When I told someone I need to chill this is not exactly what I meant…
…Though it is very representative of my mood right now.
Frosted over, but trying to push through the madness. I seriously chose the wrong year to give up coffee for Lent.
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Today is Day 8 of the March Slice Of Life Story Challenge.
Let’s how other are slicing and hopefully doing a better job of chilling out today…
Mr. Sandman has chased Ms. Insomnia around the mulberry bush for three days. I may have slept a total of ten hours twixt these three days.
Maybe it’s all the snow that has fallen on my fair city these past few hours, I don’t know. When Insomnia stopped to take a gander at the pristine snowy city streets Sandman finally caught up to the elusive chick. They are battling still, but I feel she’s losing this round – rapidly and I couldn’t be happier.
My head feels like the marionette string has been cut, I can barely keep my head up. The result being one yawn filled slice before the hay hits me <— not a typo.
G’nite y’all.
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Today is Day 7 of the March Slice Of Life Story Challenge.
I write. I write documentation at work. I write creatively every where else I can. For instance this is me, during my cruise working on a story while waiting to dock.
In the Broadway show “Hamilton: An American Musical”, at the end of Act I there’s a number called Non Stop in which the friends and family of Alexander Hamilton both praise and bemoan the prolific wordsmith.
“How do you write like tomorrow won’t arrive?
How do you write like you need it to survive?
How do you write ev’ry second you’re alive?
Ev’ry second you’re alive? Ev’ry second you’re alive?”
This is me to a smaller degree, but not by much depending on who you ask.
If I have an idea I write or at least try to write a note to myself to revisit an idea later. Trains. Boats. Planes. At a bar. In the middle of a party wherever I am.
However the downside of that is on occasions like today, where I find myself writing so much about the whole fruit, I forget I need to be writing about – you guessed it – the slice.
So for the second day -er- night in a row. I skate in just under the midnight hour.
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Today is Day 6 of the March Slice Of Life Story Challenge.
One of the interesting things about my daily commute is the hill. New York City is not known for its hills. There’s a reason we have an area call Flatlands in Brooklyn and the magical phenomenon called Manhattanhenge which occurs a couple of times a year.. Then you travel north to upper Manhattan where there are inclines that can rival San Francisco. The train station where I exit my evening commute home just happens to be halfway to the bottom of one. There is even a simple marker in the park near one end of the station that notes the area as the highest natural elevation on Manhattan.
Suffice to say at over 400 feet deep it’s a long climb from the subway platform to the street level. Essentially, we are talking a five story tenement building climb.
Normally this is not an issue as there are escalators to help. Two going up and one down, plus a standard flights of stairs. A week ago the usual escalator that goes down went out of service for major repairs, scheduled to be back in service, I hope, next week. As a result, one of the usually two escalators going up, was switched to a down escalator. There was a reason for there being two escalators that went up. This station is a busy station. Two are needed for the volume of ridership that disembark at the station. Down to only one working up escalator the inevitable happened. It gave its all – and died. So this evening after a long day of work, I exit the train and just know by the number or people walking to the right instead of left that the up escalator is broken. This has happened no less than five times last year that I can recall.
Granted, I could walk to the other end of the station and take the elevator, (yes the station also has elevators), but then I would have to walk that same distance back to continue home. What I save in convenience and accessibility, I loose in time. I don’t consider the trade-off worth it, so I climb the steps.
When this happens I dubbed them my “Rocky” steps. For climbing them is very reminiscent of the Philadelphia Art Museum Steps the titular character had trouble climbing. For like Rocky and his steps at the beginning, I have yet to make it up the entire flight of steps without stopping at least twice. I’m faster than a couple of people, much more are faster than I, leaving my in the smoke of their speed. I have no shame, when I need to stop and catch my breath for a moment for a moment, I stop and wheeze and pant. As I stood at the bottom step and looked up at the daunting task ahead of me, I figured today was going to be no different.
Or so I thought…
Today, I plugged in my iPod grabbed a banister and started to climb. It was Drowning Pool and I trudging up the stairs. I didn’t look I simply climbed. I felt my first twinge telling me I was going to need to stop. I looked up and to my surprise I was more than three-quarters up the stairs!!
But… but… But How?!?!?
I had never made it that far up without stopping, I was not going to stop now! I continued climbing. My knees started complaining. I looked up and could have counted the steps if I stopped. I wasn’t stopping. I could easily count I had about a dozen steps left when my lungs started their wheeze.
Are you kidding me? Less than a dozen. Not so easy, let alone peasey, but…
Oh! My! God! I! Did! It!
