Food is excellent,
almost smells necessary.
So does everything that possesses you
If only people could turn off the clock and wean themselves from his
nefarious purposes…
You feel five feet wide and are at least 1.
On the counter,
chocolate in all his attractions. Do not listen to him.
Eat your salad.
This is hate.
Your teeth flicker on and off.
Your bones shrink in disgrace.
Simmering air
warms the neighborhood.
Watch the eloquent vacuums roaming their halls.
The roofs are in love with the trees.
This is where lightning dies its death
no faster than you’ll die yours.
Clear candles overwhelm me with a thirst for light.
I love transparency,
translucency,
transmissions from stars.
What is it about the see through
that is so luxurious and soulful?
Lately I just can’t seem to feel any joy in the mornings. I don’t know why. I always have a good day to look forward to. But lately not only am I having a hard time waking up, I’m having a hard time getting up and getting going when I do finally wake up. I feel neither the urgency of the things I need to do nor the anticipation of the things I want to do. Instead I feel just sort of empty and low. I want to curl up in a ball and just stay still for the day. When I do finally get going I am okay, but I just haven’t been feeling my best in the mornings. I hope my mood is not starting to dip, as usually having a hard time getting out of bed is a sign that it is dropping. And today at lunch I actually had anxiety, which I haven’t had in a few weeks.
However I feel, I need to get more done during the day and I also want to make the most of and enjoy my mornings. So I need to come up with a plan to get me going earlier, and get me eager to start my day. I have a good life, so getting up in the morning should be something I look forward to.
Starting tomorrow, I’m going to do several things to change my mornings. I’m going to set my alarm using an app called Alarm Clock Xtreme. The app settings allow you to require yourself to solve math problems of varying degrees of difficulty in order to snooze the alarm or turn it off. I’m hoping this forcing function of getting me to use my tired brain in the morning will force me to truly wake up. I’ve set the alarm for 8:02. Let’s see what time I wake up.
Now for the motivating myself to get out of bed part. I’m going to start setting daily checklists in my color note app in my color note calendar that will have reminders that pop up and show me what I need to do. If that doesn’t help I’ll try Evernote or some other scheduling apps that might give me reminders of things I need and want to do. I’m hoping that just seeing a list of what I need and want to accomplish will help motivate me to get out of bed. I like Colornote because of the ease of use factor and because of all the rainbow colors it lets you use.
I’m going to try and start incorporating scripture in to my morning. Scripture can be so energizing and inspiring and it is the perfect way to start the day. So after making sure the baby has what she needs, and after letting the bunny out, I will dive into the Word. The Bible reminds me to take care of my family, my home, and myself – reminders I need when I’m not doing my best. And if the alarm I’m using to wake up actually works I should be awake early enough for once to have the chance to start the day with scripture.
Beyond that, I’m open to ideas. What can I do to dramatically change my mornings and my perspective on them? How can I take my mornings from unproductive and blah to creative and electric?
Craig got home on Friday and we got to pick him up around noon. It has been so nice having him here. Angelica actually thinks he lives on the ship, and whenever he has to go to the ship she says he’s going home. Today we went to the ship for Craig to offload the rest of his stuff from his stateroom and she asked if daddy was going home. We try to explain to her that Daddy lives with us and just works on the ship, but after the last big deployment that doesn’t really seem to sink in with her and she’s quite sure Craig lives on the Eisenhower! It’s cute and sad at the same time.
We stayed in for most of the weekend, but today we went to Steak N Shake in Virginia Beach. I love that place. Forget my previous post about dieting. You can’t diet when the possibility of Steak N Shake exists. The diet will have to wait for another day. I got the shooter trio with two garlic burgers with cheese, and one cajun burger with cheese. Then I got an orange creamsicle milkshake. Delicious.
Parsnip is settling in to family life quite well. He apparently got out of his enclosure last night and Craig found him waiting patiently outside the enclosure this morning, wanting to get back in to get to his food and water. I don’t know whether he leaped over the side or if he squeezed out because I didn’t have it secure enough. If he could squeeze out though you’d think he could squeeze back in, which makes me wonder if he jumped out and maybe had a hard time clearing that height. But at any rate he was not destructive even though he was by himself out of his enclosure for who knows how long, and today I even let him in the master bedroom and closet and bathroom, so now he has been everywhere except the FROG and laundry room.
I love it when he jumps up on the sofa to sit with me, and he grooms me and gives me kisses. He would have loved Jack. They are the best two bunnies ever. I’m so glad I found another companionable bunny. He makes the house more lively and cheerful. I always look forward to letting him out of his enclosure when I get home. He runs loose the whole time I’m home. He enjoys relaxing under the window behind the rocking chair in the library.
Angelica loves having him and is always petting him and feeding him. The first thing she does when I wake up in the morning is ask me to take him out. Getting a pet was definitely the right decision from her point of view as well. As I write, she’s playing with him.
The following are 3 poems, all titled “Housewife.” The first is the original poem I wrote. The second and third are poems I created by translating the original poem to Afrikaans and Xhosa and back to English again, and then editing what I got. This is part of a larger project I am working on where I have my work translated to Xhosa and Afrikaans, and edit the results. It is a fascinating way to create new poetry, and the possibilities from these two languages are almost limitless. I sometimes like to play with other languages, like French or Hebrew or Italian or Farsi, but Xhosa and Afrikaans are my favorite. What do these poems say to you? If you’re a housewife, or your mother was, how do these poems speak to your experiences with housewifery?
