oh-so “Personal”–for all the internet world to see–blog)

I used to write spiral notebooks full of poetry (almost typed “shit-ton of poetry”…then I thought…hmm, that visual is nasty.  Exactly how can I describe HOW MUCH poetry I ACTUALLY wrote?) Ahh…I regress….AHEM Hem HEM…..

I used to write spiral, notebooks full of poetry.  I wrote mostly while anguishing over the fact that I was a teenager without a boyfriend, or any admirers what-so-ever.  I wrote intensely when infatuated with a new crush.  I labeled who I was thinking of while writing the poem by putting their initials in the upper right-hand corner of the poem so that I could recall it later…or maybe so that I could include their name secretly on the page in code?

While writing these poems, which I now look back on as a sort of diary entry, I’d type these cliche’ phrases and statements and think “That is boring.  That’s not me.  What do I really mean to say here?  How can I describe what I am feeling without writing like everyone else?”

I often listened to influencial bands and artists like:

The Doors

Incubus

Bush (heehee)

The Fugees

I listened to them on my portable off-brand “Walkman” CD player. I wore headphones.  I burned scented candles.  I turned off the lights and dwelt in my cave.  I thought for hours about one sentence.  I wrote KICK ASS poetry.  Really.  I know it is mine and I’m an egotistical bitch for saying that about my own creation, but I’m proud of that damn poetry.

The poetry of my adolescence is dark and descriptive.  It occasionally rhymes in A/B pattern.

I would sit and rhyme words in my head until I came up with a pattern that worked.

“His eyes are tattered switchplates, turning me on”– (Totally just made that up)

On, gone, fawn, dawn, lawn, phone, shone….

I would rhyme words until I found a connection to the rhyme.

“Painting scattered numbers, a light that is not dawn”

Like that.

(Totally made up that second line too).

I miss writing like that.  It comes out ever-so often in something as god-awful as a Facebook status.  It is then that I realize how I may just NEED to write.  I started this blog without a steady reason why.  Ideas churning ’round about how I should find something that I believe in to write about.  Instead, I’ve found that this blog has become an outlet for me to write experiences to better figure out who the hell I am as a person.

I’ve been slowly ‘soul-searching’ for the past year or so.  My husband triggered a lot of it.  He’d ask questions like “Do you really think that, or is that your Mom’s opinion talking?”  At first, I’d get pissed off.  “OF COURSE I THINK THAT, I SAID IT, DIDN’T I??????”  But, the more I began to dwell on it, the more I figured out that…..shit….he is right.  That is a hard thing to accept.  Now, I am to the point where I can catch myself when I begin to talk via my upbringing.  I speak words that are Sooooooooo not Zen.  It’s an ugly bug that needs to be expelled from my belly button like the ‘bug’ in the Matrix car scene (My husband writes a lot about The Matrix on his blog, “Epiphany Now”–there’s your hidden plug, baby 🙂

Anyhow….the more I come to terms with why I am the way I am, why my defensive thoughts always kick in first, why I can’t process words verbally as fast as I can speak them…the more I figure that I should probably keep this blog and sort it out here.  First for me, then for you, the reader.

One flaw of mine that I have pretty much squashed like a bug in baby fingers (my son picked up and squashed his first insect today) is the “people pleaser” that I had become.  I didn’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings….I didn’t want anyone to think ill of me…I didn’t want to say anything stupid and come across as a moron.  PHEW!  What a great thing to purge.  SOOOOOOOOOOOOOoooooOOOOooooooo healthy to get rid of that one.  I can’t say it enough.  Part of being a people pleaser is worry.  I’m not completely purged of that beast yet, but I am beginning to think that it is hanging on by a little chicken bone tendon. (not the cliche’ thread).

Looking forward to what new discoveries about myself may appear to me through my writing.  Feels good.

