Category Archives: Rambling Rose

The Struggle is Real

Crisis DuJour, From My Brain to Yours, Rambling Rose, , ,

Why do we make the choices that we make?

I ask myself this after I fell into a blackhole this week watching a marathon of Chinese Soap Opera–56 hours later I’m still trying to figure it out.

How can you watch this many hours and not remember the plot at the end? It’s a mystery.

*****

Life has calmed down–as much as it ever does. I have moments of time available–between loads of laundry, shopping, cooking, cleaning, boy-child wrangling and working. I should be using that time wisely. I tell myself, “You should be writing.”

But it is so hard to get myself focused. There is something fractured about being me that has worsened over the years.

Have you ever lived your life expecting that ‘someday’ you’d figure things out. You’d wake up and–BAM–you’d have your act together. Life wouldn’t be so hard then? You’d definitely have a handle on being who you are!

I’m fifty-five and it hasn’t happened yet. It is dawning on me that I’m not going to have that life-altering shift of perception–the epiphany that opens wide my mind, steers me toward a better version of myself. Someone who is capable. A real go getter.

And each day I wake up and find I am still just me…it’s hard. Really, really hard.

It is somewhat disappointing to reach this realization. I’m not only not getting any better at life, I may actually be getting incrementally worse. Mostly it feels like I am floundering. I’m a human placeholder in a game I can’t win, playing against formidable forces I can’t see against insurmountable odds…and I think I’m facing the wrong way on the board and possibly missing a few pieces. (This analogy may have gone astray.) What I’m saying is, it is exhausting facing life like this. Some days, I want to give up.

Life can be discouraging that way–if you forget to look for the positives. If you don’t count the sunshine that follows the storm. If you don’t take pleasure in the small victories–like matching all the socks in the laundry. (Throwing out the single ones is just good mental health, in my opinion.) Or watching the fuzzy-butted squirrels outside the kitchen window as they stuff their face with just one more peanut. The smell of clean laundry warm right out of the dryer. Snifffff…ahhhh! (What? It can’t be only me who does this!)

Depression filters the world grayer. Drains the energies. Zaps the mind’s ability to combat the inner demons that tell you “Give up. You can’t beat this.” This inner critic chants in a hateful, hurtful voice spewing a litany of failures on repeat just waiting to bring you down. It is a broken mirror that reflects how much you are not like the person you thought you would be by now. It drowns good intentions in bile and self-loathing.

But, it only wins if you listen. If you believe its lies. It’s false protestations. If you don’t take into account the good you do. The people who love you and the people who you love in return. The worth in facing a day despite every instinct that would have you crawl back into a hole to sleep or fall into a Netflix coma to escape the daily grind.

I struggle to beat back these feelings. To see my worth. To feel it. But, I am still trying. Every day. I try to make good choices–even if that means that having tofu and stir fried vegetables for lunch is my crowning achievement in a day full of suck. That, and I got a shower. And I sat down to my computer to put my feelings into words.

Being who I am hasn’t been easy. I struggle. I fail. But I get back up again.

And maybe, at the end of the day, that is something to be proud of.

If anyone else has hit the doldrums of winter and is in need of encouragement–spring will come. Eventually. And I will join you in a little sun worshiping when it does. Until then, hold on. And remember, you are not alone.

*

You’ve read this far bonus:

I’ve just learned that February First is National Dark Chocolate Day. Dark chocolate is nature’s way of saying, “Yeah, life can be bitter…but it can be a little sweet too. Have a truffle today! You deserve it!”

And, for anyone needing help, please consider talking to someone. The Lifeline number to call for suicide prevention is now 988 or you can use the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline (1-800-273-8255) it is a toll-free hotline in the US. You can check out the webpage at 988Lifeline.org.

A Close and Uncommon Book

F*ckingAwesomeReads, Isolation Recreation, Rambling Rose, Reading-The-Eighth-Deadly-Sin,

Look, I don’t generally do book reviews on my blog. It just isn’t my thing. But if you’ve missed me at all in the blogosphere, know that it was in pursuit of relearning to love reading and battling my way through painful transitions of my own. This book gives me hope that life is worth living. Maybe you need a reason to keep on going too.

So, I offer to you Becky Chambers’ A Closed and Common Orbit and a link to my Goodreads review.

https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/4654661851

But, honestly, I suggest you just read the book instead. Any review is going to be a pale, anemic attempt to recapture the absolute brilliance of Becky Chambers’ writing. It’s actually a travesty that I tried.

WARNING–this is BOOK TWO of a series. You can read it without the preceding work–A LONG WAY TO A SMALL, ANGRY PLANET–but you will deprive yourself of joy and context if you do.

A Tale of Two Lindseys

Covid Report, From My Brain to Yours, Rambling Rose, Travel Broadens the Mind, ,

In a previous post, Another Woman’s Life, we met our intriguing heroine dumpster diving at a Goodwill depot center. (Wait…no… that makes it sound like she was doing the diving when actually I was in the dumpster…Sigh. Go read that post, it makes more sense.)

