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What Is to Give Light Must Endure Burning- Overspill of Inspiration, Texas

Posted on June 2, 2016 by FablesandCoffee

Perhaps its not always true, the title of this post. Maybe there are people out there who can shine shine shine without ever burning up, they just exude brilliance in their every waking moment and it’s effortless. But i’m neither effortless nor brilliant so, when I shine even just a glimmer, I burn like i’ve got a trail of gasoline tied to my feet.

Usually the trail burns slowly (or it’s a rather long one) and I can keep the glimmer up for a good bit before it’s all burned out and I need to go find matches to light up once more. And in general it wouldn’t be so terrible,this habit of burning up and out I have, if the expectation wasn’t there to continuously keep going, to illuminate always and forever.

But it is, and not just from myself (though heavens knows the pressures I put on myself to never make a mistake in literally anything I do is a bit of a doozy all on it’s own). Anyways, where am I going with this? Basically after the end of the last series of posts I did, I was meant to go on another roadtrip this past weekend, to Colorado this time. But my burning hot trail of energy finally curled in on itself and died and so the trip was put aside and instead I used the long weekend to get myself back together again. And so the reason for this is with regard to the new followers I gained while posting on those last adventures. I have upcoming travel plans, for sure’s, but there’s also a whole mess of art nonsense I post and sometimes the energy I fire it up with is more like embers at the end of a winters fire than a sun’s passion. So this is my cordial heads up.

Now, on those upcoming travels I mentioned….

End of June- road trip down to Marfa, TX to explore the weird lights, interesting art installations, wander around Big Bend Natl. Park and take a peek at the ghost town of Terlingua

October- weeklong trip to NYC (with a day trip planned in here somewhere to explore Boston a bit) to just soak myself in all the museums that i’ve never really gotten a chance to explore all the other times i’ve visited, as well as satisfy my craving for actual Fall colors in nature.

More small travels will happen between those two, but for now they are the ones that consume my plans.

Songs on Repeat :

Time Lapse– Ludovico Einaudi
First Step– Hans Zimmer
Ba Ba– Sigur Rós
At The Ivy Gate– Brian Crain
Devils Backbone– The Civil Wars
Wendell Walker– Andy Shauf
Concrete Wall– Zee Avi
Niobe– Caribou

not drowning in my coffee cups yet,
~m

Happiness In Black and White- Oy, Absence!

Posted on September 20, 2015 by FablesandCoffee

I’ve been away for a bit… which should surprise literally no one at this point honestly, but for those who weren’t expecting the occasional absence when they signed on to follow my ne’er-do-well adventures, erm… apologizes. I’m a massive flake when it comes to a lot of things and this is one of them.

On to some news! (good and bad) ….(mostly good though)

-I got recruited out of the mother-flippin’ blue for an amazing position working for a rather huge pharmaceutical healthcare company (don’t want to mention their name here but considering i’ve had plenty of friends give me blank looks when I told them who, it’s probably to the same effect here) . The position comes with a substantial raise, lots of vacation days/benefits and other lovely things BUT you know what the best thing is?? It cuts my daily commute from about an hour to 20 minutes. Maybe the raise would have been the best thing for most people but if you’ve never sat through morning rush hour traffic going into Dallas, I promise you that you’ve not experienced true hell. Unless you’ve sat through afternoon rush-hour traffic into Boston, in which case I bow down to you because THAT is truly an exercise in futility and aggravation.

– Me and the boyfriend bought a new car, finally saying goodbye to my beloved Toyota Corolla DX. It was a sad parting for me as i’ve had that car since when I lived back in California. It’s the car I learned how to drive in back when I was still 13 and just… lots of good memories tied in that car and I had honestly not been expecting to part from it (mostly because at this point it was really bloody old and had a good few problems with it) but the dealership offered to take it as the downpayment and well, at that point I waved goodbye to it and grabbed all my stuffed animals to move them to the new car. The new car btw is a stupidly awesome 2016 Jeep Renegade Latitude. It’s a compact SUV (whatever that means honestly) and i’m quite in love with it. There are plans for a roadtrip in the near future and I couldn’t be more excited for that.

– On a more personal note, the depression that i’ve been battling for the past 8 months has seemed to fully dissipate back into a more sedentary thing and while there are days that I spend what feels like hours looking down at the lines of my hands and pacing very dark corridors of my mind…overall i’m learning how to kick myself out of them and pushing myself to move towards creativity instead. I still haven’t quite gotten around to talking about the mess i’ve been with all the friends I abandoned these past few months (and maybe a part of me feels like a massive coward hoping one or two of them will read about it here and save me the truly awkward conversation) but I feel ok finally acknowledging how very much not “ok” i’ve been and thats sorta kinda huge for me so…cheers for that?