Wendy’s ever-changing favorite new hobby

I love crafts.  I recently had time to dwell on the question: “What is the one thing you HAVE TO do, or you’ll go crazy?”  My answer, after little thought, was “Create something”.  Sometimes the little thoughts are the ones that have the most truth to them.  Those ideas that just pop into your head as a response to a question are typically, I’ve found, either programmed through my up-bringing or the true, unfiltered truth.  This is how the name of this blog came to me.  I thought “Hmm…I need to name this blog so that I can comment on my friend Carrie’s blog.  What should I call it?  Hmm…let’s see…let me get some ideas churning here….like  a butter churn.  Oh yeah.  That will do.”

Churning thoughts are common in the world of Wendy.  Hi, I’m Wendy…the writer of the churn. (See what I mean?)  I’m often a very random thinker.  My husband says that I am perma-stoned. (you should hear those random thoughts when I actually AM stoned!)  My HAVE TO need to survive without the crazies, the need to create, often floods my thoughts.

Here is a list of the Wendy HAVE TO create plans I have for…hmm…can I do all of these right now?

-Become a beekeeper so that I can use the bees for their honey, and extract their honeycomb wax for candles. I also want them because I want a bunch of flowers in my yard, and we have a garden.  Bees like that.

– Sew vintage clothes with all of the kickass sewing patterns that I have hoarded in one huge tupperware storage tub.  I’ve picked them up from thrift stores for MANY years.  For these many years I’ve been telling myself that I am going to sew clothes for myself and my family and rock that shit out.  I have ideas of grandeur for our outer appearance.  I want to look ‘shabby and chic’ and want to be proud of myself for not blending in by wearing whatever the rest of the population deems to be normal attire.

– Make photography props and sell them!  This includes sewing those ever-so-leechlike baby headbands that you see taking over the heads of newborns being photographed worldwide.  I’m convinced that if future civilizations look back on today’s infant portraiture, they will be convinced that by 2012 we, as a species, had evolved genetically to have the ability to grow flowers from our heads.  Oh…and they will think that we had flawless, glowing skin (thanks to the tremendous need for photographer’s everywhere to edit skin until it has NO unique quality to it what-so-ever).  We’re all porcelain, right?  Well, the white folks, anyway.  The black folks have skin that is a melted, milky chocolate goodness.  Like a Dove chocolate commercial.  Mmmmm….chocolate.

– Make candles.  The bees and their honeycomb will be great for the wax.  For now, maybe I should start by melting down this 30 lb. block of wax I purchased with my 40% off Michael’s coupon to see if I can do it the un-original way.  That might be a good test of my ability to “Make” candles, right?  I put the word “Make” into quotations because I think it is cheap to say that you are making candles, when all you are doing is buying the wax and the mold and following directions on the package.  I want to MAKE candles….like, dip the wick that’s-what-she-said kind of make them.  I want to build the hives, attain the bees, extract the wax and MAKE the candles.

*side note: I am allergic to bees.  I think I might need to invest in some Epipens before donning my newly purchased bee suit that I picked up off of E-bay.  I think I feel as if I need to overcome this fear of being stung and become one with the bees.  Yes, I know…a bit masochistic.  But I feel it will also be a healthy thing for me.

– another craft that I MUST create: I must bake.  I must have desserts in my oven at all times.  I must wear a vintage apron that I have sewn from my vintage patterns and BAKE like a mad woman.  I MUST make my own bread for our family (which I have and DO!  YAY ME!).  I must experiment with spices and how they blend with one another.  I must continue my hoard of cookbooks that I attain at thrift stores (love those thrift stores…I’m sure I’ll write many stories about THAT later on….THAT).  I want to bake muffins and cheesecake and banana bread and pretzels and more and More and MORE!  (another thing about me.  I like MORE!- sometimes in a glutton sort of way, and other times in a hoarder type of disorder)

