Sunday

---^-------@

An open compliment is like spraying a flower directly into someone's heart of stone.

Monday

fittingly

"And why do they want you? What is it that gives you this strange, crumpled desirability? Your job isn't special, your law degree isn't special, your soon-to-be-heritage-colours worker's cottage isn't special. It's your crap that's endearing. It's the basis of any relationship, way beyond even the choice of who wins on to whom. It's crap that sustains things. The mutual vulnerability that comes from knowing each other's crap. How shallow would we be if we only felt things for people on account of their successes? How likely would that be to survive? I don't understand why this is making you so uncomfortable right now, why you think you should fight it. This time of glorious failure and perilous achievement is probably your finest hour, but it's not as though it's come out of the blue. I don't know what kind of glamorous past you would have liked to have had, but you didn't have it. Your life, like mine, is a series of conventional successes that don't count for much, plus good times and crap."

- Nick Earls, Zigzag Street

Saturday

mojo motions

The most dire and extreme circumstances made me cut off my needy hands and replace them with mojo motions. "Just go through the motions," he explained to me as he went through them. I get it. I got it about a week or two before he showed me his tricks. He's trying to teach and I'm always eager to learn. Most people in life never put themselves in the position of students. I think that's a real waste of self-improvement. I must be the queen of self-improvement. Maybe that's what successful people are made of. And what softies are made of. I am a bit of a softie. I told myself recently, "I need to harden the fuck up," then I got a hardcore jobbie-job and I hardened the fuck up. It was strange. I remember sitting at the steps at the back of the shop smoking a poorly packed cigarette and texting my friend with my trembling hands, "It's really a make or break scenario," to which she took a while to reply. I remember the day my life was hanging by a string. People call those days Mondays. I called that day the End of My Life as I Knew It. I was seriously hating on life as I knew life. I was on the brink of letting go because I couldn't take the pressure. I was prepared to pop the bottle cap of life. I wanted to fizz out slowly like goo.

But I persevered, or something along those lines. One text message, one afterthought, one drag of a cigarette, and a blank look on my face. I realized it was stupid. That it wasn't worth any of it. Not just the situation but everything I thought that meant anything. Meaning hurts and meaning we create. I let go of caring and said the always outstanding "fuck it". And then meaning melted like the very butter I was spreading.

And then I suppose I started weaving this different fabric like a caterpillar that's no longer sick. This imagery makes sense in my mind, maybe not in yours. In any circumstance, I set myself a few House Rules. The House Rules of my brain are standards that I should never drop. They are job requisites that my new-found tough side has to follow. They are the Rules of Improvement. So I jotted them down and consulted them and tried to let them flow. One of them, in fact, is To Let Things Flow. And by doing this shit, stuff started to go right for once. Because another one of them says Don't Think About The Past, so in either case I wouldn't know if I'm doing it right. It just feels right.

All of this to say he thinks he's teaching me, and maybe he is, but I think it's my own mojo. Motion is important.

pretty much the best thing ever