A Treasure Found at Home

i have a night tonight all to me. no plans. i want to have a long soaky bath, and i need to pack for the weekend, and i’m hungry, and i should be cleaning a little, and i need to go to bed early. it’s 8:30ish, i just got home from work an hour ago. i don’t think i’ll have time to do everything. by the time i make and eat dinner i’ll have to pack, and then it will be time for bed.

i’m feeling very selfish right now. i think it’s the ungroundedness of not having been home much in the past weeks and not being completely at ease with all the agreements in my relationship with my concubine, but also not being completely sure how to best create that ease. plus the demands of work, shambhala (which i’ve been letting slip even though it’s probably most helpful to keep at it right now), and just keeping up a social life.

this weekend away is going to be just what i need. babies and dogs in the outside. all i would need to make it perfect are some power tools! … (and have my concubine along) …

to dinner. eating always makes the world easier to face.

>5 Things
cuddling
kissing concubine goodbye as he was shaving
feeding concubine’s kitty
my kitty’s meows as he comes home to find me!
knitting
happy hat! wearer
beautiful street on the way to the train station
friend on the train
morning cinnamon roll and coffee
calls from friends

Cunning hat

Originally uploaded by Hjem.

serenity opens tomorrow! i’m so excited! not only is it a fabulous movie… or at least it was a fabulous tv show and reports are that the movie is completely in line with that, but it’s a wonderful excuse to knit cunning hats for my friends.

this is a shot of my first nearly finished hat in action. i just need to make and attach the pom pom for the top, but this friend doesn’t mind.

i goofed a bit on the pattern, but i think it still turned out fairly well. ma cobb wan’t exact, i don’t believe, so why should i worry about things like these. as it is, if he wears this hat down the street people will know he’s not afraid of anything!

i’m also wearing the serenity shirt i filched from my concubine today. special edition for the fx crew… i know people who know people who have cooooool jobs.

i’m mostly well again.
i found my knitting.
i found my camera.

yay!

busy busy busy…

so, i love books and i love bags… what’s a girl to do since they both tend to take up so much space?
how about this?

i want le mis…

i just got a wrong number. some kid from nyc. he wanted the person who had this extention before me.

sorry, i don’t know the people who worked here before me!

he asked if i was in california, if i was near la. nope, sf.

oh, he says, there are a lot of gays out there, aren’t there. um, yeah, there are a few.

are you one of em’, he wants to know. why? you wanna ask me out on a date?

yeah, but he wants to see a picture first. ::rolls eyes::

he wanted to know how old i am and i told him i’m old enough.

what a laugh!

i tried to transfer him to the operator, but he hung up before the transfer was complete.

bye, tony from new york.

i gave my concubine some booty this morning for talk like a pirate day.

all true.

i’ve signed my emails to him ‘[sparkle] bonney’ in honour of Anne Bonney, a wild irish pirate lass. i finally took the time to look up my true pirate name, and:

can i call it, or what?

(i have to laugh about the ‘jenny’ part. there was that spat in high school where, through no fault of my own, everyone i met thought my name was jenny.)

arrr. avast!

here there be pirates!

I got a fortune cookie with lunch today. As I broke it open, I thought about my crush. It wasn’t an intentional question to the universe, but I decided to go with it and apply whatever was in the cookie to the question of the crush.

Here’s what I got.

Um, yeah. Guess it’s saying this won’t be a relationship which will help too much with my stability issues. Or maybe it will… in that Buddhist sort of way.

Good thing I don’t put much stock in this sort of message from the universe.

Yesterday I went to see a performance out in the woods in the hills on the peninsula. The day before had been so warm, I only brought a light sweater. Luckily, “B” had been the year before and remembered the fickle weather before he left his house. He was thoughtful enough to bring the sweatshirt I’d left in the amb on the return from Black Rock. And, to top it off, he’d washed it for me! So I had a clean warm sweatshirt to cuddle up in as we watched five one act plays written by David Ives.

I loved how we moved from one stage area to another for each piece. I think it created more of a separation between them. I find, when they’re all on the same stage, I try to make connections between the characters and pieces. “Oh, this must be that last one’s brother,” for example.

There was one piece with two people meeting in a coffee shop. Each time one or the other said something which turned the other off, they would ding a bell, back up, and start over from earlier in the conversation. It was really funny.

Then last night I went to see Trout Fishing In America, one of my favourite hard to describe bands from my college days. I brought Stone along with me and she loved them, too.

