Catching Up

Well, that was an extremely full weekend. Not one of those weekends after which you feel like you need another, but one of constant, refreshing enjoyment. It all started Friday night. I left work early in order to meet the other cast members of Separate Checks so we could ride up together. We performed at a small theatre in a renovated church in Bonners, a town north of home. We made it to theatre about 5:30 and curtains opened at 7:00. Friday night’s show was a bit rough, but our audience and our director still enjoyed it.

After the show, I got a text from my friend Ben who’s been living in Texas for the last nine months. Ben was my roommate when I was living in Moscow, ID and last came up to visit for New Years. Apparently he’d been sitting outside his mom’s house for a while. He showed up without notice and they weren’t home. I invited him to come up and have dinner with the cast.

Dinner was hilarious. Put six actors at a table right after they get off stage and you’ve got another show. Before we were even seated three of us guys cornered one of the actresses and serenaded her with “A Whole New World” from Aladdin. I can’t imagine why she tried to hide. At some point the radio in the restaurant honestly played “Hit Me Baby One More Time.” As you can imagine, we sang along.

Once we left dinner we drove back to our hometown and headed out to a local dive bar. It was around 11:00-11:30 when we got there so we just hung out, socialized, had a couple beers and left in time to get home at two. Ben crashed at my place, since he couldn’t get a hold of his mom or her significant other. The only memorable thing that happened was an invitation to a bonfire the next night at a friend’s dad’s place.

Saturday was awesome. After getting breakfast at my favorite coffee shop/organic café, Ben and I headed to the Employee Fitness Center at work. We played eight games of ping pong, two games of pool, and some foosball. I tried to call it a game of foosball, but Ben disagreed. I guess that had something to do with my 33 points to his 10 when we decided we had enough.

From there Ben went to see if anyone was home at his mom’s and I went back to my apartment. We have a pool there and I made a new goal recently to use it as often as I have time. I was going to try for once a day but decided that having a goal of writing 1,000 words a day is enough “once a day” goals for one person. If I go swimming as often as I have time, it’s not such a big deal when I don’t do it and I can’t beat myself up for it. It’s nice to have it there for when I do have time and it seems like a low impact, high yield activity. Builds muscle, burns calories and doesn’t seem to place undue stress on anything. I’m not pushing myself, either. I’ll do it for as long as I can/feel like it each time and keep doing it for a longer session as my strength builds. Honestly, while I’m a bit sore, I feel better than I have in a couple weeks. It’s the good kind of sore that you get when you use your body, as opposed to the ache and tightness of disuse and old injuries.

The day’s not done yet! After I got done swimming and got ready for the evening, I caught a ride up to Bonners with my friend Liv. It was the last night of the show and everyone just took it up a notch. We had about 40 in the audience and our performance was as good as it had been rough the night before. Everyone was on top of their game. I threw in a couple of good ones I’d come up with and got the laughs I wanted. That’s always a good feeling. After the show we cleaned up the venue, put all our stuff away and headed home. Ben came to see the show, so I caught a ride back with him and we headed out to catch that bonfire to which we’d been invited.

We arrived at about 9:30, the time our friend had told us it was going to start. He wasn’t there. Ben and I, almost strangers to the four people there showed up and the guy who had invited us had already left to dye Easter eggs with his girlfriend and her son. In spite of that we stuck around, had a beer and enjoyed the fire while we chatted. Right before we decided to move on, our hostess brought out a floating lantern like the ones on Tangled. She managed to get it going and we watched as it slowly filled with heat. When the paper walls had gently rounded to their max the escaping heat lifted the tiny vehicle from the hands holding it and it floated gently into the sky. It really was a magical sight and the lantern turned into a tiny floating star before it winked out and, we assume, returned to earth a long way from where it began.

Eager to avoid overstaying our welcome, Ben and I left to see what was happening downtown. Once again we dropped by the local dive, intending just to see who was out and about. We ran into more old friends and joined them for an hour and a half or so. I had another beer, bringing my total to two for the entire evening, told and untold. We were still hanging out with five people I knew from work showed up and I joined them for a bit. One of the women I met when she still worked here, but she quit and works for a smaller start-up fashion company nearby. Also, she’s engaged, which brings us closer to the evening’s conundrum. No, it’s not as bad as the conclusion you might leap to.

