My toothpast has it; my mouthwash as well. My toothbrush looks like a regular toothbrush but now it is with “Whitening”. This is not a problem I used to think about ten years ago. Now when I am done brushing my teeth I smile into the mirror and wonder “Are they white enough”. Add that to the list. Urgh.
‘nuf said.
Christmas 2006 was a journey to keep things alive. It was a journey to keep traditions alive that made me feel like I belonged to a family, a journey to be alive with honesty about what it really meant to spend a Christmas by myself. It was a journey to want a real live slice of Christmas that I was not cut out of because I don’t belong, don’t have or don’t understand the thing about Christmas.
My feet were weary for the journey long but I found myself on Christmas eve at the movies. I had talked another “alone” friend of mine to go see “The Nativity” in the theatre. It is the story of the birth. It was profound in it’s simplicity. Powerful to make you think about how young Mary was and how scary this whole thing must have been for her. Her life was on the line for she could have been stoned to death for being pregnant. She was very brave. It made me want to be brave.
Then to continue on a theme my feet carried me to a very old mission church for a midnight mass. This is something I have not done very many times in my life so it stood out as special. The ceilings above me circled a intricate painting of cherubs and a ginormous wrought iron chandlelier. The candlelit mass offerered voices in song, time to pray, a simple message. My feet wet with tears knew their journey for this Christmas was over when the priest read “For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Saviour, which is Christ the Lord……. ” just like Linus in “Charlie Brown Christmas”. From then on I could almost see a blanky on his shoulder and the voice of a precocious child comforting the distraught Charlie Brown who just didn’t ever seem to belong or get it.
I realized at that moment that all I really need to keep alive is the part of me that knows the truth from a lie. Its the birth. Thats the thing.
The rest is twinkle lights on a dog house and a play that isn’t going the way you thought it would.
Thank you Charlie Brown
I have watched so many movies that I suppose would fall into the catagory of “A Love Story”. A Cinderella story is more like it and love has little to do with it. They all support our culture’s popular notion that we “fall” in love” and it seems to be based on almost nothing except being extremely good looking helps.
**********My comments from here out are a huge spoiler for a movie that I don’t know the name of, so I am sorry if I wreck a movie for you sometime. ******
The other day I was down and out with head pain. I would have watched a movie about almost anything to distract myself. I tripped upon a movie described as “a pilot and an eskimo beauty crash in the alaskan wilderness”. I thought to myself “oh here we go again”. She will hate him at first, then they will come to a meeting of the minds and then they will fall in love and be rescued. At least I will get to see some of Alsaska.
I was remarkably wrong and the movie was stunningly beautiful in so many ways. I think it depicts a real kind of love. I think the characters and their reactions to life were authentic and real and yes, seeing Alaska is always one of my big thrills in life. To see an alaskan aroura is one of my life goals. The young woman in this story is also remarkable. She is young but in a way older than the pilot that she crashes with. She is grounded to the earth and does not resist the situation she finds herself in. She is skilled and you get this sense that she knows who she is, at such a young age. The story circles around her like the earth circles around the sun. She is the rock, the connection to the earth, the reason the pilot opens his heart and loves her.
The young Eskimo woman was beautiful, that was true. It was how she was beautiful that stole my heart and won it at the same time.
The pilot was a white man who spent quite a bit of time kicking things and raging about because he couldn’t accept the fate that had been dealt him. All the while he was throwing his broken radio across the lake the young woman made a fire, caught a fish, pitched a tent and made provisions for the night. When he foolishly left the scene of the crash to go searching for help he ended up passed out from a swarm of bugs that bit, stung and sucked the life out of him. She followed him (even though he told her not to) and quietly put a herb salve on the bug bites and wrapped his feet in moss and something else. She saved his life. When he came to she had stew ready from the gogher that she had caught. She was already making use of the skin for a pair of new boots for him. She knew little english,…I counted three words. They had to communicate from somewhere else. I guess if I had caught the story from the beginning I would have found out that he was flying her to a hospital because she had pneumonea. As she became sicker he stopped kicking rocks in defience of his situation and wrapped his arms around her with skins to keep her from the dangerous cold. It was hard to get her to put down her sewing at night but finally weakness set in and the self center fool built a sleigh so she could lie down and he could pull her. This was a moving and transformative time for our pilot character. This being a love story of a most unusual order, they were starting to know each other, trust each other for their lives but they were not “falling in love”. She knew she was dying and one night in the tent she pulls him close to her and to say a few of the english words that she knows. “My brother”. In the middle of the night she walks out into the sub-zero temps and dies. He buries her in the way of her people and you can see him walking off with the moose skin suit and hand sewn boots she made for him. Now isn’t that a real love story?
