Time of Rejuvenation

So the summer ended nicely. Long road trip across the entire top side of these United States. Everything is beautiful from about mid-Indiana westward. East is all just urban gross and toll roads. Saw my folks, saw Joe's folks, and saw lots of great places that I *started* to blog about and write insightful, witty stories about but, in my typical fashion, never finished. The pictures are still mostly in my camera. (I can't find my cables...) My life is one big long "To Do" list.

I've got some new things to post, and like always, they are about 85% - 93% of what I'd like to actually accomplish. I'm perpetually in a state of B-plus-ness.

I have a fairie project I'm starting for my mom's Christmas present, and I hope to have that done before the actual holiday. I'm laying bets that it won't be, because I know me, but I'm shooting for it anyway! After all, if I didn't at least *try*, then I couldn't continually fall short of my expectations, and that would somehow destroy the space-time continuum. I'm quite certain of that.

New picks will be in the PitS gallery, if you're curious. And if you aren't....why are you even here?

Time of Rejuvenation

Unfortunately, my last term at school produced only animation videos, script files, executable game files and an Unreal Engine level. None of these things can be uploaded to Deviant Art, so you will all just have to wait until I come back with something worthy of posting. That may be a while.

Time of Rejuvenation

Milly stared at herself in the mirror, as she always did. It was the pre-shower ritual. It was important for this ritual to save the face for last. The face was fairly good. She liked her face. It wasn't a pretty face, but it was a good face. Fairly symmetrical, nice eyebrows, large eyes and full lips. Nothing to write home about, which was a curious expression. She wondered if people actually wrote home to tell their parents about beautiful people that they saw that day. No one would write their mothers about her, at least not since her first days of dating the man who had become her husband. He didn't write home about her anymore. She didn't blame him. It was, to be honest, a very sub-sub-par figure of a human being that stood in the mirror, facing back at Milly. It was a body that went to the gym for several hours a week, but also imbibed in things that made it nearly pointless to go to the gym at all. It was a body that had done a good job carrying two sons but had done a bad job of squirting them out into the world in the accepted fashion. If one were to lift the hammock sack of fat dangling before her lower abs, one could see the old trace of the Cesarian section scar.

(A Cesarian section is when a baby is forcibly removed from the mother at an appropriate time because the mother can't manage to get the baby out on her own.)

She would rather have the scar showing like a neon streak than have fat that hid it away discretely. She was proud of the scar. It was a battle scar that only a woman could have. Anyone could get fat. Milly had gotten fat pretty early on in life. She remembered tipping the scales to 100 pounds at some pre-pubescent age. She remembered the many various dieting programs her mother had put her on since the age of 8. She was the only grade school girl in Weight Watchers. Milly had always been a freak because of her fat as a kid. Now she was just fat because she didn't know what else to be. She remembered a brief stint of being thinner, and everyone had praised her and told her how beautiful she was, and she'd felt fantastic and clothes had been so much prettier because clothing designers always punish fat women by making them wear ugly clothes that hang like cheap sack with big buttons. Or, worse, they were see-through. But she also remembered that for as much as the world was convinced Milly had been thin, Milly still saw the same reflection. Sometimes it was saggier, like now. But it was always *huge*. Even when it wasn't.

It's a difficult thing.

The shower was nice, and soothed away the ached and weariness of the two hours of gym time. She was proud of the gym time. It was a new thing for her. "I exercised at the gym for two hours!" Only the words "two hours" would blink like police lights in her head and there might be confetti trickling down as well. She knew it wasn't *really* a big thing, not to anyone else, but to her it was something that, eventually, would very likely not amount to anything. That's how it was with the person in the mirror. It got saggier and older, but somehow it was always just the *same*. Disappointing. Strong. Round. Moderately flexible. Sore. Freckled. Lacking.

Milly also knew that it wasn't her body's fault. A body is, after all, is also a mirror. It reflects the mind and the lifestyle. Milly's lifestyle wasn't right for making a better body. A *BETTER* body? Better. Better better better better. The word got weird. More *desirable*. That was the right word. Desirable. Desire desire desire desire. That word stayed fabulous.

Milly was a sensualist. Feeling things was the best thing. It didn't matter what feeling, so long as it was something. Except embarrassment. She could get over embarrassment, but it took longer than she liked, and it was horrible in the meantime. Milly would rather poke a fork into her ear than be an embarrassment.

Milly's sensual nature was also not conducive to having a desirable body. It desired, but was not desirable. It consumed things that were feelings with bad nutritional value. Milly didn't eat or drink; she felt and desired. The food was there to be felt and desired, so Milly obliged. A lot. She wondered if things wouldn't be better for her if food was disgusting instead of fun.

Fun is when you are doing something that doesn't get anything productive accomplished.

Milly took her time making sure that her hair was well washed and conditioned. If she couldn't be desirable below the scalp, at least she could have good hair. So she did. She was grateful to the makers of Pantene for this consolation prize. Her hair was the crowning jewel on a flabby sack of confusion. It shone and curled just right. She liked to think it distracted from her over-sized ass.

It didn't.

When she got out of the shower, she looked into the mirror again, hoping. She always hoped. Maybe that the shower had washed away the old Milly and put someone *desirable* in her place. She looked into mirrors a lot just for that reason. Not because she wanted to see herself and liked what she saw, but because she hoped that maybe this time, this was the time, that something new and nice would look back. It never happened, which just goes to show how deeply entrenched a habit can become. It was routine. It was ritual. It was a feeling.