I’d not been sitting with my co-workers long when one of the women, Breeze, decided she wanted to go dancing at the hick/top 40s bar across the street. Yes, that’s right. Two thirds of the bar is a dedicated hick bar and the rest of it is a dance floor dedicated to top 40s dance music. She demanded I join them, so I did. Normally I avoid wading through the mass of Carharts and heels, but I’m almost always up for dancing and I prefer to do it when there are people I know around. At least in a bar scene; I’m not so disinclined when I’m at a real dance. No one assumes that anyone at a swing or ballroom dance is just there for the meat market. I don’t want to go home with anyone from the bar. I just want to dance.

We hadn’t been on the dance floor very long when Sarah, the engaged woman, and I were the only ones of the people we came with left on the floor. (Ben, for the record, is the only person whose real name I’ve used.) Sarah was -very- drunk, but since we were just dancing, I didn’t care. I was a little confused as to whether or not she was still engaged, but again, I figured we were just dancing.

A little history, before I go on. I actually know Sarah through match.com, not work. She sent me a wink about a month before I moved back up here. I wasn’t watching the site at the time, so I didn’t get the wink until I moved. When I did, I wasn’t paying for a subscription so I couldn’t email her. I assumed she was working at the same place, however, since there’s only one place like this around here and it matched her description perfectly. I figured we’d meet if we met and if not, c’est la vie.

I saw her around town a couple times before I ever got a chance to introduce myself and saw her with her fiancé to be at the same time. I shrugged my c’est la vie and moved on. I finally met her at work. In the cafeteria one day I stopped her and said, “I have a kind of strange question. Does the name “herusernameonmatch” mean anything to you?” And so we introduced ourselves and chatted briefly from time to time when we encountered each other out with friends or at work.

Which brings us back to our most recent encounter. There we were, dancing in this confused-identity dive bar. She’s a terrible dancer, as far as any swing moves were concerned. Regardless, I was just having fun and enjoying the fact that she was clearly enjoying herself. In the end, that’s all that really matters. The people staring and talking about us in the background were a little less enjoyable. The thumbs up and high five I got when she was doing what amounted to back bends were a little obvious. But let them say what they want. What confused me was the moment she kissed me.

I’ll tell you right now, kissing engaged women isn’t really something I’m big on doing. I’m the guy who had a married woman blatantly ask me while we were chatting on Facebook if I wanted to have sex and turned her down. I suppose I should have just stopped dancing and returned Sarah to the care of her friends, but I didn’t really know what the situation was and when I brought it up to her, she refused to answer. I did make that effort, three times. Not having an answer and being uncertain, I took the middle road. I kept dancing and let her kiss me. I made a point of not initiating.

I do not feel guilty about the event. In fact, I had a lot of fun and I enjoyed kissing her. I enjoyed dancing with her. I even enjoyed the moment when she suggested that it was fate that we met. But in the end, I wish that Breeze, who I’m pretty certain saw Sarah kiss me, had stopped her. I made eye contact with Breeze one time after it happened and she just nodded and smiled and motioned for me to continue. Not much of a friend, clearly.

The night continued and ended. Ben and I were able to make certain that Sarah got home safely, which is what really mattered in the end. She sent me a message on Facebook the next day apologizing, describing what she could remember of her behavior as “inappropriately affectionate,” stated that she loved her fiancé and felt she had betrayed him and hoped I understood. I did. I just wish she had made it that clear that she was still happily engaged eight or so hours earlier and I would have made sure it wouldn’t have happened. Still, I’m good with things on my end. I made a reasonable effort to be a gentleman in a confused situation. I showed concern for said situation and was ignored or encouraged. Not much to regret on my end. I just hope it doesn’t have any negative impact on her happiness. I hope she/they are able to write it off as a drunken mistake, move past it, and learn from it. Perhaps I was just the wrong right guy at the wrong right moment and if I’d been someone else it wouldn’t have happened. We’ll never know. Reminds me of that song, “It’s Alright With Me.”

It’s the wrong time and the wrong place
and though your face is charming it’s the wrong face
It’s not his face but such a charming face
that it’s alright with me.

That being all said and done, the night was over and I made it home at 2:40. Content from a very full day well spent, I crashed hard and made my way into Sunday. Sunday wasn’t quite as full as Saturday, which in it’s own way is good. I’m not sure I could have taken any more kissing from women I can’t have.

This is getting lengthy, so let me run Sunday by quickly. Breakfast and coffee with Ben and my dad, Hunger Games in the company of yours truly, swimming again, a bottle of wine and the fourth season of Eureka on Netflix. Hunger Games was underwhelming. I just read the book a month ago, I wasn’t ready to read it again. Still a great day, and a great weekend.

Tonight, I have auditions for Music Man. The adventures continue. Ah, life.

