The Importance of Will Power

And the importance of self control. At this moment I need both and I need to do both. This outlet will suffice - hopefully. Although I'm sure I will give in later this week. But I'm hoping that I won't have to at that point. I'm pathetic. This is making me pathetic. I'm getting sick of myself. What I need is a distraction, but nothing is working. How can that be? Thankfully I'll be back to work all day and all day Tuesday. Although that won't stop me from thinking about it. I had this discussion with some gentlemen on Friday about how women will do the opposite of what you tell them. So in this case, that sexist statement happens to be true in my case. In fact, that's true for most times for me. If you want me to do something, it's the last thing I want to do. I'll do the opposite out of spite. The only one being affected but it is me. This reminds me of the time when I left a whole bunch of frownie faces at work to annoy a co-worker. I'm sure it didn't really annoy her. After I did it I felt childish and regretted it, but I left it up anyway. I'm thinking this time its best to not say anything. For some reason it's a lot harder to do than I think it should be.

I watched Clint Eastwood's new film Hereafter yesterday. I forgot it was an Eastwood film. It had a M. Night Shaymalan-like feeling to it, but it had better flow. I liked the story a lot. I'm hoping there is no hereafter. I know that it's reassuring for people. I know a woman who goes to pyschics to see if she can converse with her daughter. It's sad. It's heartbreakingly sad. This desire, this need, that unsatiable want to talk to our lost loved ones when you no longer can. I hope there is no hereafter. I'm sure I've mentioned before that the last thing I want to be is streaming consciousness for all eternity. Out of space, out of time, continue to exist for always and forever. The thought scares me. Although I don't think that my consciousness/soul looks anything like my physical self. That part I don't get. It's a body. It governs me on a physical level, but it doesn't govern what and who I am. To Searle, the body and the mind are one and the same and neither can exist without the other. Meaning both are needed in order to live. I think this is true. Think of life support, once you're brain dead, you're dead. There are only machines keeping the body alive. Although I'm thinking of the strange situation of PVS patients. They don't have any brain activity, but enough to keep their body alive. Obviously they can't manually feed themselves and so on. It's that strange state that makes me wonder if the soul is still in there. In that case it throws out the whole notion of the mind and body being one, because clearly in a PVS state the person is gone and isn't coming back, but just happens to be alive. What haven't they lost that still manages to animate their bodies? Wherever that place is, that must be where life gets life. It's a long shot. It's one of the many dozens of things that swirls around in my brain on a regular basis. I don't know why it even matters to me. It wouldn't change a thing for me. Having that knowledge wouldn't be much use to me.

I lost the want to write, but it served its purpose of distracting me until tomorrow. I'm going to rewatch Sin City. I've decided to do a Sin City montage for my pumpkins. There just wasn't movies that are coming out soon or that came out recently that I wanted to do this year. There's HP7 pt. 1 which looks amazing, but I'm not doing Harry Potter pumpkins.

Cheers.

A Walk in the Park

Well not really. I went for a walk though this morning. It's been awhile. I'd like to walk my old circuit, but they're still doing construction on the road. It's been since June that it's been closed. What is taking so long. I hadn't realized how cold it was until I got home. I windchilled my legs because I wore capris. I didn't think that at -1 walking with bare skin was going to do that. Strangest part of the trip, getting asked for directions to Doc Hollandaise. I'm hoping he found it. He was way off.

Getting into the Halloween spirit, I made some Great Pumpkin cookies from a kit made for children. I didn't know you had to be a child to enjoy decorating cookies. They turned out pretty good. I made them to share and not to eat. I also found out that my Halloween lights in my window do not look as cool as they do in my apartment. But what do I care? The atmosphere they create is awesome. I like the orangely glow they create.

Last night I went to an epicure party out of town. To say the least, I felt out of place. I was the youngest adult. Although some of these parents were only 30, but they seemed older and made me feel younger. There ended up being a total of 12 children running around between the ages of 1 to 7 years old. Yeah, 12 kids 7 and under is a real treat. Especially when they get hyper because they are tired or when they start crying because they're tired. Ate too much dairy, paying for it today. Why is everything that is so good, so bad for you? I don't get this paradox. You'd think that if it's good, then it must be good for you. No. But when does anything appear to be what you think it is? Never. That expression: don't assume, because you make an ass out of you (u) and me. I like to think I'm inferring. Ha ha. Fail. Best part of the party was the mini pineapple cucpcakes and chilling with my man Hunter, who happens to be the coolest baby I've ever met. Seriously, the coolest baby I've ever met. He has slightly long hair, but it makes him look like a little country singer. It melts my heart. My problem with children is that I treat them like mini people. I don't know how people baby talk to children. That's what pets are for. LOL.

