What's all this sh**? Mucus?

-that's my favorite line from this whole bit.
...circa 6:14, Thursday September 10:
(warning: bad language. What can I say? T was nervous....)

Haircut from Charis Brown on Vimeo.

(yeeaaah never figured out how to do the bleeps, sorry)

Afterward we drove down to the beach and walked for awhile, letting our stresses melt down into the sand like wax and be carried off into the ocean, to be recycled into something new. I wondered why we haven't done that every night for the past year...

I played around with the "panorama" settings on my little Kodak camera (not the lover, but the old purse-sized standby)-
don't worry Liz m'love, I'll be bringing the love of my life Nikon along on Sunday to document our creperie awesomeness...

- and got shots of the orange-colored sky like this (50 points to anyone who gets that reference):
(not perfectly seamless on the panorama front, but I'll take it.)

Nice night.

Oh, and by the way, this morning I woke up and blow-dryed and flat ironed, and my hair looks awesome.

Today's whiteboard quote:
"It isn't enough to talk about peace. One must believe in it. And it isn't enough to believe in it. One must work at it." ~Eleanor Roosevelt
Don't forget to light your candles and say your prayers for those lost 8 years ago...

Charis Cross Country: Preparations

It has begun.

After weeks of planning and plotting and making "hey, we're gonna be in town!" calls, it happened, er, started, yesterday.

The packing process.

(I can hear all of your groans, and thank you, yes, it is tedious)

Yesterday I went through my closet, and my dressers, and my shoe collection...who knew I had so many clothes? It never feels like it...in order to decide what will be coming on the move and what is being donated to charity. (now at least all my shoes fit in their little bins that T built for me last year. Quite nice. Makes me wonder why I didn't do this 10 months ago....)

I also started in on the library, labeling my shelves so T can pack them up for me while I'm at work (did I mention that I am affianced to the perfect man?)

On the docket for tonight?
I get my car detailed so that (sob) tomorrow (sob) I can (sob) put it up for sale (sob).

Very sad.

But you gotta do what you gotta do.

Onward and upward, I say!

Today's whiteboard quote:
"Real life is insecure, you do not know about tomorrow because you know that tomorrow exists not. This moment is all we've got. Squeeze the juice of life now!"
~Tishan

The Proposal

At my doctoral seminar today, as I was yesterday, and the day before, and as I will be tomorrow, and the day after, and the day after....sigh.

I'm not complaining! The air is smog-free and the sky is blue and the trees are green and the breezes are cool. Our hotel is top-notch (for another post, pics will be included - we've found ourselves on an awesome engagement-moon) and I'm learning...alot. Not just in classes. Grist for the mill, as they say. Another story, for another blog post.

However, nothing is allowed to be bad this week. Cause I'm still walking on air from the big question Terry asked me last week. If you want the play-by-play, I've published an excerpt from my personal writing, pics included, here.

Enjoy :)

Today's quote:
A mind that is characterized by unrest will not be tranquil even in the presence of great calm.
~Dalai Lama

Love at First Night

To my gorgeous boy:

Happy anniversary, my love.

We met one year ago yesterday, and haven't left each other's side since (metaphorically, of course).

Some say that they believe in "love at first sight." Well, I don't. But, because of first-hand experience, I do believe in "love at first night," which is what you like to say about "The Night" that we met.

August 2, 2008

We, along with our friends, spent all night talking, laughing, singing songs on the guitar, and many more things that I'd type about but that wouldn't make sense (like you, not me, getting hit on by bums in Santa Monica and a bloody and mutinous TP war, which ended up with rolls in the refrigerator of your apartment days later - and you guys had thought that buying in bulk was a good idea, little did you know...)

By the time dawn had broken and you had put me to bed in your room, tenderly placing a folded t-shirt over my eyes to block the sunlight and closing the door against the snores of our many fellow and opposing TP warriors, who'd gone to sleep hours before we did, just for you to go into the kitchen and make me breakfast, I was asking myself if you could possibly, possibly be real. Two days later, after you'd fixed the clogged kitchen sink that Mary-Elizabeth poured WAY too much spaghetti down, you whispered to me on my couch that you loved me, as your eyes burned into mine. I tried to avoid making any reply, but you didn't let me off of the hook until I turned around and looked inside and realized that, oh crap, I loved you too. (excuse my crassness, but that's verbatim what I'd thought in the moment...) I'd believed that people like you didn't exist, not in this century, not anywhere. And now I know that they are by no means common, but I also know that I've somehow stumbled onto one and I'm never looking back.