And two thousand words, goodnight.

-m0rg4n

Fashionbeasta

I don’t really know what I want to write about today. I’m not feeling very creative and I’m pretty frustrated with a situation at work that I think is bullshit. I learned from one of my co-workers yesterday that her department and the marketing department made a big decision that will affect everyone in mine but they were directed not to inform us of it yet. She asked me not to say anything about the information, so I’m sitting on it for her sake. The urge to run it by my boss is pretty strong though, since if he doesn’t know about it I think he’d be pretty livid that the information is available and not being shared. It bugs the fuck out of me because I don’t think that’s the way you should treat people who on your team. If you’re considering an option that is going to make more work for an entire group of people, let them know so they can prepare. Anything else is inconsiderate, rude, and utter crap.

Speaking of work, I jumped through another hoop in the application process for a new position here; after turning in my made up portfolio I was sent a web copy “test”in which I had to come up with original copy for web advertisements/emails. It was really more of the same, though I felt the directions were unclear. Instead of just putting my replacement text into a word document I photoshopped the Greek out their examples and put my copy directly onto the photos. Hopefully they find that acceptable, because I really wasn’t sure how else to go about it. That’s what they get for not having specific instructions and vague examples.

I certainly have work to do if I’m going be writing for the fashion industry. It’s a way of creative thinking that I’m not used to. It’s a lot like writing poetry, albeit in an extremely minimalistic medium. It’s just the making the words speak to the product in a voice that wants her to wear our clothes in order to feel all those things she’s supposed to feel in them that’s different. “Her” and “she” refer to the customer in the women’s clothing retail business, if you aren’t aware.

I feel a little split about working for this company doing what I’m doing. Doing what I’m going to be doing if I get the new job even moreso. It’s like there are three parts of me, three internal perspectives. Two of them are in some kind of cold war in which they occasionally have marshmallow battles and pillow fights while the third watches as some kind of neutral observer without any particular stake and doesn’t care that the other two parts are at odd. The other parts of me are torn between the fact that I -do- like “fashion” while at the same time I highly dislike materialism in general, the inundation of commercials telling us to “buy, buy, buy”, and the so-called fashion industry. I’d say a good 80% of what I see in a cursory glance at fashion blogs or on the runway makes me want to retch. The fact that it looks like a necromancer animated the pieces in the Body Worlds art exhibit and draped them in designer clothes doesn’t help. Nor do the Bride of Frankenstein makeup and hairdos. Call me weird, but I just don’t really enjoy seeing living dead girls with bodies comparable to pre-teen boys draped in something that resembles clothing the way modern art resembles Da Vinci. Our company has the benefit of not succumbing to that crap, but still. . .

I do like clothes. I enjoy going shopping with my female friends and once upon a time out shopped one of my ex-girlfriends. (We were buying clothes for her for our Valentine’s date.) It’s a matter of imagination. How would such and such item look on someone I wanted to see it on. I have a vested interest there. That interest is limited, however. Put me in a Bed, Bath and Beyond or (worse) a Bath and Bodyworks and I’ll start yawning. Or dying, in the latter case. How women breathe in there I yet to figure out. Makes me want to break out one of those WWII gas masks. I have the same reaction to churches. Not the inability to breathe, the yawning. I blame it on being forced to sit through it when I was younger. . . I got to the point where I started to take novels and sit in the back. My mom was always shocked, but let me do it anyway. That’s neither here nor there, however. Well, maybe there. Kind of a dumb phrase, that one.

I guess you could say that my shopping preferences are tied to my aesthetic preferences. If it isn’t about making something look good, it’s not very interesting. I have similar problems with grocery shopping, actually. People say you should never go grocery shopping when you’re hungry. Doesn’t work for me, if I’m not hungry I won’t buy anything. Kind of defeats the purpose. Anyway, one can take that as an analogy for my other shopping interests, I suppose. If it doesn’t engage me or I don’t have some purpose driving me to look, what’s the point?

That’s probably one of the big differences between me and other men when it comes to shopping. Most men just want a woman naked. Me, I like a little variety, not to mention the pure artistic beauty of all that is woman. I want to spend some time admiring every layer. I like different perspectives. Stripping a woman down all the way every time, mentally or physically, is just boring. So hell yeah, let’s go shopping, dear.  Let’s see how those contours, textures, cuts, colors accent what god gave you. Let’s dress you up, dress you down and enjoy every minute of all of it. And don’t forget the heels.

And a thousand words, goodnight.

