Ten good things
Feb. 2nd, 2014 12:13 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kaberett1. I managed to sign up at the Saison Poetry Library and kind of want to just... move in there. Permanently. (As it is I have borrowed two collections of Mary Oliver, and a gorgeous edition of Neruda in parallel translation, Ode to Opposites.)
2. I saw actual sunlight today, more than once. (On Friday I got into work shortly before sunrise, and left shortly after sunset, and spent most of the intervening time in the basement.)
3. I woke up in the same place as a good friend who'd needed somewhere to crash last night, after a lot of awesome restorative sleep, and we made each other breakfast.
4. I got several Useful Errands run, including the final step of my Freedom Pass application (I should now receive one at some point within the next ten days); and posting off two parcels (one paying-it-forward of some books, one returning a thing that means I will get some working scales again, which will be nice).
5. Captain Awkward meet-up, at which I got some cooking done and ate more awesome food from the farmers' market that happens outside the Southbank Centre, including my first ever churros and also my first ever koshari.
6. I continue to mostly really enjoy Mothership (with a few caveats about occasional searing misogyny).
7. The perfume wotnoldo gave me recently ("for the discerning Iranian brodude") layers really well over my ridiculous predominantly-jasmine shower gel from Lush, in ways that made me very happy today.
8. I've got a date confirmed to give a poetry reading as part of a cabaret-style show. Eek, but also - this is a thing I want to try; let us see how it goes.
9. I am doing some important and necessary and ultimately, I think, very good brainwork, about what it means to be "hard work" and what circumstances I frame myself as same under and how fair (or, more usually, otherwise) that is to me.
10. DINNER PARTY I got to help cook, and I got to shout cheerfully about sex and flame wars quite a lot, and then on the tube home I had a really good, intense, and sadly-curtailed discussion about consent in mental health treatment, which is very much one I would like to continue.
... and as is the point of these lists, now I've started thinking of good things I keep wanting to cram more in :-) There's a poem trying to happen about this - about how it's viewed as arrogant and self-congratulatory and prideful to give time and space to thinking about things that have gone well, things that one has done well, things that one has enjoyed; where self-flagellation years after the fact about specific incidents lasting less than five minutes isn't something I experience so much general social disapproval of (possibly because I try to keep that particular endless wellspring of shame out of the public eye). A first draft happened but isn't right - there's something: I'm daring to write things that aren't quite right, to trust myself to rework them, to experiment with getting down on paper things that don't insistently nudge their way into my heart and stick there until I coax them out; I'm daring to learn, to make mistakes - but maybe it will see the light of day eventually (along with the poem about emotions as whales).
Yes. Hard and tired but good.
2. I saw actual sunlight today, more than once. (On Friday I got into work shortly before sunrise, and left shortly after sunset, and spent most of the intervening time in the basement.)
3. I woke up in the same place as a good friend who'd needed somewhere to crash last night, after a lot of awesome restorative sleep, and we made each other breakfast.
4. I got several Useful Errands run, including the final step of my Freedom Pass application (I should now receive one at some point within the next ten days); and posting off two parcels (one paying-it-forward of some books, one returning a thing that means I will get some working scales again, which will be nice).
5. Captain Awkward meet-up, at which I got some cooking done and ate more awesome food from the farmers' market that happens outside the Southbank Centre, including my first ever churros and also my first ever koshari.
6. I continue to mostly really enjoy Mothership (with a few caveats about occasional searing misogyny).
7. The perfume wot
noldo gave me recently ("for the discerning Iranian brodude") layers really well over my ridiculous predominantly-jasmine shower gel from Lush, in ways that made me very happy today.8. I've got a date confirmed to give a poetry reading as part of a cabaret-style show. Eek, but also - this is a thing I want to try; let us see how it goes.
9. I am doing some important and necessary and ultimately, I think, very good brainwork, about what it means to be "hard work" and what circumstances I frame myself as same under and how fair (or, more usually, otherwise) that is to me.
10. DINNER PARTY I got to help cook, and I got to shout cheerfully about sex and flame wars quite a lot, and then on the tube home I had a really good, intense, and sadly-curtailed discussion about consent in mental health treatment, which is very much one I would like to continue.
... and as is the point of these lists, now I've started thinking of good things I keep wanting to cram more in :-) There's a poem trying to happen about this - about how it's viewed as arrogant and self-congratulatory and prideful to give time and space to thinking about things that have gone well, things that one has done well, things that one has enjoyed; where self-flagellation years after the fact about specific incidents lasting less than five minutes isn't something I experience so much general social disapproval of (possibly because I try to keep that particular endless wellspring of shame out of the public eye). A first draft happened but isn't right - there's something: I'm daring to write things that aren't quite right, to trust myself to rework them, to experiment with getting down on paper things that don't insistently nudge their way into my heart and stick there until I coax them out; I'm daring to learn, to make mistakes - but maybe it will see the light of day eventually (along with the poem about emotions as whales).
Yes. Hard and tired but good.
(no subject)
Date: 2014-02-02 02:01 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2014-02-02 02:20 am (UTC)in that some of us are socialized
not to give ourselves so much space
as those with fuller sets of privilege
i wish you persistence
in your poetic pursuits
and look forward to gnawing every word
of ripened fruit it may bear
(no subject)
Date: 2014-02-02 11:20 am (UTC)My inner Calvinist says...
Date: 2014-02-02 08:12 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2014-02-02 11:22 pm (UTC)