Anyways….things are good right now, is what i’m trying to ramble towards. My to-be-read pile has increased by another 5 books as I went on a bit of book buying binge at Half-Price Books and bought waaaaay too many economic/economic theory/economic policy books and it couldn’t feel better to have them all piled up on desk just begging to be devoured and poured over. I’m finally getting to watch season 3 of Elementary and falling in love yet again with Lucy Liu (not a girl-crush thing btw, this a full on “I would lay down the world at her feet” thing) and i’ll be back to regularly scheduled posting on here soon enough.

Song of the moment? Bit of a gimme, but here you go :

Not drowning in my coffee cups yet,
~m

Your Sweater Vest Is Nice- Ideas about Friendships and Terrible Selfies

Posted on November 23, 2014 by FablesandCoffee

It started a little like this :
At times overly-pretentious photographer friend-” Yeah, i’ve been working out a lot lately, 6 days a week. ” *insert terrible selfie here*
Your rather tired and sleep deprived narrator– “Wow, 6 days a week? Thats dedication right there. Nice.”
At times overly-pretentious photographer friend– “Your supposed to say I look good.”
Your rather tired and sleep deprived narrator –” Yeah, I know. ”

And well, after that the conversation spiraled into disjointed words and it ended 10 minutes later with me blocking him on my phone and going to make myself a cup of tea. The thing that gets me here is, I always kinda figured the friendship would one day end this way, and YET, we stuck it out for literal ages out of a misguided idea that we were good for each other, in some way. But we were not. While it might have taken much longer than i’m proud to admit, i’m finally learning how to walk away from friendships that I hoped one day would evolve into something more than they were currently, and trying not to feel bad about it.

Maybe that makes me sound like an utterly shitty person, so let me explain.

I took a pause a couple of months ago and realized, holy-mother-of-gods I have a good number of people who I consider friends ….where the reality is that they see me as either a muse of sorts or, even worse, an idea to lean against for comfort. I don’t mind being the friend you run to when things get bad, especially because I think kindness and compassion are some of the best things you could give to your friends… but… when people see you as this pillar of endless support regardless of how out of control your own life is, thats a bit of a problem. And when it comes to being seen as a muse, the person they turn to when feeling uninspired, that can be so flattering no? What could possible be wrong with that? Nothing really, if thats just a part of how you’re seen. But when your role in someones life is “muse“, full stop, and you had hoped that perhaps you were something more substantial than that, it can easily kill little bits of yourself.

There is a full person behind these words, behind the colors seen from a distance, not just an idea to be used for comfort or inspiration.

I believe everyone has millions of different parts to them, tiny worlds and immense galaxies, whether they know it or not. The person they present to their loved ones vs the one seen by abrasive strangers. The strained smile given out of relief at the end of a hectic morning and the genuine half crazed grin blazed across a face in the middle of an adventure. The love of this vs that, fears and long held beliefs clashing with new ideas. There is so much to people, and when it comes to people who you truly love and care about, I believe it can be the greatest disservice to see them as this one dimensional structure instead of the ever growing organic beauty that they really are. No one is just one thing, no matter how much they might insist they are, and treating someone like a concept created solely for your own enjoyment/betterment, man, it’s the worst.

Anyways, this got a whole heck of a lot more personal than I thought it would but there you are. Also, I should mention that I do actually have some amazing and wonderful people in my life who see me as the walking human disaster I am vs whatever the heck others think. I like to chill out in my empty bathtub when things get really stressful, I am more dependent on coffee than I am on anything else except perhaps oxygen, and I genuinely like getting to know people for the millions of gears working to make the person they are.

In Memoriam, in The Mirror- Photography Practice

Posted on August 6, 2014 by FablesandCoffee

Sometimes I get lost behind the camera, behind the pen, behind the noise of my sewing machine. I get caught up in the click-clacking of my keyboard and the words i’m spilling into river in front of me. There comes a time at 3am that I realize I need sleep more than I need to practice my poor pronunciations and conjugations in German. When i’m sitting on the floor instead of my desk, surrounded by notebooks, journals, buttons and ripped sketchbook pages and I think perhaps i’m building up tiny walls and fortresses between the person i’m trying to become and the person that others know.
After a fiery disaster meltdown of a friendship over the weekend, i’m coming to the realization that maybe I need to take a step back, yet again, and reevaluate the things that fill me with joy, and the things I pursue only because I feel they are worthy goals. July is always the month where I barricade myself behind projects and fade into oblivion when it comes to friends, but then August comes and i’m reminded that the world does not actually revolve around me and that perhaps I need to get my butt into gear and stop being so antisocial towards people who only prod with a mind to connecting. Remind myself that half the year has gone, yes and while there is still so much I would like to accomplish, friends and strangers who could be friends, these are things that matter ever so much as well.