Smiles, Shadows and Song

The word of the week is peripheral.

Jan 27 - Timing

Time off is what I have for the next few weeks - lots of it.

Out of the next 14 days, I'll be working a mere 5.

While not a lot to make a living from, it still means I WILL have a lot of time to devote towards writing, for which I'm very grateful. Plus time I spend working( and being stressed from said day job)of the week, the more time and creative energy I have to devote towards my words. With numerous days in a row to do so, I am confident that I can get the ball rolling and get some momentum under my Muse to get my novel finished and circulating to agents this spring.

Which is definitely important, as these things always take time.

Once I have the third draft finished and circulating, I can fully concentrate on the more immediate things such as finding a better job and shoring up my other skills like finishing my IT training. I can let my novel speak for itself as it lands on the desks of agents with a sound that promises them a good read, born of hard work and a good story, to be told by memorable characters chapter by chapter in a book that's impossible to put down.

Hmmm… when I say that, it sounds like a good blog entry. I like that; there's some synchronicity there.

Jan 28 - Passion

Incredible talent. Unique. Unforgettable.

Those are the words that any artist longs to hear. I myself would love to have my work, at some point in my life far from now, evoke those feelings from people who've read it.

For those artists who play an instrument as their passion in life, their audiences can immediately hear the passion and skill that you into producing the music that tickles the ears and plucks at their heartstrings. It's a rare musician who ascends to this level and makes it seem effortless, especially after the struggles they've often had to endure to reach that point in their life.

One such person is known simply as Natalie, a street musician in Australia who only recently put the burden of homelessness behind her:  

You can see the reactions of passersby as they stop and listen, the music reaching out to hold them in place and to speak to all the secret places of their soul. The beauty of Natalie's passion pours out through her fingers as they dance across the ivories, calling sounds into being and weaving them into a tapestry that only her singular talent can create.

Such as her gift to the world: the eternal yet transcendental gift of the artist to their audience.

Jan 29 - Different Dementia

Do you ever worry about losing your mind?

As I hit middle age, I do worry a bit bout the occasional memory lapse that I experience. Should I be doing things to improve my memory: word games, puzzles, mental exercises? Maybe add some 'brain food' to my diet? Or should I popped a few supplements like ginkgo biloba into my daily regimen?

Secretly, I think a good many people worry about dementia, which is ironic given how few people discuss mental health in modern society. The recent Bell campaign to raise awareness about mental health was very refreshing to see and wonderful in that it appeared to reach quite a few people.

But we still don't agree as a society as to what to do with people who suffer from mental diseases. For the most part, they're locked away with no stimulation to fade away all too quickly. It's as though they get stuffed into the world's closet to disappear as if most everyone they knew and loved were ashamed of them.

Yet progress is being made, if slowly, in some corners of the globe.

Denmark has created a new place to help those with dementia cope with the world that has suddenly changed around them. Called Lotte, it is a nursing home with a radical difference: it doesn't lock people away, but rather creates a village for them to live in as they wish, in a way that gives them both dignity and security:

Having seen too many people with dementia locked away 'for their own good' to wither and fade, I applaud the efforts of Lotte to redefine the limits of mental disease and to give back sufferers of the disease as much of their former lives as possible. To live with dignity, to love and to be free to enjoy every day within very loose few limits is something that very few dementia patients have today.

Which says quite a lot about our 'sane' society, don't you think?

Jan 30 - Oh no, not again!

What would it take to make you move house?

How about a giant rock rolling down the nearby hill to crash through your home?

There's a second boulder stopped just behind the house!

I find it both disturbing and amusing that the owners of this house in Italy didn't move after the FIRST boulder rolled down the hill. Not knowing the full story, perhaps the house hadn't been built before the original landslide brought the first boulder to rest in the field in front of where the dwelling now is. I actually know someone who used to live in a house here locally that had a boulder roll downhill in a very similar fashion to smash through a large portion of the residence. Thankfully, nobody was hurt but it does give you pause and make you look up nearby hillsides to eye them for possible rogue rocks.

Yet you would think anyone with a little common sense might pause while considering the spot for building a home and think 'If this happened once, it could happen again' or something similar.

Myself, I would build my house in the lee of that first giant boulder and hope that mother nature doesn't go for a trick shot if she chooses to do so for a second time.

I'm stubborn though; I'd probably wait for a third avalanche before I moved.

Jan 31 - It only takes a little

Just a thought here about... doubt.