What do single girls do with no single friends on a Friday night when it starts getting cold out? Make cookies. This is pathetic. I'm 24 and I spent another Friday night in. You'd think that at my age people are going out and having fun. No. Not my friends. Or they don't invite me because they're doing couples things where only couples apply. Either way, my social life has gone from great to bunk. Don't worry about me. Next weekend is cased. It's Halloween and I have plans for every night next weekend. After that, I don't, but I'm one day at a time here and I'll worry about it in November.

Speaking of Halloween, I have yet to make my stencils. That's what I plan to do tomorrow. I have my pictures selected, I have 5 very large and beautiful pumpkins picked. All I have to do is make them. Which requires daylight and since the days are getting shorter, the supply of good day light is minimal in my little apartment, which I happen to adore now. Story about pumpkin picking. So I went and bought them on Wednesday at the grocery store. You can buy local pumpkins which are always super nice, but their size is small in comparison to what you can buy in the store. The problem with store bought pumpkins are that they are of poorer quality. I'm thinking its the process of transporting them from one place to the next stacked on top of each other in huge cardboard boxes where they get dinged and beat up along the way. So it's quite the process to find worthy pumpkins to carve e.g. they can't be too round, otherwise the stencil wraps too much and makes stenciling harder. Also if there are too many grooves in the pumpkin, it makes it harder to trace the stencil, and can screw up your carving if an important piece happens to fall in a groove. Pumpkins don't have to be flawless, only one side needs to look good. If you can find a pumpkin with one perfect face to carve on you're set. So I happened to stumble upon the most perfect giant cardboard box of pumpkins. Yes I had to go through 30 to get 5 and I had to thoroughly inspect at least 20 of them. It's like the pumpkin picker of this specific container knew that it would land itself in Saskatoon, where I would be on the hunt for the perfect selection of pumpkin carving pumpkins. So this fine picker left really long stems which add character to the pumpkin, but also make picking them up all the more easy. It's aethetics and functionality all in one. It's a beautiful thing. There aren't too many things that can be both at the same time. It was fate that I happened to find that box. In past years I've had to go through multiple cases and had to climb in and be one with the pumpkins to find anything worthwhile. This year was a breeze. I'm hoping it's a sign that all will be well this year for carving. Fingers crossed. I'm trying to make this my best year... until next year that is.

I got so lost in my one way discussion about pumpkins that I lost track of time and now I'm late and have run out of time to talk about everything else I wanted to say. Lucky for me, I have more time for writing and I now have the energy and want to write again. Yay!

7 days to go and counting.

Not So Happy Thanksgiving

Obviously Thanksgiving is about giving thanks for all the things that we have and spending time with family. This year is a shitty one. In comparison to what I had previously thought weren't good years, this one takes it, although those other ones were bad too. So this Thanksgiving I didn't spend with my family. My family dispersed and my family shrunk. I do have many things I'm thankful for.

This last month I've been working on me. I've been putting it off. I didn't have any reason or need to before. All excuses. Everyone needs to work on themselves. The longer you put it off, the harder the work is when you actually get to it. The wonderful thing that life is, the unexpected always happens. Things you never account for. In this case there wasn't any exception. I'm the kind of person that doesn't say anything and holds it in until at some point where it boils over and I just start listing all the things that are annoying me, usually with another person. As of lately, I can't seem to keep my mouth shut. It's been spilling over and I like it.

I turned on my laptop, opened my home browser and I read my horoscope like I always do when I use my laptop. It read: Today you want to dig into an intense topic of discussion that you were previously avoiding. Your apprehension quickly disappears now because you are eager to have your words heard since you know that they can have a powerful impact. Don't forget to give everyone plenty of time to adjust to what you say before moving on to the next topic. Strangely, at the end of the day this was true. How true it was. I had my words heard, but the reaction hadn't turned out the way I wanted it to. In that I realized a whole lot more than I bargained for. In that, I'm disappointed. For some reason it doesn't shock me. I think I've gotten used to it by now. It became one after another and of course, this would happen too. As J said it best to me tonight, we're alone. As much as I thought that before, it's even truer now than I ever thought possible. It's been something I've been thinking about recently, and it hasn't changed. With all my grief, what's a little more?

