Creation as the result of being creative

This evening I was criticised for complaining about the lack of opportunities to be creative in my life at the moment.

“How can you complain that you don’t get to be creative when you aren’t creating anything. If you love it so much, why do you spend so much time reading the Internet or watching TV? Surely you should be creating things.”

So here I am creating a blog post. It is a creation, of sorts. It wasn’t here before now.

Is that really being creative though? To me, rambling here is not exercising creativity even if it is creating something. My life used to exist on paper, lots of oddly shaped pieces of paper with crazy scrawled verse and thoughts all over them. Angels and wildflowers poking through the dark coloured scratchings of crayon or high flying unicorns complete with thick  tendril like eyelashes curling into impossible splashes of paint. Now it is this, sterile, universal tap tap tap on the keyboard. Nothing rhymes or chimes or sings or smiles. A plateau of perfectly ordinary.

I’m supposed to be happy about all my achievements, about the perfectly ordinary plateau but from up here there is no where to go, just wander around aimlessly and eventually head down again.

Alternatively, I could expend some creativity. Paint the plateau red! Build a fortress, then an army, then an enemy and start a war. Except that’s not what I want. I just want to lie down, look at the sky and imagine imagine imagine.

That’s all in my head. Nothing created and therefore no creativity exercised from a certain critic’s point of view. I give up.

 

Coffee coloured dreaming

I look at my coffee. I want to see through it…

Where did that come from? Part of something written so long ago now. So much longer than 12 years and yet 12 years is something bouncing around in my head next to a poem fragment much older than that. I want to say adieu. I want to say ciao. I want to say sayonara. I want to say goodbye. Yet these things, they bounce and bound and bash about in my brain like the ums and ahs of a conversation hog, leaving no room for anything else.

Pause.

Why am I punishing myself? Why am I watching the tv with the wrong aspect ratio? Is it to make my stomach churn in rhythm with my head? Usually I am a bottle of wine down before I take aim at myself with such carelessness. Note that carelessness is not the same thing as carefree. Loading the gun with hatred and all the meaness that only someone who knows you so very well can aim with.

You know that feeling when your blood pressure drops through the floor and every so often you find yourself shortly thereafter lying on the floor? Well that’s actually a gift, called foresight. Knowing, before falling, that the fall is coming. It should be like that for everything but it isn’t.

I drink it black, in the hope that one day, I’ll see through it.

 

Drifting

Self sentiment analysis. discontent.. and it isn’t even winter yet. Unshakeable feeling of pointlessness as again I traverse the daily habits and find nothing that can bring relief from them. On April Fools Day the clocks wind back giving more time to experience the darkness and less light in which to catch the laughter of my kids and bottle it like the special medicine it is. Now what? A movie that I’ve seen that I’ve found boring. Another online shopping cart filled to the brim with things I might buy, then discarded. A holiday researched and not purchased. Half thoughts. Half finished. Half alive.
Inhale.Exhale.
And then it all drifts by and it is morning again.

Daisies and Daffodils

Today was a day of high violence. I think I am still in shock.

Post usual Saturday morning activities, I decided to take on the overgrown section of garden just outside of our front fence. Of course it started as a nobel venture to improve visibility of pedestrians and quickly degraded into a nasty war of wills. Mine against the weeds. With true passion I took to them with the hateful whippersnipper that like a wounded dog swings between whimpering and snapping viciously. Why I chose to do this in the heat of the day or while David was not at home still confuses me. Yet I went at it madly and as consistently as I could, hacking into the long grass, yanking out the spiky weeds.
The kids played inside the yard, Kat was setting up some kind of school. Aidan was picking the daisies that I wanted to trim back. He loved doing that and had been in and out of the gate, carting his loot back and forth. I kicked around the idea of planting a whole row of daffodils along this side of the fence that in spring always looks so dormant before the daytime daisies come to shine brilliant yellow in summer. Aidan would have loads of flowers to pick then. I could have them in vases, Kat could wear them in her long gorgeous hair. So taken with this dream and the roar of the cranky dog in my hands I barely heard Kat. When I turned she was screaming and crying and yelling for me and running to me. I dropped the whippersnipper and ran back toward the corner of our house. Noticing thick smoke pouring from the tyres of cars on the road stopped in haste. My heart was through my mouth and pounding away faster than I could run. Tears were pushing at the seams of my eyes not yet ready to release until I knew what. What had happened? Where was Aidan? Who were these people running towards the house? Oh my God.. there.. caught on the fence…Aidan!