Recently I posted on a few websites some rebuttals concerning anti-vaccination rants and the general lack of intelligent discourse about such. I find it disturbing that people will toss out vast amounts of accumulated evidence in favor of a little doubt, which leads me to make disturbing conclusions about people's ability to reason given facts about most things in today's world versus what's all too easily available to be found on the Internet to support personal opinion and bias. Here's a snippet of what I posted, for your edification:

Just the facts, please; don't assume a little knowledge makes you well-informed.
Any web search will turn up thousands( if not more )of well-researched, fact-based articles by medical experts refuting claims about the levels of harmful ingredients in vaccines. They are experts in that these people have dedicated their lives to medicine, spending decades learning all there is to know in a constantly-evolving educational space.
Doubt is an easy tool to use; it's very human and should definitely be used to keep people - and companies - honest. Yet it is a massive disservice to all those who have passed, and those who have worked to make their passings meaningful by improving medical science, to lump the experience and efforts of the past century into 'It's all a conspiracy to kill us secretly' while ignoring scientific evidence and fact in such large quantities. That, in itself, is willful ignorance; people would rather listen to the short, easy answers than make the effort to read the available research, educate themselves and make a fully-informed decision, because that takes time.
That, too, is also very human.

Overall, my non-inflammatory comments were soon 'voted down' by quite a few people, which I found disheartening. Yet at the same time, one has to wonder how the gene pool goes about tidying itself up and letting Darwinism have its way - maybe it's even a secret conspiracy at work, if you listen to some of the extremists.

What I do know is that combining foolishness, stubbornness and paranoia usually doesn't lead to a long and healthy life.

Feb 1 - Blah, then Bazowee!

For a lot of today, I was feeling very blah - but that changed.

I'm not sure what it was; sometimes, my subconscious wrestles with things and doesn't tell me, with the result that I generally trudge around and feel like I have my head inside a paper bag. To little weird, but I've learned to recognize it for what it is and do my best to figure out how I can change things for myself.

Sitting outside in the sunshine today having some tea with my sister down at Moka House did some good, but didn't snap me out of whatever cloud I was I was funking under completely.

So I went to the movies to see Frozen.

 

What a great choice! I'd heard good things about the movie, with RottenTomatoes.com showing a rare complete agreement between reviewers and the general public to give the movie a stellar 89% overall rating. I purposely didn't look up much beforehand about the movie so as not to spoil it... and it worked!

The film was a lovely experience, moving from start to finish very naturally and with only the rare occasional hiccup in plot or pacing. The characters were memorable, believable and without exception likable, except for the ones that we weren't supposed to like - which is how it should be. The CGI served the film, not the other way around; again, as it should be.

Yet the standout part of Frozen was the song "Let It Go" by Idina Menzel, which raised the hairs on back of my neck with its power and passion:

Coming from the makers of Wreck It Ralph, Frozen is a solid entry in the Disney film legacy and one I will definitely enjoy watching again in the future, if only to see how much I'll enjoy it again after I've changed for the better since today.

It'll be cool.

Feb 2 - Seeing Shadows Smile

We continued a tradition, today.

After a long and busy day at work, I came home rather beat and a little downcast after seeing the schedule for the week after next. Work is going nowhere for me; all day long, I had nagging thoughts about how I was treading water in various ways - personally, professionally and financially chief among them. Working only a few days a week is rubbing salt into the wounds of earning a pittance and it's definitely a sign that I have to get my own feet under me if I want to walk my own path any distance towards doing what I want to do with my life.

No kidding, Sherlock.

Still, things have been looking up in the last week. I've been looking for other jobs, planning on getting a large portion of my novel's third draft hammered out in the next month and just this past week, some good financial news arrived in the mail. It wasn't a check for $1 million, but I'll definitely take what I can get at this point, especially given the miniscule paycheques I'll be getting in the near future.

What picked me up tonight was watching Groundhog Day with my sister - again.

Those of you who know me, know this is one of my favourite films of all time, for many reasons. I'll not go on at length about it, as I've already done so in previous entries this time of year, save to say I can watch this film over and over without tiring of it. Which, I guess, IS  saying a lot, given that I usually don't re-watch films or re-read books at intervals of less than half a decade or so. There's a lot of meaning in Groundhog Day for me - good meaning.

Thus, it's most assuredly the right way to end one week and so begin another.

The intermittent glitch in my computer has been traced after much effort to a failed RAID card - AGAIN - which thankfully is an easy fix, especially as I've got an extended warranty for the little bugger. Which is a BIG relief to me, as I definitely can't afford major surgery for my PC right now; time to shut up and soldier on, I have a big week ahead of me!