Here's to the night we felt alive...

I cannot tell you how nice it feels to be returning home, as of old, at 2 in the morning from a social gathering. A sliver of normalcy has returned for the night.

It's also great that seeing high school friends, after not seeing them for 2 or 3 or 4 years is so easy for my group. We pick up right where we left off, except now we're all cooler.

Also. Just the wee-est bit depressing when everyone has real lives but you.

BUT the positive far outweighed the negative here. I have grown used to the penniless actor/living with parents/applying for grad schools schpeal.

Love it.

Again, courtesy of my friend Jenna's blog. Just wanted to share.

Brilliant Sorceress

This is what I look like every Saturday morning. I wake up at 6 so I can do my makeup all fancy before opening at Sephora, then I usually have an hour break to eat something, take off all this makeup, and put on some more conservative makeup for Williams-Sonoma. Today I finally got a chance to come home so I could take a picture.

I should be wearing more full-coverage foundation, because Brilliant Sorceresses don't usually have freckles, but the eyeshadows and eyeliners and eyelashes cost enough. And instead of cutting my bangs all funky, I settled for putting glitter in my hair. Yes, it may look better if I actually did my hair, but hell no at 6 in the morning. So, I think it turned out pretty well, considering. And excuse my messy room in the background.

And rest assured I do indeed get some weird looks walking around the mall.

________...

Sometimes I greet at Sephora, and I stand at the entrance and say hello and goodbye to people and stare at the people passing in the hallway and remember when I had that kind of free time that I could go shopping. My free time is spent recovering. This is not working for me. I cannot do this for more than a few months. This is not a balance of life and work. I am not productive at all when I am home. I have a few hours which I spend making/eating dinner, going to the gym when I can, catching up on email and tv shows and then I sleep and then I work.

sigh

I need need need the money.

SO. Option one: work less. Not going to happen.

Option two: figure out a way to DO more with my spare time so that I feel more accomplished and more like I have a life instead of a life of work.

I am grumpy.

I love this:

The following is from my friend Jenna's blog. I was just going to put the Malraux one, because it's my favorite, but why not share them all?

Per usual, ol’ Neil Gaiman puts it best:

“Of course, fairy tales are transmissible. You can catch them, or be infected by them. They are the currency that we share with those who walked the world before ever we were here. (Telling stories to my children that I was, in turn, told by my parents and grandparents makes me feel part of something special and odd, part of the continuous stream of life itself.) My daughter Maddy, who was two when I wrote this for her, is eleven, and we still share stories, but they are now on television or films. We read the same books and talk about the, but I no longer read them to her, and even that was a poor replacement for telling her stories out of my head. I believe we owe it to each other to tell stories. It’s as close to a credo as I have or will, I suspect, ever get.”

Or, this from André Malraux:

“The great mystery is not that we should have been thrown down here at random between the profusion of matter and that of the stars; it is that from our very prison we should draw, from our own selves, images powerful enough to deny our nothingness.”

Or Tim O’Brien:

“Yet even if it did happen–and maybe it did, anything’s possible–even then you know it can’t be true, because a true war story does not depend upon that kind of truth. Absolute occurence is irrelevant. A thing may happen and be a total lie; another thing may not happen and be truer than the truth. For example: Four guys go down a trail. A grenade sails out. One guy jumps on it and takes the blast, but it’s a killer grenade and everybody dies anyway. Before they die, though one of the dead guys says, “The fuck you do that for?” and the jumper says, “Story of my life, man,” and the other guy starts to smile but he’s dead.
That’s a true story that never happened.”

Aw hell, even some J.K. Rowling:

“Tell me one last thing,” said Harry. “Is this real? Or has this been happening inside my head?”
Dumbledore beamed at him, and his voice sounded loud and strong in Harry’s ears even though the bright mist was descending again, obscuring his figure.
“Of course it is happening inside your head, Harry, but why on earth should that mean that it is not real?”

Or how about Italo Calvino:

“If I were only a hand, a severed hand that grasps a pen and writes . . . Who would move this hand? The anonymous throng? The spirit of the times? The collective unconscious? I do not know. It is not in order to be the spokesman for something definable that I would like to erase myself. Only to transmit the writable that waits to be written, the tellable that nobody tells.”

And finally, from Philip Pullman (I’ve been rereading The Subtle Knife recently):

“Stories are the most important thing in the world. Without stories, we wouldn’t be human beings at all.”

Inclement Weather

I love it. I LOVE IT!

Of course, I do NOT love when people get into accidents because of it.

Yesterday I worked from 10-11. I had one hour break. Yes indeed, I know how to work it. A little after I got to Sephora I started hearing things about how awful the weather was and my heart just Thrilled. Especially after I heard that it was supposed to continue into the night and get worse! And we'd get 6-12 inches of snow!!! Many people were not at all pleased by this because they had to drive places and I understand that. But I knew that the next day I didn't have to do anything, so I could stay curled in a ball drinking cocoa and gazing at the swirling storm outside. We also had practically no clients in the store all night long, which made work easier.

I love snow. I love it so much I can't say it enough.

I pretty much love any kind of inclement weather, but snow is the Best.

But I was very concerned when I drove home at 11 in the freezing cold blasting wind in whiteout conditions and saw a car on its side in a ditch with its headlights still on. I really wanted to stop and make sure no one was still in the car, but 1) I am a lone girl and 2) I didn't want anyone to run into my car at the side of the road or slide into the ditch myself. So I called my dad to call the police. But I was still worried. I hope they were ok.

I think if I had any farther to drive than the mall to Bushnell's Basin I would have been freaked out. But I am a good snow driver.

So today is the first day I have had off since Thanksgiving and here are my plans:

Sleep in. Check.

Clean room and do laundry.

Go get gingerbread house materials and at least begin that project.

Bake something delicious for my Secret Santa.

Catch up on email.

Go to the movies! (but this can't happen now because the movie I most want to see is at The Little, and I don't really want to drive to Rochester in these conditions.)

Be cozy. Check.