-m0rg4n

Time Enough for Love

Time Enough for Love

Time is an avalanche,
the work of a single snowflake,
fallen. Its weight settles
on some unnamed mountain’s peak
where the scene shudders at its touch.
Careless in its perfect snowflake symmetry,
time rumbles down the mountain
as if it too followed the law of gravity.

Time is a magnet,
the powerful pull of opposites
growing stronger as they draw closer.
It is an avalanche of force
become irresistible as one hand nears the other.
Minutes and hours surrender
to the seduction of North and are,
for a time, a compass.

Our time comes. I feel it
as though I am the avalanche,
as though the cascade of my years summons me
to the valley where you wait.

Our time comes. I feel it
as though I have walked away from the North pole
and my direction becomes clear,
as though time twists
the time and space between us
and makes it small.



I’ve had the idea of that poem eating away at me for days. I just have this inexorable feeling that something is coming. I talked about it briefly in the “Foretelling” post. You are welcome to think I’m a little crazy, letting myself trust my feelings and something like tarot cards. I might think so too, if I cared. I can feel it in my chest, like a warmth around my heart, as though that space was expanding, growing, opening in a way it never has when I’ve been alone. I find myself coming to love new people, more people and speaking as I mean to without fear. Let the consequences be damned, the woman is beautiful and deserves to hear it. -wink & a smile-

This feeling has settled on me like the first sip of coffee in the morning. I can feel it spilling down over my tongue, down through my chest and spreading like the delight and heat of a mocha. Whether it is simply hope that has seized me in my arms and holds me closer than a lover or if this is the caress of Fate herself, I am content to linger. I am ready.

There is no calendar, no clock involved. Just time. Time that shrinks and fades, time that disappears into past as the present is born anew. In one of those presents, I will feel her lips on mine, I will taste her, breathe her, love her, live her. She will see me, love me, forgive me for all the flaws that I wear so boldly and cherish me. The time comes. She comes. I can feel her.

I love the word cherish. It has the taste, the comfort and warmth of this feeling inside me. It has a meaning that transcends the word love. Even the dictionary definition is beautiful because it is a list of words that are all a tiny part of this word. Love is one of them, but there are so many. Cherish, I think, has a component that makes it about the one you cherish. Love, in one or more of its many incarnations, can be selfish. I’m not certain that cherish can. It can’t, for me.

The word, cherish, reminds me of another concept I’m fond of, caritas. Caritas is a description of love that I would like to blatantly acquire from a certain religion and affix my own definition to. It is similar to the Greek “agape” and can be defined as “altruistic” love. That definition bothers me, however, because I’m not a big fan of the idea of altruism in the first place. So rather than cheapen the definition, let us instead call it intrinsic love. Love for the sake of the one loved. Love that gives and asks nothing in return. Love that is a pillar of strength and not a pedestal. Te caritas es.

For the record, I don’t know Latin.

I do know what it means to love like this, however. It’s not always the most comfortable form of love, because sometimes it means hurting while you encourage someone else toward a happiness that doesn’t necessarily include returning your affections. That’s not always at a romantic level, either. It doesn’t matter. That’s the point of caritas. If you ask me, love isn’t SUPPOSED to be so concerned about whether not it is returned and in what quantity. It’s simply enough to love. Do I want to be loved in return? Obviously. Has loving someone who doesn’t share my feelings in the same fashion ever stopped me from loving them anyway? No. Nor will it ever, I suspect. That’s not who I am.

If you’ve been reading me for a while you’ve heard the following (and probably much of what came previously), before, but I want to share again one of my favorite Robert A. Heinlein quotes: “The more you love, the more you can love--and the more intensely you love. Nor is there any limit on how many you can love. If a person had Time Enough, he could Love all of the majority who are decent and just.”

I think this is one step down the path of a life of caritas. Don’t limit your love, don’t be afraid to love many and well. I wrote a post about how I see the heart as an object that exists in many dimensions, and I believe that perspective is not only accurate, but allows a person to love in this way, while still loving morally. There is no room for infidelity in the concept of caritas, in the concept of love. Infidelity is by nature, selfish.

Perhaps it is important to state that in spite of my support of loving in a way in which you cherish and love intrinsically, I still place a lot of significance in loving the self. Just as others must be loved for their self, so must one respect and love one’s self. It is the foundation of loving others. I’m not certain that one can give unto others what one is unable to give unto one’s self. In order to achieve the kind of emotions I’m talking about, it’s necessary to be able to respect and love yourself and seek your own happiness while at the same time respecting, loving and encouraging others to seek their happiness. Whether that happiness is with you or not is beside the point.