Originally uploaded by webbyandme.
A couple of months ago I was afraid that my brain was going to seed. I was afraid that I was not thinking anymore and because of this my abillity to think was diminishing by the day. Thus was born “The University of Annette”. I am in school. I take classes on the internet on a wide range of subjects designed to wake up my brain and sprinkle grow juice on my creativity. I have to say I am quite pleased. Some days I study for hours and some for fifteen minutes but quite literally not a day passes that I do not learn something new. I am also pleased to announce that I do not forget everything two hours after I learn it either ( my other big fear).
Those who have been close to me in the past many years have known they have been hard. I believe the stability of staying in one place for longer than a year has been good for me. I still struggle with chronic pain, a headache that never goes away and I think going through that drains my sunny spirit. I had no idea that my simple and less expensive than going to a real college solution of internet learning would give me such a boost. I didn’t know it would make me feel connected to life in a way I have not in such a long time. And I really didn’t know I would come up with goals and see a future for myself even if my head never changed.
I have been a heavy internet user since my first “Mac Classic”. It has been entertainment, research, work and a tool. I never thought that it would be the University of my own making and a vehicle for change in my life. That’s good medicine.
I have a problem with papers. I get so many of them that I usually end up making a pile. When that pile gets too high then I have to get it a box so they don’t fall over. I actually don’t know how many piles I have going right now but it weights on me and I have been thinking about why. The first thought I have is of course there is something wrong with me. I am so completely bad at interacting with an organizational system that I just heap on the guilt.
Then a picture of a different time, not that long ago popped into my head. I remember being at my Grandmothers house when I was a small girl. Her house was so modest compared to today’s large family homes. She had a small writing desk where she would sit and “write letters”. Ha!. Imagine that and she did it often, with a pen! I had occasion to bring in the mail for her because I stayed with her many summers for at least a couple of weeks. She would get in the course of the week a personal letter and perhaps a bill for heating the house and she would file them in her writing desk.
She did not have the deluge of papers that is in my life. She never had thousands of emails in her Outlook, piles of mail of every kind to fall over and put in a box. I am not making an excuse for my lack of discipline. I own it. I just wonder if the computer age which I have enjoyed so much in most respects has amped up the volume of paper that can be created. I just wonder what it would be like to have lived in that simpler time. Instead of making a blog amoungst my paper piles I might be making a garden like my grandmother.
Originally uploaded by webbyandme.
Tonight I stepped out of the safe boundaries of everything that has defined me this past 47 years and showed up to a party as a photographer. I could barely own it myself when I first got there sheepishly apologizing for everytime I got in somebodies way. I was embarassed by my whimpy little camera and thought nobody would take me seriously. By the end of the evening this man was dragging me around the patio saying ” I found the picture lady!!!, here,..take a picture of these people, ok, please”. More than one person commented that I was a good photographer and one man was fascinated with the new fangled camera I had. Well,.that is what fears are like. They are based on thin ice that break and melt when reality comes up warmly to meet.
I went from barely knowing the setting on my camera at the beginning of the evening to changing them on the fly because something didn’t look right at the end. I went from sheepish to quick like a bunny when I was in demand and in a flash I had to make the light and exposure adustments and zoom and focus while this man said “hurry” in my ear. But my fingers did not fail me. I guess I am still a bit amazed but through time as it sinks in and as I sort the over hundred pictures I took at this party, I think I am going to know that I stepped up a step of the confidence stairway.
Originally uploaded by webbyandme.
