Hey Bono, I'm glad you asked / Life is still worth living, life is still worth living

[song]

Bedtime stories

A bedtime story is not necessarily a cozy story with a happy ending. It is not necessarily a story with any ending.

But to be suitable for bedtime, a story must have a flavor you can't forget. It needs rich images, strange or beautiful. It needs to enchant you, to be something that you read before sleeping because you hope it will stain your dreams.

Also, it must be a story that can be told and listened to as well as read.

I've been working on a family of my own bedtime stories this year, as some of you know, and at the same time have had the idea of an Etsy store rattling around in my head for quite a while.

So [here's the exciting part] I'm planning to put these little stories together in a chapbook that I will list for sale online.

Watch this space for further news.

Eeps!

Award+meme

Rachel of The Creamy Middles (she's great and I think you would like her blog if you like mine) has presented me with this blogging award. My instructions are to share ten facts about myself before passing on the award.

1. I'm good at convincing myself that I dislike people when I'm actually just jealous of them. Same goes for pretending that I hate people who've really hurt me.

2. I gave my Muni transfer to a cute tourist boy this afternoon.

3. So far in my life, I have tended to get very passionate about a hobby or activity and then lose interest after a year and a half or so. (Running, ballet, cycling, Irish dance). I will give myself the benefit of the doubt and say that's just been me exploring a variety of interests, not me having commitment issues.

4. On that note, I really like change and spontaneity. If I suddenly decide one morning to give myself a haircut with kid scissors, I'll probably be happy whether it turns out well or not, just because I'll have satisfied my daily quota for novelty.

5. On my desk: laptop, Robin Hood, stamp, alarm clock, potted plant, three Icelandic stones and two 5k coins, votive candle, lamp, vase of dried lavender, poster putty, Christmas present for a friend, Nordstrom box of feathers, loose prints of pictures I took, loose prints of pictures someone else took.

6. Thing I most hate about traveling by plane: when I'm trying to sleep with my head in my arms on the tray table (it feels very natural when you've been a student for so long and so recently), and the person in front of me leans back, thereby compressing my skull between their seat back and the tray table. If they wake me in this manner, my sleep-defense rage frequently incites me to try to push their seat back upright with my head. Yes, there's your free fact: I get very ugly when people interfere with my sleep.

7. This is my fourth semester of college, and I have no major.

8. What I really want in life, logistically speaking, is to a) have my headquarters in San Francisco and b) have a job that lets me travel often, and either pays me to be creative or leaves me the time and energy to be creative on my own.

9. My favorite Disney movie is Mulan, and I have had a fat crush on Li Shang for years.

10. I used to love coffee and energy drinks, because I love being hyper, but then I realized they were also the reason I would randomly get freaked out and anxious about nothing. So now I don't drink anything more caffeinated than tea.

I am going to pass this award on to Em because she is very honest and honest people say interesting things.

Things that are making me happy

Indian summer.

Reconciliation.

Velociraptor vid! I need to reread the Jurassic Park books now. [I read them when I was eight. Do I make more sense as a person now?]

The sound an instant film makes when it comes out of the camera.

Very Awesome new vocab word: squish. It's like a platonic crush. You know when you're like, MAN I wish that person were my friend? Yes, like that. No, I didn't make it up.

My anthropology and women's studies classes.

Two more rolls of film back from my Diana [I put the good ones on flickr].

Doing EoBs at work. It means I get to make everything tidy in the ledgers; it's the tail end of the billing process. Satisfying.

I love you all, Explosionism

Do you remember that time I almost ran out of things to talk about with the therapist? That time it was so muddy and Phil Keaggy sang "Here Comes the Sun" to you? How about that time I found four perfect shells on the beach where I had never found anything unbroken except sand dollars in twenty years? Four perfect shells in one day and I went clambering about the ruins of the old baths with seafoam still clinging to my feet and met an old man who told a story about the Summer of Love? That time I climbed up into your bed when I almost fell asleep with you? Because it was Sunday afternoon.

Or how about when I was so scared that I might get kicked out of my German exam, or the time we went to the dollar store in Japantown and I bought a rice bowl because I thought I was still going back to Illinois? Remember when I was stuck, dead in bed but then you texted me and I got up and when I went out there was a letter from our mutual friend to read and reread as I walked to the library before closing time. Or that Sunday, I sang "Blackbird" that day, when it was SO COLD and I had to walk home with all this coffee in my stomach enough to make me sick?

When we were driving back from the airport after midnight and I was hanging out the sun roof and accidentally let go of the directions that were written on the paper that I was holding in my hand? And the chocolate milk that exploded all over the inside of the car? It cracked me up for days afterward, the chocolate milk stains on the ceiling.