I pulled him free with the strength that only adrenalin gives you. He was okay and we were okay and the seams broke away and the tears came in a rush as I held him tightly against me. The men from the cars that had stopped came running over. I don’t know what they said or who they were, but they, like me were overwhelmed. Nothing like the sight of a small boy impaled on a metal fence… even if he somehow has managed to escape injury.

I don’t know how long I sat on the grass not wanting to let go of him. If I was angry at myself for leaving him to play in the yard, I didn’t feel it as much as I felt the pain of those few seconds where I thought something much worse had happened to him. I felt Kat’s arms around us both and we sat and all had a good cry and eventually a good laugh.

Some hours later an elderly man was walking by the house. He was one of the men who had stopped earlier but I didn’t recognise him. He asked after Aidan who was running around again bare chested shooting plants with his water pistol. The man also pointed out how dangerous our fence was for adventuring little boys. I agreed. He asked me if he knew why it was a dangerous fence. I said it was kinda pointy. He shook his head and said with a dark expression, “because that is the fleur de lis” pointing at the shape the metal work formed.
With this, he went on his way and sung back “but you’ll be ok from those French from now on because you thanked God your son was alright. I heard you”.

I put away my tools then, put away the old frustrating whippersnipper and my rake, loaded the green bin with the fallen and headed out of the heat.

I don’t want to dwell on what happened and I don’t want to see that scene in my dreams tonight. I am writing it out and away from me so that I don’t think about daisies my son might’ve been pushing up but instead about all the daffodils he’ll still get to pick.

And at least now I know the French won’t get me.

Two Weeks

It’s been 7 months since I set out to lose 30kg.
And I’ve been putting off going back to the doctor because I don’t want to be disappointed. I don’t want to know that I haven’t lost enough or that I am still a high risk of this or that. I don’t want the half-congratulations that you get when you haven’t quite made it.

I’m down about 20kg now which sounds like a lot but doesn’t feel it, probably because I still  have 10kg to go and anyone who told you they were 10kg overweight would still feel overweight. I’m really scared that the doctor won’t have good news and all of these months of hard work haven’t paid off in anything more than random comments from people who can only judge appearance not health.

I’ve had an incredibly shitty time changing roles and trying to find answers to questions with sliding definitions. I’m still not sure if I’m up or down or on a slope heading in or out. So why did I choose this time to bite the jaggered edge of my fears and book an appointment with the doctor?

I don’t know.

But I have two weeks to talk myself out of it.

New role that needs to roll

I started a new role this month as a Digital Strategist. I’m still not entirely sure what that means. I’m taking it to mean that I have to actually work out how we do things, instead of just doing them. At least the title is a little more meaningful than Digital Lead which without an “er” on the end, kind of always made me feel like a cord short of a socket.
The immediate impact of my new role is that it needs to roll. At the moment it is very stop start backwards forwards chop change inside out. There is nothing groovy about it. Gotta get a groove, then we can roll.

An Experiment in Humiliation?

Today I did something monumomentarily silly.

I allowed my personal trainer to use my example on her FB page. Part of me knew this would be a deeply humiliating exercise to have something so personal shared so liberally to my FB network and hers instantly. Still I convinced myself into it on the basis that the worst that could come of it would be my humiliation, at the hands of others. But hadn’t I been doing that for years anyway? With everything that I ate and joked off? Wasn’t my network thinking all of these years that I really shouldn’t be making those brownies or eating those burgers? Except they are my friends and would never have known how to tell me that I was doing the wrong thing, in any way, that wouldn’t of caused me embarrassment, maybe defensiveness and hurt. Maybe I would’ve been humiliated and shrugged and said “yeah I know, but “. Maybe.

So the worst that could happen was I would be embarrassed. Friend after friend would see the update about my size and the praise from my trainer who has seen how hard I’ve worked and how hard its been. They might giggle a little to themselves because size 14 is still pretty big to most people.. particularly looking at it from a size 6 or 8 or even a 12. They might wonder why I would let the whole world know where I’m up to because I haven’t really achieved much (from their point of view). But that is really the worst that can happen from this. Their giggling. Which might’ve been happening all along. But I am not getting any bigger while they giggle. I am getting fitter and stronger and healthier. So laugh away at my expense.

