The Good Shadow

Obligatory comment about how it’s been a while and I’m terribly sorry. Moving on.

I found this poem floating around my computer just now. I’ve no idea how old it is, but it makes me happy every time I read it. Tweaked slightly, here it is!

The Good Shadow

He is the creature who comes in the night

to clean the kitchen and return

that sock you lost in the laundry last week. He is

the hooded figure who slinks by you

in a darkly-lit alleyway with his hood up

when you’re dead drunk at 3 in the morning and

you just know he’s going to mug you or something

but he doesn’t, just

turns a corner and disappears. (He is

going that way to gently chastise

the man who had an entirely different idea. The man

is cowed, cries, gets back

on the road to being clean the next day.)

He is the one who whispers

into your ear in the middle of the night terrible

terrible things

but only so that you turn over

and hold your lover closer, tighter

than you have in months. He

is one of the many who move things around,

puts them where you’re sure you didn’t leave them,

but he alone puts them where they

should have bbeen in the first place.

He sets a floorboard creaking

in the dark; you

deadbolt the door for the rest of the week.

(The next night, somebody considers

breaking in, but chooses easier prey.

You sleep.)

 

When you turn on the tap and the water’s already hot,

that’s him. When tears fall and the kleenex box

is right there, that’s him. When you

get home that night at 3:30 and your keys are gone and

your roommates didn’t lock the door for once, that’s

actually just dumb luck, he was still busy. But

it could have been him.

 

He is not your guardian angel. He

is from somewhere else entirely.

He is here

because none of us is perfect. Nobody can

be truly selfless while shining brightly. Good deeds,

real ones,

are done from the shadows.

A soft laugh in the night

and he is gone,

back into the snowstorm

to rescue a housecat who was left outside.

NaNo is over!

Yes indeed, I won NaNoWriMo. I’m excited. Are you excited? Because I’m excited. I took a couple of weeks to recover, but now the writing bug has hit me again. I may have started a habit here.

A friend of mine did tarot readings last night. I don’t put too much stock in any predictive aspects, but I do think that if the reader knows what s/he’s doing, it can be a good source of insight. And the fact that everything to do with me kept coming up Queen of Swords and Judgement is one hell of a coincidence.

Conspiracy theory of the week: SC Johnson runs everything. EVERYTHING.

I wrote the first draft of a poem today. Its working title is “The Good Shadow.” It’s a bit whimsical. Should I post it here when I’m semi-satisfied with it?

Satisfaction. That is one of my favourite words. It naturally comes out of your mouth with a pleasant sigh behind it, and the meaning is pretty great. It seems so much less intense to me than a lot of other emotion words, and that’s a good thing to me. Satisfaction is gentle. It’s not ecstasy, it’s not elation, it’s just that deep understanding that right now, everything is okay. You’ve done well, and it’s time to rest and be happy.

I’m in a strange mood tonight it would seem. Too much weirdness these past couple of days, and not enough sleep. I shall end this here, because if I get any less coherent I’ll start losing the basics of sentence structure.

Also I have Jesse McCartney stuck in my head. GO AWAY JESSE.

NaNoWriMo!

National Novel Writing Month is almost here! I will, of course, be participating. I don’t know how likely I am to actually win – this is my second attempt, and hopefully my first success! This does mean that I probably won’t be posting many long entries for the next month, but I’ll try to do short updates every so often (assuming my fingers don’t fall off from typing 50,000 words).

Fragments

Hello internet. It’s been a while. I don’t have one specific thing on my mind today, so enjoy some bits and pieces.

Ways to make the world a little brighter

1. Next time you’re in a long line, turn to the person behind you and strike up a conversation. I know – they’re a random stranger who has nothing in common with you. But when you’re both stuck somewhere for two hours, you’ll find out pretty quickly that you have more in common than you think.

2. Bus drivers are – for the most part – good people. Say thank you.

3.  Another time to strike up a conversation: when you happen to walk in the same direction as that guy who works near your house. You know the one I mean – the one who smiles at everybody but whose job is a total joke. And I know he has a limp and you’ll miss your bus if you slow down. Do it anyway. He needs it, and so do you.