No, I did not jump up and down like Rocky Balboa. 1- I was too out of breath and 2- while I’m sure many would have gotten the reference, 3 – I would have looked absolutely ridiculous in my suit and winter coat jumping up an down on the pavement.
I climb the steps without stopping! That’s not to say I am going to be able to do the same tomorrow if they’re still down. That’s not so say I will not pray that the escalator is working tomorrow.
But today – today….?
Gonna fly now
Flying high now
Gonna fly, fly, fly!!!!
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Today is Day 5 of the March Slice Of Life Story Challenge.
Come see how others are slicing it up today.
My eyes opened on the alarm clock blinking at me.
Huh? Blinking? Crap!
Apparently the power had tripped some three plus hours ago. Luckily my circadian system still works and that’s what woke me. I glance at the burgeoning dawn outside my window, grab my cell phone and see I have roughly forty minutes to get it together and catch the bus.
You can do this, shake a tail feather, Raivenne!
Please note, I am not a morning At. All. So I am still not quite awake as I haul arse out of bed and head to the bathroom for my morning ablutions. I am under the shower when my brain starts to come online at last.
Wait…
Why didn’t the alarms on my mobile wake me, even if the clock radio didn’t?
Oh for fuck’s sake! It’s bloody Sunday!
Sigh – I’m wide awake now, in annoyance.
On the plus side – I’ve changed my sheets, completed the Sunday Whirl, posted the story that sprang from it, checked my emails and now have an easy slice to submit today.
Even better – once I post this I’m off to brunch!
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Today is Day 4 of the March Slice Of Life Story Challenge.
Come see how others are slicing it up today.
March 1st marked the twelfth year of my being a widow. I’ve had no serious relationships in the interim. A friend asked this morning if I think I will fall in love again. I told him I hope so, but I’d prefer to rise in love again someday. It sparked a discussion that the results of I thought would make a good post. So here goes…
We say we “fall” in love.
Fall.
Falling is uncoordinated; a generally unconscious act. No one wants to fall. The body instinctively tries to reach out to brace itself against it. Falling is not something we want to do in any other circumstance.
Why is it allowed in love?
Now to rise? That’s something different.
Rise.
To rise. To uplift. To elevate.
Love should bring you above it all even when in the muck of it. Does anyone remember a few ago during the Vancouver riots after the game – specifically the now infamous photo of the couple kissing on the ground? There’s chaos around them, you can see police in the near distance behind them. Yet they are kissing.
Vancouver Riots 2011 – Couple Kissing
For all that was going on around them, in that moment it, was just about the two of them. It’s him giving her comfort in the midst of madness, still it comforts him as well for her to accept it and return it.
That was a moment of rising in love between two people who had no idea the moment was captured until it was shared across the globe.
Also note: rising in love is no guarantee of its reciprocity. Nor is it solely the providence of romantic love.
And because sometimes the love you have to rise up to, is the love of yourself:
And that is the blessing, but also the crux and the curse of it.
Because falling in love is relatively easy. I said relatively.
Falling in love is that easy B-. It required very little effort on your part to pass the test. Now you have time for that Saturday Social with your B- and maybe even B+ friends. And if that was all you wanted, then okay. When you see the Honor Roll and your name was not on it. You’ll always know you could have done better.
Rising in love takes work, compromise work and yes some sacrifice.
Rising in love is not being satisfied with that easy B-. You’re willing to work for it. You give up a couple, maybe a few Saturday Socials. Some friends may tease you. You see the pictures of what you’re missing, but you persevere. When you do show up at the Saturday Social again, you do so with a hard earned A, maybe even an A+ and your name on the Honor Roll.
Yes, rising in love is work, but the pay off is so worth the extra effort.
You do not choose who you fall in love with. However, you always choose who you rise in love with.
So yes, I do hope to fall in love, again.
But then I want to rise.
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Today is Day 3 of the March Slice Of Life Story Challenge.
Come see how others are slicing it up today.
The words blurred into one another, every yellowed page like the one before.
Sela pulled her sweater tighter around her, the sudden chill making her teeth rattle from more than the air conditioning protecting the ancient scrolls and text. Preconceived notions now shattered under the gravity of what she has learnt.
She was not ugly, but she knew she was no raving beauty, either. She was simply layogenic, all the pieces were there, yet they did not quite seem to align up for true beauty. In school her interests were not those of the other girls her age. She was very intelligent, but she was not valedictorian. She was popular enough to be the good friend, the wing man, but never enough to keep the guy. And she had her secrets. She had spent her teenage through late twenties with a constant sense of the autophobic. Then three years ago, just when she was truly starting to accept the single life would be her lot in life, she met Avery.