For this Thanksgiving I'm thankful for friends. I'm also thankful for some clarity. I've been wandering a bit - in trying to figure out what to do, when I haven't been really trying at all. I've been enjoying the ride. In the past I was doing too much of one thing, and now I'm doing too much of another thing, but that's how balance works. You can't do everything equal at all times. It's just not possible. Life has its way of needing and demanding things from you and you just have to go with the flow. Lesson learned in France. The influence of a certain someone has made me want to be ambitious again. This whole working on myself has made me see that being in bad faith is more toxic than just making the decision already. Obviously you can't always make the right choice, but you don't know if its the right choice when you make it, so it's like whatever. I don't think that's nihilistic at all. It's more like que sera sera, whatever will be, will be, the future's not ours to see, que sera sera. My motto as of late has made me drop the anxiety, go with the flow and just ride it out. Things are what they are. It is what it is. All my views of the cosmos are the same, they haven't changed. I'm breathing and I'm not homeless. For that I am grateful.

The whole ambition thing. I had written a great post about ambition after watching All About Eve, but I decided not to post it. I'm not sure if the movie had rubbed off on me, but I had mentioned a minion of the devil and couldn't go through with the post, but I also couldn't delete it, so it is a draft and will always remain a draft. I had been hungry for success, got side tracked by life, and then hit a brick wall, which I remained to stay stuck to until today. That brick wall can get out of my way. Cheesy as it is, I'm thinking of that Hannah Montana song. Maybe it's because I heard it about a week and a half ago multiple times which is odd on any occasion. It was a sign. Don't get me wrong, I don't mean a religious one, I just mean a sign. For example, about a month ago I was on my way back to Concourse when what I thought was a bird shaped leaf, was really a just a bird. Not any ordinary bird. This one didn't fly away as I went passed it. It stayed where it was. I thought it was injured, took a closer look, saw that it was fine. Since the bird didn't fly away, I had these deep urge to pet the bird. I did. We had a moment. It was brief, but it was a moment. I'm sure that the oddness of the experience was for sure a sign. Something telling me I was on the right track. I had another moment like this once. I was 19 and at a campsite out of Jasper and a male Elk and I had a close encounter. We made eye contact, and he let me get rather close to him for some amount of time. The point is, there are little things in this chaos of events and randomness that seemigly come toegther in time to remind you that you're exactly where you're supposed to be at that specific moment in time. In those moments, it doesn't matter that my existence is insignificant in time in comparison to the vastness of the universe's size and multiple dimensions. My atoms are moving, they're creating ripples that influence matter and those ripples that everything else in the universe are making are influence my matter, and in all this chaotic movement that the naked eye can't see and even technology, there's a harmony, a balance of energy and it's hard not accept that even the things I'm loathing, digusted with and just tired of, I happen to be at the right place at the right time that there's this connection with nature that is unlike anything else. That brick wall can go es a dee. I have no use for it.

Que sera sera. C'es la vie.

The Beginning of a New Season

I've come to the conclusion that my lack of writing was not because I have nothing to say. I thought about it for awhile, and it's nice being in the groove of mundane activities. For a month now I've been doing the same working a full and a part-time job, but I threw in an accounting course into the mix, which takes up a lot of my free time that I'm not using to socialise or catch up on missed TV shows. I'm missing reading and writing. All I really want to do is read a book. I can't find the time. It's strange that we use justificaions. I think I can't read because I should be doing accounting, but I justify being social, which trumps accounting that day. And then I spend my Sundays trying to catch up on what I should have done in the middle of the week so that I can read a book on Sunday perhaps.

And then there are those seasonal habits. The prairies had the worst summer I can remember. It was cold and rainy, and then it was September and it blew by so fast and now it's fall. Sadly, its windy and half the leaves have already fallen. Back to habits, people are changing whatever it is they were doing and it all comes back full circle. Like at Pacific, league has started again. I didn't realize I missed them until I saw them all again. I do have to say there are a few faces I haven't missed and a few that came back that I wish would have stayed gone to wherever it is they came from and stay there. I do know one thing, I'll be sick of them by Christmas and there won't be much of a break. These pool players are intense. And they play multiple nights and spend a lot of money and they do this every year. I don't have anything in my life as a hobby that's nearly this engrossing. Maybe that's why I like it so much. I partake in this yearly ritual, except I'm not playing, I'm watching and working.

Speaking of habits, it's October, which means it's Halloween this month. Over the next couple of weeks, I need to work on my pumpkin stencils. I think I'll have to make mine this year, since I haven't been able to find anything that I'm looking for. This will be the year I carve some good ones. Last year was a flop. And a bad one at that. I just didn't have the time to produce anything and since I made my first stencil last year and carved from it, it was a learning experience and that hindered me slightly. This year though, I won't be having any of it. I will take off time if be necessary. Maybe, just maybe I'll do a preview of the stencils when I get around to making them.

As usual, I have something else I need to do. Yay Autumn and October.