4. Any other ideas? Leave a comment and I’ll give it a shot.

Weird Pop Culture Theories

1. Cee Lo Green was spending time with some childhood friends when one of them played a song he had written about a gold-digging woman who left him for a richer man. Cee Lo loved it and turned it into the hit “Fuck you,” not realizing that it was written about the girl he was seeing at the time.

2. The new Britney Spears song “I Wanna Go” makes heavy use of autotune and other electronic techniques, minimizing Britney’s trademark vocal tone. This is because the song is not, in fact, sung by Britney, but rather by a fairly good imitator. The use of autotune distorts the voice enough to make the difference virtually unnoticable.

3. The latest Star Trek movie established an alternate timeline through Spock’s time travel mishap later in life, leading to some events unfolding differently than in the original series. This alternate timeline is the same reason Marvel’s new movies (Thor, X-Men, etc) operate in a new, slightly revised canon.

Poetry

I haven’t written much in a while, but I want to get started again. If I get a list of at least 10 subjects to write about, I will try to write 5 per week until I finish them all. Go!

Signoff

That’s all I have for now. Do we like this format? It was actually pretty easy for me, and I felt it getting faster and looser as I went. (That’s what s/he said?) Anyway, I’m off for now but I’ll try to be back soon! I leave you with a quote I just either made up or stole from somewhere I’ve forgotten.

“Nobody who matters will ever tell you it’s impossible.”

ARG

The other day, I was driving with the radio on, not paying much attention to what was playing. A song came on and I thought “Hm, this girl has a decent voice, but the lyrics are a little whiny.” Then the chorus started.

“And I’m like baby, baby, baby, ohhhhhhhhhhhh!”

I’d never heard a Justin Bieber song without knowing who it was before. God he sounds (sounded? Has his voice changed yet?) like a woman!

I found a neat little facebook app, and I’ve a master plan to use it over the next week or so. This is gonna result in some hella weird facebook statuses. (Yes, the title is related. Hint: R stands for Reality.) It may spill over into the blog, so don’t get confused! If you’re not going to join in my silliness, just ignore all the strangeness over the next little while. I’ll make it clear when things are back to normal. Until then, I will NOT publicly break character here or on facebook, and any out-of-character comments might be deleted 😉

I’m finally moving back to Ottawa this weekend! It’s been a long summer, and I’m kinda glad it’s ending…I miss having a routine, I miss my friends from school, and most of all I miss my wonderful boyfriend! Posting frequency may suffer what with the move and and back to school. But who am I kidding, I have no set times or steady topics, so it probably won’t make a difference. I guess this was kind of a useless entry, but I have a feeling my life will get a bit more exciting in the coming days.

Snork

Coming at you from the land of cold medication today! At least, I think I took some. Or maybe that was yesterday, I don’t really remember. (Come to think of it, the fact that I barely remember the past two hours probably means I had some. Mystery solved!) Either way, I am totally out of it and my throat is STILL closed. I sound about 80 years old.

Puzzles! I’ve been doing SO many puzzles! Mom and I started a Mona Lisa jigsaw, but it’s freaking ridiculous. It’s literally all shades of brown and grey. We made her face and hands, and the sky behind her, but the rest of the background is impossible. And I’m learning how to solve a Rubik’s cube. Well, I can already solve it, it just takes a while and I mess up sometimes. But I can pretty reliably do it in 5 minutes! And oh my gosh you guys, there are SO many puzzle games scattered around the internet. You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.

I am annoyed with Toshiba tech support. It is bloody impossible to find a phone number for Canada on their website. USA? Yes. Argentina? Yes. The rest of South America? Of course! Canada? No, why would we need that? It’s not like this website is in the .ca domain or anything, don’t be silly. So we went digging through my warranty info and found it. I went through a few menus, as expected, then was on hold for 15 minutes listening alternately to elevator music and a chipper female voice urging me to buy more products, visit their website, all that good stuff. Then I got a rep, described my problem, and was immediately told that they won’t fix it. I asked if he was sure, and he gave me a huge speech about how it was built to last forever and he had been working with tech for 20 years and had never heard of this problem before, so it HAD to be my fault. I was not impressed. I was not impressed at all. And then he gave me another Toshiba number to call to get it repaired  – at a cost, of course. (Screw that, I’m going to Future Shop.) And you know what really bugs me? The fact that I know he’s probably right. If he hadn’t been so insistent that I absolutely had to be wrong, I would have let it go way sooner. Something probably did damage the cord at some point (I travel a fair bit, so it probably got banged around in my suitcase despite my best efforts), and I can totally accept that…now that I’ve calmed down.