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Milly is the adopted name of a fictional character named Georgia who's real name I can't remember. She is a Grim Reaper. She died when a space station toilet seat landed on her. I like to imagine that I might be a Grim Reaper when I die. I like to think that I will get to help other people die. Not to be mean, but just to smile nicely and say, "There! That wasn't so bad, was it?"

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Milly is fictional here, too. She is me, although I'm not ready to admit that in prose just yet. It will be easier to make Milly thin, like she wants to be, rather than myself. Milly can be what I want her to be without the friction of reality impeding her progress. Things are much more difficult for me. I figure if I can make my voo-doo doll into a real girl, maybe I can do the same for me.

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Milly wants a salad. There are lots of things to make a good salad in the fridge. The problem is that all of Milly's knives are dull. She's bought lots of knife sharpeners of various sorts to give them teeth again, but they are still dull and won't do their jobs. Milly's body can relate.

Time of Rejuvenation

It's finally over. The long slog through winter has come to an end. The grey clouds have pulled back, and the glorious, blue sky of the northwest pours bright sunshine, like water from a clay pitcher in the hands of a Greek goddess.

The warmth and sun inspired me, and yesterday I was able to walk/jog the full length of my goal track, from the police station to the valley road. Two miles of straight, graveled earth beneath a white, springtime sun. The smell of the cows hit my nostrils before I saw them, lounging and grazing in the green fields beyond the blackberry brambles. There were people, but not too many, and it wasn't any great effort to smile and greet the strangers that I passed. Most of the time, I didn't even have a thought as to whether they would consider seeing a large woman in spandex jogging shorts offensive. In fact, the only down side to the whole experience was that my cute, pink 8 gig Zune wasn't charged and I had to lug around the old, grey clunker model, which was too big for the zip pocket of the shorts.

It's been nice getting back to exercising, again. I'm already showing signs of increasing strength and endurance, and the cellulite is receding. With it, the perpetual, monotone gloom of my mood is also ebbing. Spring is less a time of year than it is a change in perspective, attitude, desires. Flowers are blooming, and so is my happiness.

School is starting again, but this time, I don't mind so much. It's nice to feel the energy of my creative growth once again.

Joe: He Takes Care of Me

Ah, it's good to be back in the realm of the faithfully and dutifully subscribed. It's as though all of the billboards on the highway have been removed, and I can drive in peace.

I want to give a public "thanks" to my faithful partner, help-mate, husband, lover and best friend - Joe. He got me all subscribed again, and since he makes the money it was just all around really thoughtful of him. I love you, hon! *hmmmmmmmmm....*

Time to be depressing again!

In the world...

I keep trying to be Buddhist. Or, at least, to give the ethics thereof some credence. Some plausibility of meaning. I suppose that the real point of true Buddhism is that there isn't any meaning, because there is never any end. Meaning is something that is granted in retrospect. Christianity has meaning. Islam has meaning. Scientology has meaning. This is because all of these things bring to the faithful an end, whether to life or to the world or to evil or whatever-the-hell Scientologists think the problem is. Buddhism, on the other hand, is rooted in the understanding that life is a cycle, and that wheel just keeps on turning. The problem with thinking of everything - even enlightenment - as being illusury is that it supresses meaning, save for how we convince ourselves things are meaningful.

I invest. I get attached. I see myself. I see others. I hurt and I feel others who are hurting, and I am apalled. I am disgusted by my fellow man. I am tired of it - this endless rotation through the machinery of Hell. I really, really want to be Buddhist so that I can realize the final futility of caring for anything other than the understanding of caring. In the end, all of them are useless. All of them are, to some degree or other, enablers or contributors to the cycles of violence, suffering and torment that define our legacy as a species. All of them are, to some degree or other, an excuse to escape responsibility behind some veil of humanitarianism or rarified existential wisdom.

Inaction and action are two sides of the same coin, but if both are caught in this cycle of humanity - as they are doomed forever to be, because there is always *someone* to act or to not act - then what is the point? Where is the redemption? Where is the realization of the love we all want one for another? Where is the end to the horror of death, not through a personal realization of salvation, but through a concensus of the human race to simply stop, forgive, and allow ourselves to simply live with one another? Can any one person only ever truly save themself? How can that be, since we are all a part of one another?

No religion gives this to us. No religion can help us find these things, because religion directs us away from one another and toward some "higher" ideal that no one can agree to define. Useless. Meaningless.

I watch Isreal and Palestine on the news; I see the photo-op made ready, a sundae scoop of bomb-created rubble with a dead little cherry-red child on top. I want to vomit, first at the provocators, then at those who washed their hands of the consequences of their actions. Is this God? Is this God's promised land? Are these His "chosen people?" Are those who would be shephards and stewards of His world so concerned with the prize that they'll destroy the game to get it? Whatever god this is, I want no part of It.

I want no apologists to respond. There is no explanation or argument to be presented in defense of either side of this farce of death. With each bomb, each crater, each violent incursion in Gaza or Aphganistan or Iraq or Cambodia or Columbia or Africa, we are killing god because we are killing ourselves.

At least we should have no fear of Hell. We're already there.