This may seem confusing, or contradictory, but I find that most real things are. You need two shores to build a bridge and if one of those shores is weak or the ground is soft the bridge will collapse. It’s a simple thing, really.

And now for a terrible conclusion. . .

That’s enough on that subject for now.

And a thousand words, goodnight.

-m0rg4n

Elitist Jerks (from 4/3/12)

No worries, I did my writing yesterday. I’m just not satisfied enough with the work to post it. I started a short? story that focuses on the question of eugenics and will explore its morality and immorality. I admit that the story began with no real direction, only a desire to write about the subject. It has begun to grow however.

I’ll share the story when it’s a little further along. I admit I didn’t quite make it to 1,000 words. The working title is simply “Eugenics, Inc.”

The story will focus on two characters. One is Erik Denton, a man in his late twenties/early thirties who is CEO and founder of Eugenics, Inc. He is charming, relatively good looking, rich and fervent in his belief that eugenics is no more immoral than a gun. The second character is a woman who leads a group of protesters and hates Denton and all he stands for. She, obviously, believes that eugenics is wrong. This woman is has yet to be named. She decided to be part of the story only last night, after I had stopped writing.

Through their interactions I plan to explore arguments for and against eugenics. The intention is to reconcile these two characters on some kind of middle ground, but I will see how the story develops. I tend to write organically, letting the stories I write unfold as time goes on, instead of outlining and plotting it all out and forcing my work to walk into whatever pair of shoes I try to fit its feet into. I believe in the kind of planning in which you plant the lawn, then pave the trails people have made a year or two later instead of paving a nice path and expecting people to conform. That’s a sure way to have dirt paths in your grass. I’ll re-evaluate my planning choices someday when I actually finish something. In the meantime, LIVE CREATURE, LIVE.

I also have some research to do if I’m going to do the topic justice. Until I plugged the word eugenics into the dictionary on my Mac at work a minute ago, I had never heard of Francis Galton. I certainly owe it to myself, my work and any potential readers I foist the story off on to do so. Besides, writing is so much more fun if you can subtly point out all the neat stuff you know. Like naming one of the buildings on the Eugenics, Inc. campus the Mendel Administration Center. Clearly I was paying attention in my high school biology class. (If you don’t know, Gregor Mendel was a 19^th century monk who is considered the father of genetics.)

That being said, it reminds me of an interesting topic. It surprises me, (and my own knowledge isn’t necessarily any less lacking), how little people around me recognize pieces. You would think that in an age when we’re literally constantly bombarded with information that somewhere along the line Michelangelo’s David would be more than just a naked man. Oh, yes. Context.

I went to a co-worker’s housewarming party on Saturday night and he had an apron with the statue of David printed on it. I’m not 100% positive on this, but it’s possible that I was the only one of the ten or so people who attended who recognized it. Everyone else was mildly scandalized by the giant picture of a muscular naked man. Maybe I’m just an elitist schmuck (says the man writing a short story exploring the topic of eugenics), but I feel like David is one of those pieces that is so famous that everyone should be able to know it on sight. It seems to me that not knowing the piece is like being unable to recognize the Mona Lisa. The thought kind of bothers me, particularly since I consider my own education in famous art to be severely lacking.

There’s a lot to be said for a classical education, which isn’t necessarily one I received. Certainly the people I admire most tend to know authors, poets, art, music, theatre, wine and can talk about them. Perhaps it’s a product of my own liberal arts education, but I think it started young. Those things were always important to my parents and I spent plenty of my childhood exploring museums; listening to the soundtracks of musicals and going to them; and staring at shelves full of Shakespeare, Eliot, Poe, Kipling, and many others.

Education is actually going to feature into the Eugenics, Inc. story as well. The company not only matches people genetically, but I’m imagining something on par with a gated community or at least a school system. The Eugenics, Inc. schooling will include positive psychology training, physical education training, arts appreciation, math and sciences. One goal of this fictional company is to create better leaders for the world, from conception to high school graduation.

And close enough, dammit, goodnight.

-Morgan

Foretelling

Well, fuck. Here I am again, writing. I’m fighting one of those moods in which I do just about anything else in order to avoid the task I’ve given myself. I don’t want to write. I don’t really want to do anything else either, however. I read so often it’s not like there’s reading to catch up on. In fact I’m in the middle of two books right now, one on Kindle and one physical. I don’t own a Kindle mind you, I just use the app for PC/Mac. I’m reading some fantasy book by some Kindle novelist whose name I don’t particularly care to remember or look up and Glory Road by Robert A. Heinlein. Once upon a time I considered Heinlein my favorite author. I’m still a fan, but not to the degree I once was. Still one of my top three, though. Heinlein, Gaiman, and Orson Scott Card in no particular order.