So, partner in crime, I love you.

August 2, 2009

Here's to a gazillion more years together.
love,
Charis


Today's whiteboard quote:
"It never occurs to me that there are things I can't do."
~Whoopi Goldberg

To Get Anything Done

Today's whiteboard quote:

Love yourself first and everything else falls into line. You really have to love yourself to get anything done in this world. ~Lucille Ball

Lucille Ball, you say?She, actually, was a heck of a woman, especially for the time she lived in. T used to work at Paramount, and I found out when I started dating him that, since she was a workaholic, she designed a small courtyard outside her office at Paramount Studios to look like her back yard. She'd have her children come to work with her and play there. She also had the front to one of the buildings made up to look exactly like one of her houses. Because of these things, she
#1) felt more at home, which is nice when you work a lot (hence my candle warmer here)
#2) could do photo shoots and record media messages from right outside her office, but seem like she was at home, perfectly balancing all the things involved in being a working mother, and taking wonderful care of her children.
Smarty pants, that one.

But back to the quote.

Every day I pick quotes that speak to me and that (sometimes I hear), end up speaking to the people who walk by my office every day. That's nice. But, to be 100% honest, the quotes are only up for selfish reasons. So, today, as I was trying to avoid getting dry-erase dust on my white sweater while I wrote this one out, I did a little mental check.

Do I love myself? ...I think so. Yeah. Sure I do. Hmm. What's the catch? Um, I need to drink more water. Okay, I'll drink more water today. And I need to work on more positive thinking. And I need to get my website up. And I need to remember to run those errands this afternoon.

...and before I knew it my mind had sprinted into to-do list mode, which later, after I realized what I'd done, showed me that I've run into the same pitfall that I think a lot of young professional women (and at-home women. And not so young women. And men) fall into. And that's measuring our own opinion of ourself - our effectiveness, worthwhile contribution to the world, basically right to be living and be loved, even by ourselves, by how much we accomplish.

There's something wrong with that. My Reiki teacher once gave me a huge lecture on how, especially for women, so much thought is given to, and weight is put on, being "enough". Doing enough. Saying enough. Cooking enough. Making enough money. Giving enough love to those we love. Being interesting enough.

She said that, sooner or later, you have to be able to just sit, quietly, calmly, and smile and say, with an appreciative and relaxed sigh, I am enough.

And I nodded, perplexed, because I really had no idea what she was talking about and I was halfway listening with the other half of my mind thinking about how I had to stop by the store on the way home and calls I had to make and homework I had to finish and a flight I had to book for the holidays and how I'd schedule out time to visit both my family and friends and how I needed to take something out of the freezer to thaw it for dinner and the new wall treatment I was working on and how I needed to update my AIM info (yes that was back in the days of AIM) and what I was going to do that weekend and.....

-and now, years later, after I've grown and changed and seen babies born and loved them and massaged their little feet, and after I've had my heart broken a couple times and seen that, even when someone DOES seem to do enough, if it's true that they're NOT enough (not really, not for me), then it doesn't matter.

And now I have some new friends and some old ones and a new(ish) love that has shown me that, if you love the core of someone, what they do, today, doesn't matter at all, because it doesn't define you - so you can love someone even if, tomorrow, they choose to go to clown school or something and derail all you thought that they were going to do...

So shouldn't that count for yourself too? The love at the core, for all that you have the ability and potential to do, moreso than what's checked off of that to-do list?

Seems to make sense. Now, just to do it.....

Just sayin. Thoughts?

Sick Day

Today's whiteboard quote is:

"Fortify yourself with contentment, for this is an impregnable fortress."
~Epictetus

Yesterday was a sick day. I wore my pj's all day, finished watching a movie that I'd needed to for at least a month, and read when I should've been sleeping (can't help it, I'm an addict! Once T walked into the room and I heard a booming voice say, "What did I tell you?" ... I'd promised no more opening of the book....). I also carried a little box of lotioney tissues around with me (my nose officially thanks T for getting me that kind), blew my nose about a zillion honkin times, which is gross -the blowing in general, I HATE that feeling-, and did not write anything, which I had planned to do.