***

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Wordless

Poetry?, Rambling Rose, Thinks I Like, Writing, , 
WORDLESS
by Kiri L. K. Salazar

The words hewn from my mind are forced into uncomfortable arrangements. 
Sentences with broken backs and incomplete endings. 
Things that dangle. 
A worrisome focus on grammar and clean lines—syllabication truncated to succinctness. 
When all I want to do is run through words like a child through a field of flowers. 

Wild and untethered, 
I would pluck the verbs that please me best and make of them a bouquet.  Smell the deep earthiness of adjectives that bite the tongue when you speak them. 
Crush the scented mint between lips full of prose.
Using adverbs sparingly so as not to overpower the taste. 
       Slowly. 
               Surely. 
                      And with great pleasure. 
 Carefully measuring synonyms by the spoonful.
 
But harnessing words is tricky business. 
Bringing them through the slip stream of consciousness and pinning them to the page is not unlike stabbing a butterfly after the ether withers them. 
Do they become inert things no longer filled with life?
Pretty facsimiles of something that once breathed?

If words are not my playthings, then what toys do I have left?
How to describe what lurks in the folds of my mind? 
If I cannot use them with abandon, are they orphaned? 
Are they lost forever in a void of never-has-been-ness? 
A not-being that sucks my soul into a black abyss. 

Am I then become wordless?

An Oldie But a Goodie…

Crisis DuJour, Friends, Rambling Rose, Travel Broadens the Mind, , , ,

I am driving back home Sunday, through a raging storm when the call comes over the radio:

“Beep Beep Beep…please be aware that a tornado watch is in effect for West Michigan counties from now until 8:00pm tonight.”

I don’t know if you’ve ever seen a tornado–I’ve been lucky not to–but the minute you know it is a possibility, you start seeing potential tornados everywhere you look. They become tornados of the mind. This is one of those imaginary journeys…

***

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Hell’s Home Kitchen – Napalm Edition

Family, Highly Flammable, Parenting Heart Palpitations, Rambling Rose, Snow Day,

I recently read a few other bloggers’ trials and tribulations in the kitchen–HERE and again HERE and this made me reflect on some of my worst disasters.

Please enjoy my retrospective and recollections of thymes past.

*****

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The Cannibal Diet

Click Bait, From My Brain to Yours, Palate Pleasures, Rambling Rose,

TRIGGER WARNING: The following people might want to avoid this particular post: those with delicate constitutions, the humor-impaired, vegans who didn’t reading the title. You might find this a tad offensive. Actually, anyone with any sense of taste whatsoever might want to give it a pass. It’s that bad. If you choose to consume my unfiltered thoughts, don’t say I didn’t warn you.

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Out-of-Focus Musings of a Disturbed Mind

Covid Report, Crisis DuJour, From My Brain to Yours, Isolation Recreation, Isolation Recreation, Photographic Memories, Rambling Rose, Reading-The-Eighth-Deadly-Sin, Terrifying Transitions, Travel Broadens the Mind, Welcome To Autismland: Population YOU!, , ,

Head Rush

I was complimented recently on my writing, it came via someone with a tenuous Facebook connection. It’s the first time anyone who wasn’t a friend or blood relative (and therefore obligated to like my writing or at least lie to me and say they do) told me they found my writing funny. (But funny in a good way.)

It made me feel, just for a nano-second, what it must be like when famous people get recognized. It was awesome and I thanked him…and then felt like a total fraud because I haven’t given two thoughts to my blog in months!

You can thank/blame him for this post.

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Sundown – A Poem

Art, From My Brain to Yours, Isolation Recreation, Isolation Recreation, Older 'n' Dirt, Photographic Memories, Poetry?, Rambling Rose, Thinks I Like, Writing,

SUNDOWN

by Kiri L. K. Salazar


Memory is the golden shore where summer waters lap.
Where sanded children shriek like gulls,
And mothers shade their eyes and search
The ever distant beach for tears or missing faces in the surf.

There the castles build and fall, where triumph tragedy becomes.
And sticky mouths suck greedy gulps of sugar-saturated pops—
Rainbow colors melting down.

See criss-crossed marks burned into skin which will no permanent memory make
To keep from repeating the mistake of measuring the sun by an SPF span.
Boiled-lobster faces whine and belated zinc is applied in futile effort to rewind time.

Gritted bodies, tired, worn but happy with a day’s respite,
Ride the chariot once more toward the sinking orb
Which threatens little from its perch on the lip of the world,
Leaving a flip flop token of remembrance behind.

You’ll find no ribboned concourse marking childhood’s end.
It is fleeting, passing, and no trumpet heralds its demise.
So, measure well those steps you take on burning sands
They will the hourglass wind down and scorch tender flesh
In haste to reach Lethe’s waters.

A picture of the author’s son, back when he was little…a hundred years ago.
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Notes From The Squirrel Bunker

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Covid-Diaries Day 32

“This siege is going on longer than I would have imagined. Supplies are running low. I may have to eat the squirrels in the yard. Hope I can get better with the slingshot, just in case survivalists storm the brigade.”

Continue reading Notes From The Squirrel Bunker →