Lasagna is binging. BRB.

And I return to complain about the weather. If you’re one of those people whose had an early spring/summer this year, I envy you. As an acquaintance of mine noted today, even though it’s warmed up and raining, everything is still brown here. None of the vegetation has started to liven up. I heard bird song one day this week, but only one. I’m tired of it.But it is what it is, so. . . make the most of life anyway.

Today I spent the morning with a girl from work. There’s a peculiar dynamic between us that I can’t define. I don’t know if we’re just on opposite ends of some spectrum or what. I enjoy her company and even without any particular need or desire to become intimate with her, she is beautiful. (This is the girl about whom I commented to a friend that she could make Paris and the Greeks forget Helen.) Even today, in her t-shirt, blacks tights and calf-high boots, she looked amazing. I am somewhat partial to that look, though, which I describe as “equestrian”. Regardless, I’m undeniably drawn to beauty. That’s just the way I am.

My appreciation of beauty and excellence is actually one of my top seven character strengths according to the VIA survey. VIA stands for Value in Action and is measurement of an individual’s strengths in 24 characteristics that are valued by cultures around the world. For the hell of it, my top five are: creativity, ingenuity, and originality; appreciation of beauty and excellence; curiosity and interest in the world; honesty, authenticity, and genuineness; and love of learning. If you’re interested in learning about your strengths, check out authentichappiness.org.

Back to my day. We met for breakfast at a little bakery/café in town to which neither of us had ever been. She invited me earlier this week and I was happy to say yes. After finishing off a chocolate croissant, (my favorite pastry), we went antique hunting. Having joined her for this adventure, I have solidified my opinion on the interior decor aspect of any future relationship I have. As long as I retain veto power over anything I find particularly hideous, I’m leaving furnishing/decorating to my girlfriend/wife. I’m pretty satisfied with the $40 writing desk I finally went and picked up from Walmart after trolling antique stores all day. I will never convince myself to spend more than a $100 on a desk. Nor, as nice as they were, could I spend $125 on three original prints of nude women beneath chiffon covers. (She was tempted, but decided to think about it. I respect that decision.) They were lovely prints/photographs, but. . . I just couldn’t do it. All the paintings/art/decor in my apartment was either under $30 or free. Mostly free. I’m somewhere between minimalist and frugal. I’d probably be offended if someone called me a miser. I’d just rather live without something I don’t particularly need than spend money on it. I’m pretty certain this arrangement will go over fairly well with whomever is in my future. As long as she isn’t addicted to stuff the way my mother is, we’ll be just fine.

Speaking of the future, one of my new. . . friends always has a deck of tarot cards sitting out at his house. I need a word that fits in between acquaintance and friend. Any suggestions? Anyway, I used to play with tarot cards on a regular basis when I was younger and hadn’t even seen a deck in years. I don’t have the cards memorized, but I know the standard(?) layout by memory and have done two readings while passing time at his place. I ask a simple question, “What’s next?” and both readings have been fairly complementary. It seems like the future I want is in the cards. I give it the credit it’s due, but it still makes me smile. In the last reading, the Tower sat in my past and the Queen of Cups in my future. The Tower was a significant obstacle in readings I did when I was younger, so it kind of had a little personal meaning to see it firmly rooted in the past. I am content with whatever the future brings. Que sera, sera.

But I can’t wait to meet her. I love her already.

I’m open to the possibility that I’ve met her already and we just haven’t figured out that part of our lives yet. I can think of a few women I wouldn’t mind exploring the world with, but we’ll see. Isn’t that part of the beauty of it? It’s going to be adventure.

Surgeon general’s warning: don’t eat half a loaf of french bread and hummus to tide you over while your lasagna is in the oven. I am not hungry. At all. Oi.

Speaking of looking forward, tonight will be interesting. I’m not certain what’s going to happen. One of our new co-workers, who is likely the only metro guy in Idaho, is hosting a small housewarming party in about an hour. I haven’t attended a lot of social functions with the people I work with, mostly just run into them on nights when I go out on the town. It will be nice to take another step toward being more than a face in the hallway and a hello. It helps, of course, that I’ve been able to conquer my shyness more and more as time has passed. It helps that I’ve taken my life in my hands and thrown myself into the community I live in, becoming a little “famous” in my own right.