Because the best that can happen… is that someone, amongst all of the people that see that update, who is as big as I was or getting that way or bigger still, might just might think to themselves.. well if that desk bound nerd can get off her fat arse and just start.. and keep going.. and going some more.. then maybe I can too. That’s the best that can happen, so I think I will sit here and wrangle my own levels of embarrassment and humiliation because really they are doing me no harm and maybe they are doing someone somewhere a little bit of good.

Empty

sitting on the bus, late for work again with only a rough chance my laptop will work when I get there. So much time wasting…and I can fill it up with reading, news gathering, social updating but it just seems so incredibly pointless and noisy and at once, lonely too.
I used to support the idea that online discussion was just an extension of offline but now I sometimes think it is a different beast altogether.

Growing up

My kids are growing up. This morning they ran into our room rather unexpectedly and announced we had to get dressed, close our eyes and follow them. Kat took my hand, Aidan took Davids and led us out to the breakfast table.

“Open your eyes” they shouted happily.

The table was set perfectly with a stack of freshly made toast a steaming bowl of scrambled eggs and two suprisingly good tasting long black coffees.

This is the part where I kick myself out of dreamland into the reality that my daughter is only 6 and my son is 4 and they had made us breakfast.

I was horrified.

I was amazed.

I was sure someone somewhere would criticise us for allowing our children to use dangerous things like hotplates and toasters and coffee machines and *gasp* breaking eggs.

In our defence, we didn’t know they were doing any of this and the more I think about it, I am less horrified.

You see, they know how to do all of this, not because we have trained them to make us breakfast but because they have watched us do it. They are learning machines! And while it might be worthwhile to teach them the alphabet or algebra, we know all of that comes in time. Right now, we teach them as we share space in the kitchen or in the backyard or as we play at the beach. We show them how we do things, how we try to be safe and they are learning all of the time, growing all of the time.

Still thinking about growth, I think today I realised that D and I have grown up considerably. Our first major purchase together was a lounge. It took weeks of debate and included no less than 4 massive arguments, 1 of which involved D storming out of a store and attempting to walk to his home in Turramurra out of complete frustration. We lacked a lot of the skills adults hone around negotiation, compromise and patience.

Fast forward ten years(?) and we have this mornings relatively big deal of a fridge dying and needing to be replaced asap. We calmly went out, visited a few stores, made a few decisions, narrowed our choices and within the morning had purchased and arranged delivery of a new fridge without blood pressure concerns and more importantly without anyone leaving in tears or storming out.

I am hoping, that as we grow towards being more even tempered as adults, our children will be watching and learning and maybe, like breakfast they’ll just know how to make it happen.

It is a pretty crazy hope though because I know deep inside I am just as childish and selfish and manic as I ever was, that part of me just lacks opportunities to escape. Tonight (at the end of a very mature kind of day) was one of those opportunities. I ran away to the movies by myself like I used to do when I was a kid. I sat in the back row with my feet on the seats and relished the dialogue, the soundtrack, the story and everything I could see all over the screen. And it didn’t matter what I watched, it was big and it was beautiful and it was just so much fun :)

Of course I signed up to the rewards program so I could get movies more cheaply, earn points to get freebies and get notifications of when special events are on. I am concluding that was a very grown up thing to do.

 

Vicky Cristina Barcelona

I watched this movie for the first time last night. I must in the mood for random. Anyway, I was so depressed after watching it, because it was so ordinary and so undisney. Nobody got what they needed to make a happily ever after, they just got what was going to happen to make an ever after. It bites because nobody is living a photograph. In a photograph, everyone smiles for a moment, or does something in a moment and it’s caught, but not sustained. Then we look away and move on and live the very inhale exhale of ordinary life. It is not sunshine and franjipani breezes and passionate kisses and laughter and triumphs. At least not all of the time and hardly ever most of the time either. The gaps that stretch between these moments are stuffed to bruising point with staring at nothing, thinking about everything, tending to routine and the gentle echo of experience. So much time wasted and yet only waste in contrast to what we are told to value.

I could identify with all three women in the movie and perhaps that is why the ending depressed me or maybe I can just blame Woody Allen for seeing life as it really is.