He courted her. With flowers and conversation arcane, often profound, sometimes profane. And when the granite walls she had built around her hear came down at last, she in turn courted him. With creativity and art and myths and politics. The curves to his edges. Avery with his pale fine near otherworldly features. His naturally pale blonde locks that naturally bleached to almost platinum in the summer sun. Avery never made her feel anything other than utterly beautiful inside and out. He was not perfect. She could barely get him to stay the night. And if he stayed he was always up by dawn puttering about.
It was all so transparent now, so obvious, but it was anything but several months ago.
It had started as a joke, a far-fetched notion dreamt up after the late night/early morning hours following an alcohol fused evening. They had lain nude in the sand, under the stars of Cancer. Their bare bodies, beginning to be tinged blue from the cool night outdoors, was now slowly pinking again as they greeted the warmth of dawn.
Then she saw it.
Sela had awoken on her back, Avery was laying sideways, facing away from her, his back to the burgeoning dawn of the shore. Every instinct told her do not move. So naturally Sela found herself in a rapid series of suppression as the urge to yawn, to sneeze and most of all, to reach and touch his beautiful back tried to overtake her, but she persevered.
His skin was so fair she felt she could all but see the blood flood as his flash warmed. She was admiring the fine-boned, yet nicely toned structure of his back. It was she was looking at his back, at his shoulders, that she saw the thin curved lines that sudden marked his shoulder blades. It was just a flash of light, a bright electrified blue that appeared and was gone in a flash. She was so surprised by it she must have made some sort of sound, for Avery quickly turned to face her. His smile was beguiling and she assured herself she must have been seeing things as he pulled her in his arms.
Later that morning they sat in an outdoor café, sipping chamomile tea with honey, for him, coffee black, for her. They listened to the rising crescendo of the local birds as they woke for the day when she spied a dragonfly in the distance. Not afraid of insects she pointed out the beauty of its transparent wings. She jokingly wondered how such wings would look on him with his coloring. Avery had simply smiled at her flight of fancy and changed the subject, but that flash in the dawn popped into her head and again tried to dismiss what she thought she saw.
She tried to. She couldn’t.
She could not let it go and every single cell of her being knew she could not just ask him. At least not yet. So she didn’t. It was good fortune they both travelled for work. If she stayed an extra day overseas to research something he never batted an eye, just as she never questioned his trips if he chose to stay an extra day. She sometimes felt guilty, but not enough to stop researching. Until today.
Today she had the answers, the evidence; the truth.
She carefully closed the yellowed pages and packed away the last notes she’ll take on the matter.
Sela, the last Nyx Fairy, will trust Avery with the truth of her wings come dusk.
She has faith the Avery, the last Aeshnidae Fairy, will trust her with the truth of his come dawn.
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Mindlovemisery’s Menagerie|First Line Friday – March 2, 2018
The words blurred into one another, every yellowed page like the one before.
Use the above as your opening line in a story or prose.
The Sunday Whirl 340
Honey, Crescendo, Gravity, Blood, Blue, Shatter, Edges, Teeth, Bare, Rattle, Birds, Electrify
Use at least ten of the words in a story or poem.
Mindlovemisery’s Menagerie|Wordle #186
Cancer, Fairy, Sideways, Farfetched, Chamomile, Bleach, Assure, Granite, Suppression, Layogenic, Transparent, Autophobia
Use at least ten of the words in a story or poem.
I’m on the subway, iPod plugged in with rock music. My cell phone in hand as I scroll through Facebook trying to not laugh out loud at some of the silliness my friends have posted overnight in response to Astroglide <– see yesterday’s SOL18 post for that explanation, if you don’t get the reference – among other things, when I feel a gentle, but definitive tap on my shoulder.
I was deep into my personal Lip Sync Battle, giving Steven Tyler a run for his money on that high note in Aerosmith’s “Dream On” and did not appreciate the interruption. Somehow managing to not sigh loudly, I turn to a fellow commuter with a questioning look.
“Hi, I’m sorry, but I have to ask: how do you do that?”
I, of course, do not have a clue as to what the hell “that” is I am doing and state such.
Apparently, I have the ability to not just listen to my music, also but lip sync with it while simultaneously reading Facebook posts and clearly laugh at them.
Really? She’s honestly asking this, non-facetiously? I’m equally impressed and appalled at her single-mindedness that thinks this is norm.