I was also made homemade chicken soup by T (best boyfriend ever), with help and tips from B (thank you SO much B, especially since I know you hate cooking using meat!), and ate lots of raw-garlic popcorn, which will probably make me smell bad for the next 2 days, but what always works to knock out a cold.

Somehow, as always, even when I'm snotty and disgusting, T made me feel beautiful. Love him.

Finally I fell asleep around 6:30ish and woke up this morning, only slightly sniffly, and with none of the vertigo or gross swollen eyesedness I'd had yesterday. I was surprised, because I didn't get nearly the amount of sleep I'd expected!

So, I armed myself with some leftover chicken soup, bundled up because I'd heard a newscast on Wednesday that said we're getting in an "Arctic breeze" or something that had made it 60 below in Russia so it's supposed to be really cold this weekend.... Yeah. 52 degrees. Bollocks!

Sick days are nice. Even though you feel like poo, it's nice to have a free pass to do nothing but lay around. Not that I don't have plenty of laying around in my life, but usually I feel guilty afterward for not being more productive. Not today!

What makes it better? I come back to the world to a Friday! Woohoo! And M and I are throwing a dinner party tonight, which I'll have pics from tomorrow, if I can force myself to be productive enough to post them on a Saturday morning ;)

Happy almost-weekend!

Crossed off the Calendar

The other day, as I was looking for a quote suitable for the whiteboard (they have to be just right), I came across one that basically said that if, every night before sleeping, you cross off that day on your calendar, saying "this is one day that I will never live again", you will learn the value of time. I forget who it was by.

Good grief. I didn't think much of it at the time, but it's marinaded for a few days now and I can't get it out of my head. Living with that knowledge (I'll never live this morning again, this afternoon again, this sunset again)... has made my life more precious moment-to-moment, as I wonder what things I would miss if I were looking back on my life. They're always simple, like the feeling of the cobbled sidewalks of campus beneath my shoes and the tiny leaves of the silhouetted fern trees against the sky. Or T making me smile -

Speaking of, last night as I was driving to Santa Monica after work and only intermittently stuck in traffic, I decided to listen to an old Garth Brooks cd that I hadn't put in yet in this time zone (the last time I listened to it was in grad school I suppose, in FL). When the song You Move Me came on, I remembered how many times I used to listen to it, along with other songs that spoke to me in the same way (sorry if you don't like country, but they have some of the sweetest songs. I'm an equal-opportunity music lover) and how I would think of them. For instance, with this one, he's saying how the person he loves has changed everything for him and made his world a better place to live in. I used to listen to it and swoon and wish that I could affect someone that way; I was entirely too cocky about my own potential life choices to ever think that I could ever be in that position with another person - that they would give me new ways of seeing things that made my world brighter...and that's just what T does. Not that I'll go into it here, but suffice it to say that not only did he give me faith in love again, he has given me faith in the goodness of people.

Here's a picture of us soon after we met:

Ok, done swooning now.

Anyway, I was talking later to my friend B, a.k.a the sexy vegan (who is also T's roommate and who makes amazing videos, hence the link - make sure to check out the interlude video - awesome) and we somehow got into a discussion about life, health, positive thinking, the power of prayer, and so on. Leave it to me - in college the joke was that after I'd had a few, I wouldn't want to dance or flirt - I'd go sit in a corner with someone and discuss the mysteries of the universe. Weird.

Then, on a more mundane note, I ordered some gluten-free stuff for turkey day! T can't have gluten or else he has mild Celiac's symptoms - tummy ache, fatigue, etc. (as I remind him every time he contemplates ordering a Guinness these days), so I was a bit worried about how I'd make some of the holiday stuff, but lo and behold, there is a gluten-free pie crust mix here! That was the only one I hadn't figured out how to sub rice flour or something into. I'm very excited.

In closing, have a great day. Enjoy your weather (yes mom, I AM jealous of you having to warm the car up), and remember, there's only a month and change left in our lovely 2008 - make it memorable :)