When Capri moved to Missoula and subsequently started ignoring me altogether, I was heartbroken. I was lonely, depressed and life, for a while, was really hard. The peculiarities of our relationship didn’t make things any easier. She encouraged me to do as she had. It was her belief that I was unhappy because of where I was. She was wrong. I was unhappy because of who I was.

I made it my goal, in the aftermath of those events, to stay here until I could be happy wherever I went. I wanted, and want, to be someone who is happy with himself. I want the world to be my dance floor. (The one place where I am most comfortable.) I’ve come a long way since last September. I joined the local theatre and have been lauded for talent I’m not certain I have. I’ve been given credit by some for stealing the show for the last two shows I’ve been in, in spite of my minor roles. I continue to teach my dance class and have gotten involved in a group that plays D&D regularly. People I don’t know appreciate my karaoke and I receive a lot of support when I play my music at a local open mic night. I think this summer is going to be great as I continue to explore and open up to accepting myself. It’s important to note that the best part of all of this is not the events and recognition itself, but the changes in my self-expression. I am most content because I am finding my own voice, my own way and a self who is eager to be great.

Remember, there are two wolves fighting within you at all times, the positive and the negative. The one you feed, wins.

And a thousand words, goodnight.

-m0rg4n

Nobody's Perfect

Another day, another doughnut. Then again, I don’t eat doughnuts. One of the many unnecessary foods I gave up a long time ago. They’re disgusting. Between the sensation of all that sugar scumming my teeth and the way they sit in my stomach, I just can’t do it any more. Every once in the rare while I try again and remember why I “just say no.”

I feel the same way about fast food. I can’t eat it anymore. I’d rather eat an entire bag of parmesan Goldfish for dinner than shell out for Taco Bell. (And do. As recently as oh, an hour ago.)

I’ve been thinking about my surprising degree of confidence, as one of my friends put it. When we were out for our cast party I made some comment about “even if I am an ass sometimes,” and she responded, “It’s not that you’re an ass, you just have a mind boggling degree of confidence.” People shouldn’t say things like that to me. It goes to my head. -grins- More seriously, I wonder how much of that is confidence and how much of it is, as I’ve come to think of and recognize it over the last week, conviction. And what is the line between the two? Is confidence something that feeds conviction or is conviction more like faith, which doesn’t take confidence. Or does it? What is faith without confidence. Are faith and conviction any different? If so, are faith, conviction and confidence all part and parcel?

I do not have the answers. Apparently what I do have is confidence. And self-diagnosed conviction. It’s one of the flaws of being wrong so rarely. Another friend once said, “The problem with the fact that Morgan is right all the time is that he admits it when he’s wrong.” This probably should not have been said either. It definitely went to my head. And while my opinion may be biased, I don’t really think it’s far from the truth.

Before you snort in disgust and run off to read something else, hear me out. Instead of labeling me arrogant, listen. I think the most important thing to remember when discussing this tendency of mine to think I’m right is that I don’t think that what is right for me makes what you believe wrong for you. I may not understand your opinion. I may think you’re wrong. But I’ll respect your right to your opinion. I don’t have to respect your opinion, but I’ll certainly respect your right to it. There isn’t any one Truth.

Truth, it turns out, is based on perception and no one shares the same perception. Not even identical twins, who seem to share more than any other pair of individuals share the same perception. At some point, we all learn the meaning of a word differently. We all experience some situation that changes our perspective on that scenario for life. We make different choices. We skip church on a day when the sermon changes the life for another parishioner. We attend church on a day when the sermon changes our life and bores the fuck out of the last guy. It doesn’t matter what you believe. The only “Truth” is that each of us have our own truth.

It’s like expecting some kind of constant in your life. There IS one constant, but it’s not your wife, your brother, your friend, your mother, your job, your house, your kids, or the government. There’s one constant and that constant is CHANGE. All things change, and they do it a lot, day by day. As a wise man once said, “No man can step in the same river twice, for the second time it is not the same river and he is not the same man.” No matter what we do or who we were yesterday, who we were yesterday was not the person who went through today. And lives can change drastically in seconds.


Not quite a thousand words, goodnight.


-m0rg4n

The Music of the Night

Tonight is a little more Jack’s Mannequin and a little less The Civil Wars. That’s just a reference to the station I chose on Pandora, not any reference to my mood. I had one ear plugged into my Poison & Wine radio station all afternoon anyway. I’m ready for something with a little more energy.

It’s a little weird to write from home. I don’t remember the last time I wrote prose while in my apartment. It’s been a while. I often write lyrics or poems, but not prose. I usually fill the kind of time prose takes with video games, books, or movies.

