I hear this more and more, it seems:

“I’m just touching bases with you to see blah blah blah…”

Your turn. I’ll widen the berth to include words that aren’t words, but people use anyway.

Go.

The Mc is “spring breaking” with his sister, her husband and their two kids at his mothers house in south GA until Saturday.

What this means, cats and kittens, is that I had to wake up without help. Turn the alarm off. By my self. Make coffee. For myself. Carry it upstairs. Myself. Scoop the poop. Myself…before coffee. I also had to make my own dinner last night, and with no one telling me to go to sleep, I was up until midnight finishing a book.

It’s a good thing I haven’t grown dependent reliant on him or anything.

My 10 minutes of playing with it review:

For those of you using Flickr and Picnik, don’t bother. It’s essentially the same thing, but slower and with a prettier GUI that makes you think you have voonderbar new functionality. Sure, it’s slick. Sure, the interface is friendly and dark, and gives you a better preview image (sans futzing with the little slider bars) but still.

Hot:
- High light and fill light options.
- Free.
- Browse others pictures.
- “Pop color” quickly changes a pick to b&w, then refills whatever color you select. Think little girl in b&w with big red balloon.
- “Soft focus” knew to zoom in on the face of the person in my test image for the preview, which was easily 1/60th of the whole picture.
- Distort & sketch bits are free (unlike Picnik)

Not:
- 17 ways to alter your image (avg x7 previews per option)
- No privacy filters/flags for your pictures (private albums)
- Email photo (not album, boo) functionality sounds like a good idea, but is really a maggot infested lump of giaffee dookie (see image below)
- No obvious stand-alone social networking bits, but links to login to Facebook, PhotoBucket and Picasa
- You can add a caption once you upload, but you can’t rename the file
- 2gb “free rent” is what…two RAW images? I kid. But seriously, that won’t get me too far.

Was I excited that I might get something *just shy* of PS that’s not Lightroom and doesn’t cause me to take out a personal line of credit to pay for? Yes. Am I surprised it’s just a tease? No.

A few of the many great lines from the Anne Lamott book I referenced in a previous post, do with them what you will:

“Being enough was going to have to be an inside job.”

“The world can’t give us peace. We can find it only in our hearts.”
“I hate that.” I said
“I know. but the good news is that by the same token, the world can’t take it away.”

“Lighthouses don’t go running all over an island looking for boats to save. They just stand there shining”

And perhaps the one most perfectly suited to my particular brand of juxtaposed defect and sensitivity:

“You don’t always have to chop with the sword of truth. You can point with it, too.”

Mmmmm hmmm.

The Mc and I have been bouncing up to NC nearly every weekend, and the hour and a half or so in the car provides much needed time to knit and quiet my mind. Current project (along with half a dozen started but not finished projects in various spots around the house awaiting a fit of knitting spontaneity [see also: motivation]) is a scarf for Karen. Just in time for summer.

The recipe I’m making up goes something like this:
*Knit approx what – 5 or 6 rows (? eyeball it)
Next row double wrap the needle on each stitch
When knitting the next row drop the extra stitch
Knit a row, repeat double wrap row
Knit 5 or 6 normal rows
When knitting the next row triple wrap the needle
Next row, drop the extra two stitches
Knit 5 or 6 rows…lather, rinse, repeat from *

There are more days than not – lately – that I lack the time, motivation, and inspiration to write.

This is a serious fug-your-world-upside-down-with-a-pineapple problem when you want to be a writer. When it’s been part of your daily life for years and years and years. When you’ve toyed with the idea of making a living doing what you love.

Seems happiness has it’s downside: blockage of a non rectal variety.

Segue:

Last week when I was meeting with Melinda – my therapist of nearly five years – we discussed building bigger gaps between our sessions. Every week for the better part of five years with the exception of a few months two years ago, I’ve spent 50 minutes in her company. Every week. Because I had that much baggage. Because I needed to pour my heart out, reveal parts of me I typically recoil from, cry uncontrollably, laugh at my stupidity and stubbornness, and heal under her care.

We’ve just graduated to every three weeks, and it’s been good. I have fewer and fewer emotional explosions and anxiety attacks. I’ve got the tools in my mental workshop now to communicate more honestly and effectively – even if it appears to most that I’m still holding back. I can speak a common language to those that want to speak it with me.

We’re half way into our session last week and there’s a lull in the conversation. A lull because nothing I have on my mind is big or painful or mentally distressing. She tells me she thinks it’s time to start talking about winding down.

I think about what she’s saying for a few seconds before fat little drops of saline start falling out of my eyes.

She asked me to talk about what I was feeling, but my chin was quivering and I was shaking my head in disgust, disappointment, and surprise at my reaction.

Minutes passed.

“It’s like being eighteen again, the right way”, I said and trailed off.

More chin quivering.

“Most kids get to go away to college, knowing there’s a room waiting for them when they come home. (more head shaking and chin quivering) I never got that.”

“I’m not going anywhere” she says, “we’ll take all the time you need.”

I nod. Quiver. Release more quiet tears.

Her compassion and peaceful nature have sustained me for the better part of what I consider my adulthood, at least the part of it I’ve been awake for.

She’s seen me through my separation, divorce, impulsive trips to Ireland, England, and half the US, girlfriends that have come and gone while I tried myself on for size, and the duration of my relationship with The Mc. I’ve watched her discover she had cancer, and watched her fight it…wigs and shortly shorn hair and all.

Now I have to grow up. Leave my surrogate parents house, as it were. I’m terrified. I’m terrified because I’m happy – for possibly the first time in my life. Truly, deeply happy. Comfortable with who I am, what I want and need.

I’m growing up, without desire to ever be a grown up, and it’s time to leave the nest.

End segue.

Happiness, many artists will tell you; is not good food for the creative mind.

Last week wrapping up my reading a book Gwen lent me called Bird by Bird by Anne Lammot. I’m sitting at Eddie’s Attic waiting on the girls for our monthly brainstorm/motivate meeting (followed by Griffin House) when Anne tells me to start a writing group.

Okay, so what she really said was that for those not mentally equipped to handle the carnage and full on heartless criticism of a writing seminar/workshop, you may want to start a group. As someone with a big mouth, who half believes in her abilities and has a Fabergé ego, I am one of those people.

So dug my BB out of my handbag and emailed Seth.

I risked.

He accepted. Which is awesome, because Seth *can* write, and he’s smart and funny and a good listener and honest and it’s all a little contagious coming from him.

In my journey, I’m having to find new ways to motivate myself and stay there. To expose my weaknesses, one of which happens to be chasing my goals instead of just talking about them, another of which has to do with staying creatively alive when I’m not miserable. I have to ask others to help me…and to help them (I hope) in turn. I have to trust. Maybe this adventure with The Muppet Man will assist me in maintaining some respectable level of motivation. Force me at verbal gunpoint to dig deeper, find the dark again (in a healthy way, if that’s possible and what I need) and be painfully honest about what I find in the crevasses.

Who knows where that could lead.

I force optimism. Then I write drivel like this, and I’m not sure WTF I’m thinking having the dreams I do. *sigh*

I sent off the pictures I took of The Stranger in New Orleans, and got this lovely note back.

Yeay for photography! Yeay for strangers! Yeay for not being afraid to do.