This is why empathetic people can’t rant. We end up admitting we were wrong too and the other guy was just doing his best, which kind of defeats the purpose of spewing venom at a stranger we’ll never meet in person. Curse my ability to understand the perspectives of others! Then again, I do feel better now. A lot better than I would have if I’d yelled at him or something. Alright, I’m at 500 words and I have no idea if it was coherent. Time for a nap…oh wait, I have plans. So, time to go try on jeans! How fun, I’m totally looking forward to it!This is the best day for it. Yes. That’s right. It will be such fun. Such fun.

Whyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy? 😥

Gardening adventures

Whoa, hi people! Today I’m going to tell you about the different types of weeds I removed from my grandparents’ garden last week. It’s quite a list.

• Dandelions. Luckily, the soil was very loose and most of them were young, so I could generally pull them up with very little effort.
• Clover. These were fairly well-established, mostly because they like to grow right in the midst of the good plants. They were annoying to get rid of, and I think I left some roots behind
• Grass. Stay in the lawn, grass. We don’t want you with the flowers.
• Thistles. These were a bugger to get rid of (I had no gloves and my only tool was a three-pronged digger thingy) until I discovered something important: Thistles only have spikes on their leaves, not their stems. With this knowledge and a bit of luck, I avoided getting stabbed too much.
• Tiny maple saplings. Nothing exciting.
• Mushrooms 1. Brown, about an inch across the cap, normal-looking. Easy to pull.
• Mushrooms 2. A bit funny-looking, since the cap was inverted, and teeny tiny. Again, easy to get rid of.
• Crabgrass. SO MUCH CRABGRASS. I never want to see crabgrass again in my LIFE.
• Unidentified. Tallish, with pointed spiralling leaves. Easy to pull.

Honorable mention: Elm saplings, and not babies like the maples. (They’re an honorable mention because I pulled them from my own garden, not grandma’s.) There’s a picture of my roommate holding one of these. It was literally at least 4 feet tall. I couldn’t uproot most of them – they were too well-established, and the biggest one was in the middle of a bush – so I hacked them down with a kitchen knife.

Aaaaaaand end the most boring blog post ever. (Although I’m sure I missed a weed or two.) Just felt I had to write something to stay in the habit. Next one will be better, I promise! Goodnight world.

asdfghjkl;’\

Mmkay, so I came upon a Cracked article about the worst types of blogs on the internet (find it at http://www.cracked.com/blog/the-8-worst-types-blog-internet/) and I realized that I am drifting dangerously close to becoming the first type. I vow not to fall into the clutches of writer’s block and boredom! At least, not for another month or two.

The only issue here is that I don’t really have a direction for this space. I’d rather it didn’t degrade into a journal, but I also don’t have that one driving passion the way a lot of people seem to.

Maybe that’s a bit unclear –  let me try and explain again. (Whoops, too much Kate Nash lately. Go listen to her, it’ll do ya good.) Most of the blogs that actually take off have a specific topic, whether it’s music or gadgets or raising children. And the people who write them can keep going because they are passionate about that one topic.

Then there’s me. I’m such a generalist, more so than many people around me realize. It’s very easy for me to find common ground with most people, largely because I have such a wide variety of interests that we’re bound to have SOME overlap. And of course from then on, we mostly talk about the things we know we have in common.