On a completely random note, I’m finding it difficult to remember to use Oxford commas. We don’t use them at work so I spend plenty of time deleting them from copy. Yes, you can get paid for that. It’s a little weird, but hey, if they want to pay me to delete commas, that’s cool.

I am, however, applying for a new position at work. We have three web copywriting positions open and the hiring manager told me specifically that she wants to tailor one of those positions to an entry-level position that uses my skill set, which she thinks the team needs. I’m not entirely sure what she thinks that skill set is, but the entire copywriting team, web and direct, apparently to have good things to say about me when I’m not around.  

The woman in HR who is in charge of recruiting called me down to her office today to talk to me about what they want from me. She had a conversation with our new SVP of Creative Services and they decided they wanted me to go through the whole application process in the standard way. This means they want a portfolio from me, even if I have to fake it. This is contrary to the information I received from the hiring manager and it’s clear that the three of them ought to sit down and have one conversation instead of several different conversations depending on who is talking to whom.

In the meantime, I’m submitting to the will of the gods and doing what was requested of me. I don’t really mind, since I really don’t have anything else going on most of the time and can just get paid to make this portfolio. My current plan is to gather the articles that I’ve had “published” on our company Intranet, include a few of my poems (specifically one titled “Seeming” that uses clothing metaphors heavily), and make up some fake ads/copy for the company.

Which is what I spent my afternoon doing. I jacked the template for our retail postcards from the server and made up two ad campaigns with original copy. I may do a third. Considering I’ve written hundreds of poems and a collection of lyrics I’ve never bothered to count, it’s not as though that kind of creative writing is challenging in the slightest.

At the recommendation of our senior copy editor, I’m going to find some pieces I’m not familiar with and come up with my own names and copy for them. He suggested finding the actual clothing, but I think I’m going to just take advantage of my access to our images server and find a few worthwhile archived pieces and include them with my “copy”. When I’ve put everything together, I’m going to have him take a look at it and tell me what he thinks. He’s pretty critical, so that should be good. Lord knows, I hate it when I write something, ask someone to edit it and all they have to tell me is that my work is wonderful. I’m not so talented that I don’t need to edit at all. If there aren’t typos somewhere, I’m sure some of my transitions could be improved. Somewhere in all those sentences there has to be one that is weighty, awkward or could at least use improved diction. Telling a writer his first draft is wonderful is actually kind of insulting, I think. Perhaps disrespectful is better. Take a second and think about it. You’re my editor. Edit.

In other news, writing is going pretty well. I haven’t done as much work on any of my creative projects as I’d like, though I did write the first scene of a comic/TV show out. That’s the Angelus entry. It’s friend’s only due to wanting to protect my copyright-worthy ideas. Of course, I haven’t made it a week yet, but as things stand, come tomorrow I’ll have written approximately seven thousand words. Only 155 weeks to go!

I jest. Not regarding the intended amount of time, but that I’m counting. This is about the journey, not the goal. It’s about the art that stems from it and the growth of self. It’s about self-discovery and creation. Stories and entries are the byproduct. They’re the scenery you see as you drive down Highway 200 through Montana: the breathtaking beauty of a twisting highway married to the curves of the Clark Fork river. My work is the vista we see from one of the many viewpoints along the way. They’re beautiful and we’ll never forget them, but it’s the drive that matters. Without it, we’d see nothing.

Thank you, if you’re still reading, for heading out on the road with me. When we stop for the night, let’s pull out Kerouac and read aloud to each other. I’ve never read it, myself. It’s on my list, along with Fahrenheit 451. Whaddya say?

I was thinking about how this project adds up in the terms of psychology. According to the scientists I’ve been reading, it takes 10,000 hours of practice to achieve Mastery of anything. In those terms, Bradbury’s little challenge to the want-to-be writers of the world makes a lot of sense. I don’t think writing a thousand words every day for three years will quite add up to 10,000 hours, but it’s certainly a damn good start and hardly includes the uncounted hours I’ve done so since I was a child.

If nothing else, I’ll walk away from this with an awesome habit. I hope it helps me accomplish one of my other desires while I’m at it: I want to be someone who inspires others through his passions. My announcement of this plan already had someone declare a similar intent, though he has yet to follow through at all. But hey, that’s enough to make me smile and chalk one up for my purpose. If someone wants to walk my path with me, that’s wonderful. In the meantime, the guy singing Edwin McCain’s “I’ll Be” while he’s wandering down the halls at work is pretty good company.

And a thousand words, goodnight.

-m0rg4n