Having woken up in a pretty sour mood, I got into my exercises after a pretty lengthy bit of procrastinating. While doing them, I watched Michael J. Fox’s Adventures of an Incurable Optimist, a one-hour documentary on his search to understand more about what makes us optimistic, and how it might impact things.
It’s a lot of food for thought. I found myself with a few questions. Continue reading
Category Archives: Journalling
Nocturnal Thoughts about a Long & Windy Road
It’s 2.30am and the lights are low in my apartment. I was on the verge of bed when I saw a tweet from the singer John Mayer that made me think, so I took a look at his Twitter page, and I saw this:
“There’s this moment in creation, when you’ve made something truly special, where you become euphoric. And then, utterly lonely.”
I’ve been feeling that tonight, the lonely. Continue reading
Why I Don't Follow You On Twitter
I tweet incessantly on Twitter. Most of us know this by now.
I also, inexplicably, will hit 1,300 followers probably before the weekend is through. I follow little over 300, quite a few of whom don’t follow me. Whatever.
So why don’t I follow you? Well, it’s not about you, is it? It’s about me getting the most out of the experience for me. It’s about me enjoying my time on there. Not making you happy in Nantucket or whatever. This is my gratuitous fun time, nothing more. Continue reading
The State of the Steff: Rolling Along
Hi!
Bear with me. I’ve just realized it’s been a week since I posted, and I still don’t really have anything to say… I’m sort of “percolating”, processing all of my life. It’s been a tumultuous couple of weeks, and I think my brain needs to catch up. Continue reading
Occam's Razor
Denis Leary was on Letterman the other night and was joking that he’d gone through five marriage counsellors that “sucked” before he found the sixth, who was awesome, but then he said that once he accepted he was wrong, everything went gr-r-r-reat with counselling.
I had to laugh.
I’ve been having the same epiphany of late.
For five straight days now, my back has improved every day. This doesn’t sound like much to you, but to me, this is life-altering. I have not had *two* days in EIGHT MONTHS where my back has improved each day, let alone five straight days. I’ve had a couple days where my back’s “felt good” here and there, but feeling good and improving are distinctly different experiences.
What changed? Continue reading
The Trouble With Writing
I have this longstanding love/hate relationship with writing.
I love the articulation of thought, the solving of ideas, the expressing of inner qualities.
The trouble with readers is, what they see is what they get.
You people, you read my blog and you somehow think what I put up here is some finite guide to the divinity of Steff, or some such.
Unfortunately, it’s not. Continue reading
In Vino Veritas: Turning Points
[One of those into-and-almost-done-a-bottle-of-wine postings. Bear with me here.]
So, Mission: Get a Life is underway.
Making friends, for me? Not very hard. Not if I am myself. If I’m relaxed, content, sociable, people warm to me quickly and easily. And why not? I’m a good person. Better yet, I’m funny. I even make the aesthete’s basic requirement of being “smart” in the broad yet defined “non-Wikipedia” kind of way.
Bonus: I’m brutally frank. This makes me unpredictable. I still regularly shock my best friends of 15+ years, because I’m unflinchingly honest — always. Fortunately, I’m often (definitely not always) tactful, so it’s a little more easily swallowed. Even my employer calls me “honest to a fault”, but she laughs when saying it, and I notice coworkers will actively eavesdrop when I speak, so it can’t be that offensive. Yet. Continue reading
My Own Private Dichotomy
Fear is not my friend. I don’t care what the bookstore’s self-help section says.
Fear is a bitch. A mean, driven bitch.
I am not a fan of fear.
I bought that book. Twice. Feel The Fear and Do It Anyways. Sometimes I do it anyways. But I always feel the fear. Ever-present, always-niggling fear.
Fortunately I know that I’m apparently invincible. Continue reading
In The Wake of the Storm: Thoughts on Life
It’s the weeks where we feel beaten down before Monday begins that are the hardest to face, eh?
This morning’s rife with the turmoil of a good Pacific storm. A lot of wind and rain. As is usually the case, a good windstorm means a blue sky’s on its heels. I literally see both from my north-facing writing desk. Blue skies over the Pacific, charcoal over the inland. A torrent has just ended and the roads are filled with the splitter-splatter of cars racing through puddles, and roofs are dripping themselves dry.
It’s life. Damages come fast and fleeting. One minute we’re one way, the next, everything’s changed, oppressively so. The storm passes, we’re in a daze, but the reality is, we look around, nothing’s really changed.
That’s the trouble with troubles. Continue reading
In Vino Veritas: Of Bananas And Hotties
I’m drunkish. I feel obligated to write for you. But you’ll take obligated, won’t you? Yeah, that’s human nature.
Stringing thoughts together might be a challenge. But. It’s not like I get graded on this, right?
It’s been a weird day. I’ll get into that in a minute, but you need the prelude first.
I was up at 5, for starters. Oh, what a horrid thing that is. Then I weighed myself. Down 3 pounds this week. Heh, I’m sure I’m rectifying that terrible inconvenience tonight, though. Continue reading