Now that I’m actually writing this, it suddenly seems selfish. This probably happens to everybody to some degree. But it still seems that many people have one major passion, one thing that they love above all others. It’s been suggested that I do have one: singing. I have a few objections to that. First, it’s difficult for me to verbalize a lot of my thoughts about singing, and even if I could I don’t know why I would. By the time they’re on the interwebs reading blags, people either know what’s great about making their own music already, or they never will. Second, I spend very little of my time in song lately. I haven’t lost the drive, I’ve just lost some of the outlets – mostly, it’s the fact that I haven’t had access to any sort of choir for a year. A year! Holy monkey butts. Oh, and third, I am simultaneously a snob and not a snob about music – way too hard to explain, and I doubt I’ll ever find somebody who fully understands how I feel about it.

Wow, I’m so rambly once I get going! This is exciting. Who knew I had all these words in my head? (Actually, I did. Nevermind.) Anyway, I feel like I need a good strong closing sentence/paragraph, but endings were never my forte. (Man, do you remember those commercials a couple of years ago? This guy would be lying sprawled on the sidewalk in a gi, or some other weird situation, and he’d say something like “Karate’s not my forte……but that is!” and then he’d point to his car. ‘Cause the model was called a Forte. Get it get it? Aaaaand end tangent.) So the best option is probably just to wrap it up without any sort of long-winded signoff.

I am secretly an old person

No seriously.

At the ripe old age of 18, I display many of the qualities associated with people a bit older than that. What follows is a partial list of reasons why I am old.

– I refuse to listen to loud music. My laptop speakers rarely go above 20%  (10% if I’m wearing headphones), and I don’t go to many concerts because it hurts my ears. Also, when I watch TV or movies with pretty much anybody, I am saddened and annoyed by how loud they need to have it. The level I find comfortable is “way too quiet Katie, I can’t even hear it.” Will I be the only person of my generation who’s not deaf by 30?

– Kids today aren’t the way they were when I was that that age. At least I have some support on this: I’ve seen at least one study suggesting that girls especially are maturing younger. And dear lord, they are rude! Didn’t their parents teach them respect?

– Even people my own age seem like a foreign species at times. 4 a lil bit in gr 8 i wrote liek this but i totes want u 2 no i dont do it nemore. We are plugged in and tuned out, and I don’t like it. I got an ipod for Christmas one year – I excitedly used it for about 6 months before the novelty wore off and I remembered that I had spent a decade and a half of my life being happy WITHOUT needing a constant, personal soundtrack that alienated me from all human interaction. As for the actual content of most popular music today…don’t even get me started. I’ll finish off this section by noting that as a general rule, I don’t text when I’m with friends (with the exception of answering my boyfriend if he contacts me, and letting him know I’m busy).

– For the most part, I am reasonably content with my life, close relationships and body. I know that’s not necessarily a quality of older people – I just see a lot of people my age who are convinced that they’ll never be good enough, physically or otherwise. We’re told that happiness will come to us if we do well in school and after we go to college and when we find the right person and if/when we get the “perfect” bodies in the fashion mags.

-Speaking of fashion: function over it. ‘Nuff said.

Alright kids, it’s after midnight and Grandma’s getting tired. Enjoy, and if you think of anything I’ve missed, feel free to comment. Adios!

Stuff and things

I am not in the proper emotional state to be writing, but it’s been way too long.

Remember how I said my laptop charger was getting really iffy? Yeah, it broke. In quite possibly the only place that is not fixable. I’ve been using my boyfriend’s computer for quick things like checking my email (and possibly facebook… ^^”) , but blogging from there would have felt wrong, somehow. Maybe because he uses a Mac. Anyway, I’m home now and stealing my sister’s cable. (And here I thought she was stupid to buy the exact same computer that I had.)

Man, stuff has happened! It does that. Let’s see. I was in Buffalo with the bf’s family for their 100th annual reunion. Fun happened, baby cousins were cute, nothing else to say really.

I attempted to go to a show about an hour ago. A good friend of mine is in a band, and I was really excited that I was actually in Peterpatch to see them. And of course, it turns out to be a 19+ event. (I will be 19 in less than a month.) The facebook event for it didn’t say that, my friend didn’t mention it… Needless to say, I was NOT impressed, hence my less-than-ideal emotional state tonight.

I feel like there should be a point to this entry. Give me 5 minutes to think of one.

Nope. I have nothing. Happy Canada day, and goodnight folks.