Synchronicity
Synchronicity. Though not an entirely new concept to me, it’s one I’ve been exploring and experiencing lately. No, I did not just come up with this on my own – I may be creative, but I’m not that creative. I first encountered this term studying Jung, then really started contemplating it while practicing The Artist’s Way. Yes, I studied Jung, he’s my favorite psychotherapist. Leave me alone. Synchronicity for this purpose is the idea that it is natural to create and be creative, and as such God (or the universe, or the Force, or whatever) delights in creation, and will provide whatever you need for productive creativity. Now. I know this whole concept sounds…
Why I Am No Longer Advertising
Last November, I made the decision to advertise this little blog a few places, hoping that I’d gain new readers and wider exposure. Six months was the internal deadline I set for myself when I started, knowing that at that point I’d reevaluate my financial situation, the blog’s statistical data and my ROI. Yeah, I can rock the financial lingo with the best of them. Well, there I was at the six month mark last week. In the weeks leading up to it, I’d been thinking a lot about whether or not to pull the plug, and I went into a tailspin of self-doubt because that is part of my…
Dark Comedy
In the tradition of great minds such as Darth Vader and Wes Anderson, I have always been drawn to the Dark Side – of comedy, that is. Like how I did that? I’m just getting warmed up, too, muahaha! Dark comedies, I admit, appeal to a specific sense of humor that not everyone shares. They possess a certain dryness, a level of irony lost on many and disliked by more. It happens to be my love-language, though. This doesn’t mean I’ve seen every dark comedy known to man (A Fish Called Wanda and Dr. Stragelove are still in my queue), but I have a list of favorites that I thought I’d share…
Passions, Otherwise Known as Unhealthy Obsessions
Hey, lookey-here, another Finish-the-Sentence Friday, courtesy of Katie Hall! Any excuse I can find to indulge in this topic, since I am a very passionate person and sometimes journaling just doesn’t cut it. Plus, this is Friday, and I need to write something easy and non-serious so the first thing visible on this blog isn’t my first public attempt at poetry. Gah. I am very passionate about… Um, everything? More specifically, everything I write about on this blog? Do you need more detail? I guess so. I’m feeling lazy today this week. Must be a twenty-four hour tumor going around. Let me see if I can drill my passions down…
Permanent Employee
“Have a seat, Natalie,” the HR Director said, gesturing to the uncomfortably stylish chairs facing her desk. I sat and crossed my legs. The skirt I wore tightly squeezed my hips when I sat, as if they were encased like polyester-covered sausage. I seemed to have gained weight in the seven months since I’d started temping at the sleek marketing company. Perhaps it was the coconut cake I scarfed every day as a “snack” to get me through another painfully boring afternoon scouring the web for tech resumes…or maybe the hazelnut latte that went with the cake…or maybe the lack of exercise from working two jobs and going to grad…
When it’s Plausible to Live in Two Cities
For something completely different, I am participating in Finish the Sentence Friday, because I read Katie Hall’s post, decided I wanted to write about this week’s prompt, and actually had time to do so. If I could live anywhere I’d live… Okay, first of all, I’m slightly tweaking the prompt, because anyone who knows anything about me knows I want to live somewhere in France or Italy more than I want a new baby kitten or a big scoop of gelato, so that wouldn’t be a fun topic. It’s predictable. I do NOT want to be predictable. So, I’m making a slight alteration… If you could live anywhere in the U.S., where would you…
How I Talk Myself into Good Things
For the last few weeks, I’ve been struggling with a decision. I’m a wrestler, in that I spend a lot of time in my head arguing with myself. Wrestling. I had planned to go to a blogging conference pretty much since the day I started this blog. I have always known I wanted to be a writer, and this blog was the vehicle by which I would finally make that happen. There was no question about me not succeeding – I had to be a writer, because my “safe” career choice already didn’t pan out. That’s right, I worked on the “safe” choice first to avoid the pain and rejection involved in selecting…
Not as Irish as I Thought
I’m not as Irish as I thought. This has skewed my worldview a bit, and now I’m feeling culturally adrift; in the throes of an existential crisis, if I allow my flair for dramatics to take the spotlight for a moment. But I’m getting ahead of myself… Being part-Irish has helped me situate myself in a world where culture has been wiped dry by chain restaurants and American flag-waving patriotism, with which I don’t identify because it’s so sterile. The only meaning I can extract from being American in this day and age is the value of capitalism and imperialism, and I’m not big on isms. When I was too…
Star-Crossed Lovers – My Dramatic Reunion with the Oscars
I have a strange, emotionally fraught relationship with the Academy Awards. Believe me, I am aware of how weird that sounds. When I was a little girl, I used to design gowns for women to wear on that magical night, confident in the knowledge that one day I would wear the shimmery pearl sheath down the red carpet (this was the nineties – shimmery sheaths were in). At eleven years old, I had no reason not to believe I wouldn’t one day strut onto that stage and accept one of the gold statues. After all, I was the most dramatic person I knew (at the time), and I had been practicing my English…
My New Artistic Secret, or, Why I Am No Longer a Zombie
You know those days when you have nothing to say, and so you surf around online for some inspiration and the writer’s block only gets worse and then you realize you aren’t very funny or popular and you suspect you may need to lose ten twenty pounds? Then you get caught in a spiraling snare of watching funny cat videos with the sound off and are tempted to emotionally eat the entire jar of almond butter? Yeah, me neither. I’ve been working on a project for the past two weeks. It’s a project I heard a fellow blogger mention, and it’s designed to help recover your creativity. I don’t know about…