“Multitasking?” I shrug, not getting why I am being disturbed for such drivel.
Rai, be nice to the people, don’t be a Mean Girl – I hear my work wife kvetching at me in my mind. Fine!
“No, you’re reading, laughing at what you’re reading, while lip syncing to the song and still manage to hit repeat on your iPod barely missing a beat as far as I can tell.” She states emphatically.
Uh, just how long has this women been observing me?
I am a little confused at first, but then I get it that she cannot do those things – simultaneously.
Soooo? I care because…
“If I tried that I’d either be singing the words I’m reading out loud or have to stop either lip syncing or reading.” She continued confirming my thought.
I bit back the urge of my Sarcastic Siren in me that wanted to inquire if she were capable of efficient forward motion in the midst of the consumption of Wrigley’s Doublemint. Hey, I said I bit her back, but it was a close call.
“I don’t think about it, I just do it.” I replied honestly, “Anything else?”
She shook her head in the negative and we returned to our individual, in my case multiple, pursuits. A couple of train stops later, I felt I was being stared upon. Sure enough it’s her.
“Yes…?”
“Are you even aware that you added toe and finger tapping to everything else? I mean how?”
What is with this chick? Did she not get enough attention as a child? Was she given too much?
Seriously, Whiskey. Tango. Foxtrot.????
At this point I most emphatically regret having given up coffee for Lent as I am on my way to work and it’s much too early for alcohol, not to mention it’s kind of – you know- frowned upon.
“Have you ever been to a live music concert?” I asked through near gritted teeth.
“Of course!” She seemed offended that such a thing -her having never attended a live concert- could be the case. I could not have cared less if she were.
“Ever notice how a drummer can play two different rhythms on each hand) with his sticks, as his feet strike a different beat on the base drum, while he take cues from – or give cues as the group lead and sings at the same time?”
Side note to say Thank you To the amazing Dave Grohl of the Foo Fighters for popping into mind and being the inspiration for this impromptu object lesson. Some of you will get the reference. Hopefully, all of you will understand the example.
“Yeah..” She nods in the affirmative, but still looks a tad confused.
“Same principle. I have no idea how drummers can do that, they just can.I have no idea why you cannot, but you can’t. I’m not special because I can. You’re not less than because you can’t. It just is. Capiche?” ” I finish.
“My dad says capiche when I’m annoying him. I’m annoying you aren’t I?”
“Why nooooooooo! Don’t let the fact that I’m about to plug back into my iPod and ignore you for the rest of my ride mean anything. It’s nothing personal, honey. Scouts Honor! Capiche?”
I bet you’ve already figured out I was never a scout, haven’t you, dear readers?
So okay – yeah, the Sarcastic Siren mode came out with that one. Enough that a guy sitting on the other side of her snorted, loudly.
I went back to what I was doing and I’ll be damned if I didn’t notice her trying to multitask a few minutes later. I shake my head sadly and ignore her.
The guy on the other side of her catches my eye and smirks in sympathy – at least I think that’s what it is– as he exits. I’m just grateful I exit in a few more stops and I can leave her to work it out for herself.
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Today is Day 2 of the March Slice Of Life Story Challenge.
Come see how others are slicing it up today.
…would have me rolling my eyes anyway.
But today I actually noticed the little Q&A feature Facebook added. Under the guise of letting your friends learn just a little bit more about you, the questions are definitely designed to evoke a more meaningful exchange than posting a picture and friends clicking a reaction button.
The questions are deep probing
Yes, my tongue was planted firmly in cheek when I typed “deep probing”.
The call of my not so inner Sarcastic Siren would not be denied. I simply had to respond to some of this drivel. Or as I stated on my facebook page:
We’re talking my prurient mind where down in the gutter is several steps up for me on a good day. I was bored today and started answering a few of them.
So what could happen, you ask? This…
My facebook friends seem particularly amused about the Astroglide. Not all of them have caught on that I’m being more of Un merdeux than usual. Adds to the fun.
Either way – I suspect I am going to be amusing them, and myself, for a while with these.
Facebook – look what you made me do!
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Today is Day 1 of the March Slice Of Life Story Challenge.
Glacial white peaks
Above cool blue waters
What’s seen only a third
Of What speaks
The bottom of the world
Once in a lifetime dream
Made real
For this city girl
Frozen landscape
Full of life
Visual poem
Of nature
Nurturing
My soul
Le Raivenne finds herself immersed in the frozen beauty that can only be found at the bottom of the Earth.
Raivenne-lations 