I might have to frame this one. Webster gets this look on his face so very often. He can be very serious when he thinks somebody with a dog might be walking on “his” sidewalk. Or, when I am about to give him a bath, or wrap my arms around him and love him up and there is nothing he can do about it.
One of my favorite shows on TV is the Nation Geographic Channel’s “The Dog Whisperer”. This man with seemingly boundless energy named Ceasar Milan shows all of us non-dogs how to really communicate with dogs in a way that they are going to understand because its so primal. Its the language of the dog pack.
Just a simple change like always entering the doorway first communicates a great deal to your dog whether you know it or not. The pack leader always goes first and whether you know it or not you want to be the pack leader in your dogs mind. You may say “oh, I just want to love him”, or “I just want to have his companionship”, but in the dog pack somebody has to be the packleader and if you won’t step up, he will and that leads to behavior problems. (This is my take on what Ceasar has said on his shows).
This is especially important when a dog owner is wounded from a shattered life, disabled, in pain,in chronic pain or depressed. The day I realized that my weakness was putting a burden on my dog to move forward and take on pack leader in our family a big lightbulb went off. I don’t want him to feel like he doesn’t have leadership just because I live a life of chronic pain ( I have not talked about that but I will soon). So I have made an effort in every way that I can to make sure Webster knows that I am in charge of the pack and he can relax and be the companion dog I intended him to be.
Originally uploaded by webbyandme.
I suppose I should introduce myself–at least a part of me. My dad always taught me that if you see something in the store–don’t buy it, make it yourself. Because of that philosophy I have collected an “wow” like list of skills and unearthed talents. My newest for sure is unpacking the less than hundred dollar digital camera recently and pointing it at everything. It seems here I tried to point it at myself and kinda missed.
I don’t mind. I don’t feel all here anyway.
I understand that people tend to like the tools that they get used to working with, are comfortable if they can find things and motor around within its limitations however limiting they might be. I have been a graphic artist and web designer (part-time) for this past 8 years. For a while I thought my particular affection for a graphics tool called “Fireworks” was in part my comfort in motoring around but I knew there was more to it. There was a sneaky and subtle power that I seemed to be wielding with every upgrade.
When I would interact with the professional community I usually detected an odd look when being discovered about my devotion to this little known kissing cousin to the big mama…”Photoshop”. I have even lost jobs because Photoshop was not my tool of preference. I have been a bit quiet about it and continue to enjoy the powerful tool that does 90 something percent of the work needed for website design. I didn’t shout with glee, except I think to my brother the day Fireworks came out with the jpeg selection mask that allows you to change the export settings on different hotspots on your graphic–no more fuzzy text while keeping the data size down to size! Nobody really knows how I layout an entire page design, slice it in Fireworks and when the changes come–and they will–I just turned the blue thing purple ( because it is a vector object not a flat bitmap page) and exported the slice. This way everything is lined up exactly as before and the new graphic perfectly replaces the old. You can’t put a money value on that kind of ease of workflow. Well, I came upon an article that delinates exactly why Fireworks is so powerful and I have recieved permission to include a link to it in my blog. Please visit this link if you are at all inclined to understand more about the world of web graphics tools of the trade.
Thank you to Pixelyzed.com for this amazingly clear description of this often overlooked powerhouse.
I have been taking pictures lately. I find it relaxing. I find it to be brain state altering-in a positive way; The way painting or needlepoint creates endorphines. My favorite! You have to find your artist eye to have a photo shoot. You become hyper sensitive to the details around you that you didn’t notice and stepped on two hours previous. You need to set the stage, create an image from the light that comes off nature or otherwise. And sometimes you just shoot and see what happens.
I didn’t realize how much fun I was having with all of this or how
attached to documenting my life at this time through pictures I had become. I found myself at the most magical spot I have been at since I have been living in CA. I was suddenly and spontaniously having dinner with my best friend ( since I was six) at this posh hotel overlooking the ocean, complete with those great sideways trees from the wind that molds them from the ocean breezes. A garden path guided your eye right to a colorful sunset on top of the water. I have to tell you about it because the moment is gone and me,….without my camera.