– Yard art.  I MUST create things out of junk and display them in my yard.  Maybe I will sell them too.  I must drive around on trash day and pick up broken lamps and old doors and rickety ass tables and make them MINE!  I must have delusions that I will paint them a brilliant aqua color…but an aqua color that is crackled and old and weathered looking.  I MUST tell myself that I know how to recover a chair…even though I have never attempted it before.  BUT…MORE!  I do already have the fabric/furniture staple gun that I need to recover.  (Here it is…the confession…I hoard craft items because I tell myself that if the world stops beyond the walls of my house I HAVE TO own a staple gun, candle making kit, woodburning tool, zillions of buttons, overload of fabric, random junk to make fabulous junk art with….and on, on, on.  I am a CRAFT HOARDER!)–but don’t tell my husband 😉  hehehe ) <DUH!  He DID move all of my hoard to our new home.  I think the may have caught onto me by now.  Alas….I will continue to deny it>

– I HAVE TO decorate.  I have stacks of stuff all around our new living quarters that I plan to make into this awesome retro-bohemian chill pad.  Hanging lamps, wall tapestries, wooden divider screen, old ass silk scarves that I say I am going to sew together to make pillows.  All THAT.  I have delusions of grandeur here, too.  I think I could create a room like I tag on Pinterest.  I think I can have this chill pad…and have a toddler who will, of course, think it is chill too and not terrorize it.  Riiiiiight.

– I MUST plant flowers and garden.  Boy o’ boy, I went deep into this one last Spring.  I had this notion that I would be a master grower of the flora and that the fauna everywhere would worship me (or did I get the flora and fauna reversed there?  For some reason, I always end up sounding stupid because I often reverse them.  Ah well, I’m not going to stop to google it.  You do that for me and let me know, m’kay?)  This notion that I began last Spring was inflated by my Ego thinking that I could grow these flowers so well that I could SELL them, too!  (See this other theme I have in my life?  I’m always trying to make money by creating things.  Always.  And I’m proud of that.  I think it is a good goal 😉

So…that about sums up the majority of  MUST and HAVE TO create projects that I have running around in my head.  I tell myself that since I’m now living the life of a retired ole broad, I can do them 24-7.  Not happening yet…but I look forward to grooming this new living space into all that it can be, creatively.

 

That.

The overanalyzing, ellipses crazy, blogger

So….I love to use the dots…

I tend to make up my own grammar.

I write my blogs like I used to write poetry.  One liners here and there, maybe a paragraph, maybe a huge run-on sentence.  I have traded in putting pen to paper for typing onto an online blog.  This is all new to me.  I’ve had business blogs in the past, which were mostly photos, but never a personal blog.  It’s a new adventure.  An adventure that I may grow tired of and end up deleting.

At first I thought I needed to type this out for my ‘readers’ (all one of you), but the more I thought about it, the more I realized that I actually needed to type it out as an explanation for ME.  I see it as a sort of free pass for typing however I want, in whatever format I choose, without fear of coming across as a blabbering idiot who thinks they sound smart, but has no logic when it comes to grammar and punctuation.

So… (love those ellipses!) I’m going to get over that now and start typing how I see fit.

Oh…I’ll get over it after I also state for the net that I also like to overuse the word “that”. That’s right. 😉

Anyhow, I won’t be ‘proofing’ and re-reading these random thoughts after they are typed into my little box of cyberspace.  If it pisses you off that I can’t spell for shit and that I type like an un-groomed redneck…then we can’t be friends.  Sorry.

Okay.  I think I feel better now.

This ole broad

My family and I recently made a HUGE change in our lives.

My husband quit his job.  I left behind a network I’d been building for my self-employed business.  We cleared out our house and found renters for it.  We moved back to my hometown.

Why?  Why would we leave all of this seemingly perfect existence behind?

How?  How can everyone assume that just because my husband had a job, I had a business and we had a house…that life was what it was supposed to be for us?

The answer:  I thought we were the happiest we could be, while doing what was expected of us by the norms of society.

Well, well well.

Here’s the “Big Picture”– We still felt like we were missing out on something.  We were gardening.  We were eating organic foods, and reading books and baking cookies and playing board games.  We thought we were living this authentic life.  We thought this, until we let it all go and allowed what was meant to be to fall into place.

Here is our story.