Grateful skirts swirl in a breeze maybe meant for them.
Design is Holy,
is enamored of its Designer,
is a crossroads of means and ends.
A housewife manufactures sunshine in her laboratory,
the beakers from the store always having a sale,
her thesis supervised by green,
and critiqued by her children.
After 20 years who will know whether the
skirts were mended or replaced?
Just that they were infused with laughter
and smelled like mother in the living room
living with her eyes full.
Translated into Afrikaans and Xhosa, then back:
Skirts twirl in the grateful air
they were meant for.
Design and the Holy Spirit,
are enamored
of each other.
Is the intersection of the cross where it all begins?
The woman who produced the sun in her lab,
is studying all the ways you make happiness from the mundane.
Her thesis is green from watching her children.
After 20 years will you know that
the aprons can be repaired or replaced?
You will appreciate the humor.
She won’t.
skirts and gratitude for the atmosphere,
either of them.
Design and Holy Spirit,
make enamored designs,
are the ends on the cross.
The woman who makes the sun in her lab,
Her laboratory in Delaware furnished by a company
in Hong Kong.
Her thesis supervision is green.
So is the clock looking at her children’s energy,
their youth,
her youth.
After 20 years you will know that
the skirts can be repaired or replaced.
As you appreciate the humor in
And sort mothers by whether they baked cookies or used the microwave.
In her eyes you live fully,
live fully alone.
Juice bar
I was Lysol scented
dark light opening doors everyone wanted shut.
She was a bursting gummy bear the woman hugged
then woman devoured slowly.
But no one eats poison.
No one devours a sour black light,
and no one hugs it either.
Lush lights linger lightly on my legs.
Excess ecstasy jerks in my finger tips.
I have too much of myself.
I am smoldering.
My old jeans make juice from jam.
I’m going to take my face off
and dance with the band.
Please understand.
Lately I’m not totally happy with my weight. It isn’t that I want to be thin again. I don’t really. I’d rather eat what I want and be fluffy. I even like being fluffy. I think it suits me more than being skinny. I have disproportionately large breasts, so being skinny just makes me look a little weird in my opinion, like a snake that swallowed two watermelons. But I’d love to be about 20 pounds lighter. I’m definitely more than 20 pounds heavier than slim, but I’d like to lose 20 pounds. I was supremely happy with my weight at 175/180. I like plus size clothes, but I miss having the option to wear regular size clothes. I’m a size 18, so I’m one size too big to shop in regular departments. Gone are my days of shopping at Macy’s.
The problems are these: I like food, I’m on heavy psychiatric medication, I have hypothyroidism, and I cannot do my old favorite forms of exercise very much. I used to be really in to walking and for the past year or more I’ve been unable to really take a good long walk because of my problems with my foot – problems two foot surgeries have not fixed. Walking was my favorite form of exercise. I used to go on nightly one hour walks, with a little bit of running thrown in.
I need to find a new form of exercise. I’m thinking of swimming, but I don’t have a pool and it is time consuming to drive to the pool. Plus, the pool lap swimming hours don’t work with my schedule. I’d love a trampoline to jump on, but we are moving to military housing in January when we go to Colorado and I don’t think trampolines are allowed there – and it isn’t worth the money to buy one for just one summer and fall. And honestly, I’m not sure how much impact my foot can really take. My problem tends to be more with bending my foot than putting impact on it, but impact hurts too.
Then I think I could count calories again, but I don’t miss the days of my life where I counted calories. It was miserable. I don’t want food, or the lack of it, taking up that much space in my head. I don’t want to count everything I eat. Still, if I want to get back in to size 16s or 14s I need to eat less and move more.
Why does size matter? Why can’t they make the same clothes in all sizes? And why do I put this pressure on myself? Society tries to put pressure on me, but I don’t read fashion magazines anymore and I’m old enough to pay no mind to the tv, so I don’t know if that is where the pressure is coming from. My husband doesn’t put pressure on me and loves me the way I am.
Am I really unhappy with my weight or am I unhappy with something else? Sometimes unhappiness about other areas of myself manifests in unhappiness with my weight. Even when I was skinny I was miserable about my body because I was miserable about other things. So how do I separate my feelings about my body from my feelings about other things? How does one love their body the way it is and yet try to change it at the same time?
I can’t put pressure on myself to lose weight, or I’ll go too far. You’d never know it to see me now, but I used to have two eating disorders. I’m an obsessive person by nature. Calorie counting becomes the focus, vomiting becomes regular. I don’t ever want to go back to that. But why is it that sometimes I can love myself the way I am and other times I can’t? How do you lose weight without dieting? How can I enjoy life and enjoy the foods that I like while still making sure I don’t go up a dress size? And why am I not good at this balance? Being size 18 is not bad, but I’d like to be a 16 or a 14, and I don’t want to go up to a 20 as I get older.
How can I get happy with my weight again, either by losing weight or by loving myself as I am?
Miniature Moon 