I went to buy a CD and realized I had all the grown up CDs… not that there’s anything a child “shouldn’t” listen to, but they’re just not child oriented. Ezra suggested I buy the Christmas CD so I followed his suggestion. We chatted about D/FW and places they’ve played there and where I used to go see them. I think he thought I was younger than I am (I suppose I’m supposed to be flattered by that at my age), and mentioned a few places and celebrations at my university which I’d never heard of. He and Keith signed my CD and Ezra handed it back to me, “There you go.”

To which I replied, “What do I owe you for it?”

He laughed and thanked me for reminding him.

It was a great show and I wish Acrobat, et al. could have made it. TFIA play so rarely out this way.

All in all a fantastic performance filled day.

Two years in a row my life changes dramatically post burn. What’s the correlation? Do I really relax that much in Black Rock City that my life can’t help but fall into place? Do I just stop fighting so hard? Doubtful, yet it seems the most likely explanation. Maybe it’s just that there isn’t quite as much to worry about. Or maybe it’s that pretty much any return to ‘normal’ life after a week in BRC seems like a drastic change. To be sure, the groundwork for this year’s changes was all laid before I left for the burn. New job, new routine, all that jazz.

This year’s burn was difficult for me. I’m reminded of walking along the playa a couple years back in complete awe of how wonderful everything had been. I was telling someone how every year was better, significantly better, than the last. As a result I was almost nervous about continuing to come to the burn because it was clear that trend couldn’t continue and I hoped I wouldn’t become very disappointed when I had a burn which wasn’t stellar.

This year was it. My non-stellar year. I wasn’t for a moment sorry I’d gone, but I felt very much out of place and unsettled the entire week. “B” runs his camp differently than HoCo. There was not nearly the same amount of pre-planning. To be sure, I wouldn’t have put as much effort into planning for HoCo’s camp this year as I had in the past, because I already know what’s up there. I felt “B” and Pink and Pan already had the system down, and I couldn’t quite catch on. When I tried to make a decision, it seemed like it was frequently not what “B” had in mind, and when I tried to ask him about things I was unsure of, he’d encourage me to figure it out on my own. All that wind the first night and subsequent day surely didn’t help our tolerance of each other.

I smacked my head on the amb and one point, and that opened the floodgates. I sobbed and told “B”, “I’m not having a good time!” As if that were somehow supposed to be part of the deal! Actually, what I was trying to convey was that same concept of having a bad day, except my day was turning out to be much longer than just one day. It wasn’t as if there were anything in particular which I could point to, but a number of things which I could have normally taken more in stride were stacking up. After the minor breakdown, I finally started working away at building the dome. Finally! My niche. I should have thought of that sooner. I’m great with building and tools and puzzly things. Why was I holding back?

My guess is, it was the little hiccup “B” and I had hit in our friendship right before the burn. I was still trying to hold back to see what our relationship would look like on the other end. Goodness knows I should have jumped in and just *created* what I wanted to have in my friendship with him, but … hindsight and all that, ya know.

I never quite got my footing. I didn’t realize just how important those camp breakfast/coffee times were in NoseFish until I didn’t have them with the Amb camp. It wasn’t as if we never hung out together, but I really dug the easy mornings with HoCo and co. They really helped me come down from the nights and recharge for the days.

I ran into a lot of people who were experiencing difficult emotional experiences. Freshly ex fiancées camped spitting distance from each other, people promising to show up then choosing not to, at one point a woman was sharing her experience with me around a guy she’d become interested in at the burn. Her story sounded so familiar that at first I thought she was really trying to get me to talk about my own situation!

For all that, I never once wished I hadn’t gone to BRC. I laid the groundwork for a new friendship or two, I deepened others, I learned to trust just a little more. I walked a good distance in a dust storm with my eyes closed holding onto “B”’s arm. Which may not sound like much to you the averagely sane reader, but that’s just not something I do. I rely on my sight too much, I get uncomfortable when I don’t know where things are. It’s not to say I let him lead me with complete ease… mostly I was still nervous and felt as though all sorts of objects were closing in on us. But, I did it. At one point I even made a decision to drop all that fear and go ahead and put my trust in “B”. For a few seconds it actually worked! I was so surprised that it actually worked, though, that I yelped and sort of lost the feeling. Whatever, I know now I can do it.

“B” and I finally got a chance to sort out some of our misunderstanding. We were both making assumptions about the other without really talking. Funny how that never seems to work, even with good friends.

Now I’m back in the Bay Area, at work in my new gig, feeling more relaxed and more at ease than when I left. I love the Burn.