My husband had a job with an EMS service.  He drove an ambulance and responded to 911 calls.  He loved the job…but eventually couldn’t deal with all of the outrageous “corporate bullshit” (as he calls it).  In fact, he had such a hard time dealing with expectations of the corporation that toward the end of  the last chapter of our life, he ended up being prescribed an anti-depression medication.

Here, I must tell you that my husband and I are sort of hippies.  Hippy is the best word I can say to get you to understand that we sort of ebb and flow with life in a way that original humans used to live.  We don’t watch TV.   We don’t eat processed foods.  We don’t drink soft drinks. I don’t shop for clothes and pretty girl things.  He doesn’t wear Sperry’s and watch sports.

We are a pair of folks who can sit and stare at the forest in a pair of Goodwill lawn chairs and be content. We feel that we are, in short, not your average couple.

Anyhow…back to our story.  Being on a form of prescription, mind altering medication was not an option for us.   In our original thoughts, we had no choice.  He had to take the medication to keep the job, to keep the house, to feed the baby, to live the American Dream.

It wasn’t until we realized that today’s “American Dream” is NOT how we want to live.  We don’t want to be a part of it.

So…in short, we both moved back to the area where my husband spent his teenage years, and I spent the first 20 years of my life.  We moved in with my Aunt, a family member that I had never allowed myself the pleasure of knowing beyond the courteous southern getting-to-know you conversations I’d had with her all of my life.  She has recently lost the love of her life. Her husband of almost 20 years.  She was dark, depressed and lonely.  She offered up her home to us in such a serendipitous way…in such a perfect synchronistic manner.  We went for it.

Now…we are both living under her (paid for) roof.  She recently went to an Attorney and had the house and property willed to us.  She has allowed us to come in and move in all of our things to fit our style.  She doesn’t care what we do with her walls, her cabinets or her closets.  She is a beacon of light, leading us away from our lonely island existence.  The island of misfit grown-up-toys that we thought we needed to work all of our lives to attain.

Add to this, our son.  We have a son who is almost two years old.  We had a hard time finding trustworthy people to watch him when we both needed to work.  We were landlocked about an hour and a half away from all of our family and friends.

Now, we have my Aunt to watch him and love him and teach him as he grows.  Her help in watching him has allowed us to follow our dreams.  The dreams we never thought we could attain.

I’m a photographer, so it is easy for me to work hard when I really want to 🙂

My husband is gardening and working toward building a self sustainable future for our family.

We have created a business together in which we find used or unwanted items in thrift stores, at yard and garage sales, etc. and find a buyer for them.  We salvage trash from curbs and turn others’ waste into profit.

We are living our bliss.

Living your bliss is hard to describe.  I wake up each morning whenever I want to (remember…I get to work hard when I really want to!)  My husband is an excellent cook.  He has taken to cooking all of us breakfast each morning.  We found a local source of eggs from a farmer, so we get the good stuff.  I fiddle around selling things on the internet for a few hours (or however many hours I want) and then have all of the free time I need to play with my son and watch him grow.  I have a craft room filled with boxes of fabric and trinkets just waiting to be turned into art.  I have a yard that is begging for original flower beds and beehives.  I am living well beyond my years.

Hmm…Living beyond your years.  Since I have moved in with family, I feel I have aged in wisdom in the past month than I have in the past six years.  I feel that I must be an old soul, because I don’t fit in with people my age.   I am living the life of a retired woman.  I even make sure I run my errands before everyone gets out of school or off work.

I recently had one of the best conversations I’ve had in a long time with a woman in her 70’s.  She is the wife of the farmer with the eggs I mentioned before.  We talked about farming and gardening and the chickens.  We laughed about the price of flower bulbs at Lowes, and how you can just dig some up from a family member who has excess plants for free.

What does this say about me?  I’d think that it says more about my generation.  We don’t know how to talk about real things anymore.  How did life become technology?

Bathe, work, eat.  That schedule is not living.  Wake up.  If you can find a way out, take it.  Dump off your Ego and your pride…and live.  Dream your happiest dream vividly and while you are awake.