Personal Perestróĭka

Thank you all for the amazing birthday wishes.  I will get to telling each and every one of you, individually, how much I appreciate it, uh, some time soon.

My birthday started with coffee and cupcakes from Libelle and later included some fantastic sushi, definitely the best I’ve had in Nashville.  And lots of new shoes.  And because Missy Sue asked (she’s going to kill me for calling her that here, but it does protect her identity), here’s pictures of the shoes I got (courtesy my super awesome mama):

I maintain that the last pair are very practical.  You can never have too many low-heeled crepe soled boots.

So there it is, I left 35 behind with sushi and shoes.  Not bad, not bad at all.  I’m sure I’l have some long dramatic post to make about aging and life changes, but not today.

Pictures of this week’s sewing projects are up on Flickr (with details about each project).  We have a couple dresses from the Goodwill.  One simple resized and shaped, one turned into a skirt and a top, three blouses made from scratch, and an apron.  Last summer all I wanted when it was hot was light cotton peasant blouses to wear, so this year I’ve set out and made myself a couple already and will probably make a handful more.  Am working on size adjusting the pattern so I can make them for Libelle too (and anyone else who wants one).

I was very, very productive between about 7:30 and 11:30 this morning.  Now I have eaten lunch and am seriously considering taking a nap. I really wish I had set up the hammock before today, because I could be lying in it right now.  Alas, the 6 hours of sleep and already busy day has left me too listless and lazy to set the hammock so that I can go slack off in it.

As you may or may not know, I am unabashed Will Smith fan.  Let me say that I know absolutely nothing about the man, nor do I have any interest in him, his personal life or anything he does off screen (this is true for most actors, people are icky and I’d rather not have their lives taint my movie fantasy time).  But I love me some Will Smith movies.  Any of them, all of them (yes, even Wild, Wild West). So this morning, I’m watching Hancock (again) and it strikes me how great the little kid in this movie is.  I mean he’s like a normal (and by that I mean spastic) 8 or 9 year old boy.

TV and movies are full of so many precocious, overly wise children.  And sure those exist, but it’s really nice to see perfectly normal children in mass media.  Even if that media otherwise has no relation to reality at all.

Also, I might currently be excessively hormonal, but this movie is making me cry a lot today.  I’m not even to the end yet, but even rescuing the cop int he beginning? Gah, tear-fest!

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As a kid I loved Mad Magazine and Cracked.  In fact, I love Cracked more.  Lately I’ve reading a lot of lists that folks link to at Cracked.com and man, I still kind of adore them.  For instance:  10 Great Books For (Traumatizing) Children.  I mean, yikes, serious yikes, but that’s still some insightful (and messed up) hilarity.

I want to wear only cute skirts and t-shirts, or jeans and cute blouses.  To that end, I’ve been making blouses.  I’ve only been modifiying existing shirts and making really, really simple blouses (pics soon) but maybe, maybe I am ready to work up to real blouses.  I definitely need a dress form in my size though, as the trying on while sewing thing isn’t going to work for much longer.

It is late and I am awake, and cold and I want to be in bed, warm, snug and preferably sleeping.  Here are some reasons I am not asleep:

Day 3 of no smoking for me.  (Yes, okay, thank you.  Please feel free to mock, berate or chastize me if you see me smoking, otherwise, I’m not yet ready for your support.  Rather just be aware that I am freakishly, unnaturally bitchy right now.)

Work was less than satisfactory.  While clearing one of my last tables, I found a half full pack of cigarettes that some patrons left.  Fuck you, universe.

Some guy got robbed at gun point in our parking lot tonight.  I gave the left cigarettes to the girlfriend fo the guy who got robbed.  She seemed to need them.

I feel both safe and not safe.  I am anxious and yet exhausted.  The sentencing hearing for the guys who robbed me at gunpoint is at 9am the morning after my birthday.  I have nothing deep, meaningful or sensible to say about all that except it all still kind of pisses me off.  I will drink more beer, hopefully sleep and ask everyone to remember that East Nashville isn’t the suburbs, it’s still gentrifying neighborhood and you can’t be too cautious.

Warm weather can’t get here soon enough.  Really.  Also I wish everyone I love in the world could be here right now to see the dogwoods.  You don’t know dogwoods until you’ve driven around neighborhoods in Tennessee in spring.  My heart hurts with hugeness of the beauty and my inability to share it with everyone.

I had a very long detailed dream about high school last night.  I dreamt I went back to visit with another former classmate (who also lives in TN and doesn’t actually exist in real life), and everyone who had attended the school while I was there was also visiting.  I saw all my classmates and old teachers (they looked very old in my dream, but were all teaching the same classes).  Then we went to watch the school production of West Side Story and I talked to all the new students about how they liked it.  It was very intense on details, like the conversations with old classmates and teachers were very spot on and filled with details of those teachers that I haven’t thought about in years.  It’s hard to believe that high school was fully half my life ago.

And upon waking I realized that my birthday is two weeks away.  I haven’t done my usual 30 (or 60) day countdown to the event this year.  Truthfully, I just feel kind of meh about it.   I have low expectations, so it’s not like I’ll be disappointed or anything.  It’s more about just being older.  Not that I am old by any stretch, rather this birthday seems like a marker and by my own measure I haven’t yet achieved what I feel I should have by this marker.  It’s just kind of depressing.  Blah.

I assume I am somehow projecting this blahness I feel because recently a couple friends have asked if I’m okay in way that seems to indicate they have reason to be concerned.  I was pretty sure that to all outside appearences I am as I always am (sort of an amalgam of cheerful, chipper, pissed off, tired, friendly and ice princessy–yes, I am a contradiction), but maybe not?  Maybe everyone is very concerned about me for reasons I don’t even know?  Maybe I need more coffee before I try and think/explain things like this?

In conclusion, I think posting a link the other day wasn’t enough, so just in case you missed it (or didn’t), here is the lovely toddler fairy dress again:

Is it wrong that I wish I could wear little yellow sundresses with fairies on them?  I mean, I could, I guess, I’d just look very eccentric.  Now I will get on with my day thnking about daffodil dresses, fairies and sunshine, even if there is no sun shining in Nashville today (damn it all too, blue skies would go a long way to cheering me up).

Nothing resets me mentally like ignoring everything important and just sewing.  Today I made a little dress for a pretty toddler I know.  I turned an ill-fitting summer dress into a top and skirt, I refashioned two button up shirts into spring blouses, I made a wrap skirt that wouldn’t stay shut into a dirndl skirt and I made a new waistband for the skirt I made last week.  Most exciting was the appliques on the toddler dress and pintucks!!!  I made pintucks.  I’m super excited, I put seven rows of them on the front of one of the blouses instead of darts.  They are hard to see unless you are up close but I am very pleased with them as decorative details.  I suspect there will be many pintucks in my future. There are pictures here (the last 11 pics are the new stuff).

Now I am utterly exhausted. Though not just from sewing.  From everything.  It’s storming again.  I am too tired to say much other than food good.  Bed better.  Tonight hopefully I will sleep long and hard and not have hideous and disturbing dreams like I did last night.

I am agitated and utterly out of sorts today.  I have the peculiar underlying anxiety that I think maybe always comes up when storms are rolling in  (need more data to make sure this is fact).  My routine was severely disrupted this morning.  And while I can do fine with some routine upset, it really threw me off today.  Also I had long elaborate dreams about the apocalypse last night  That always puts me off my feed as well.  To so sum up: lost routine, storms a’comin’, bad bad dreams.  Okay, well now that I’ve written that down, it’s no wonder I’m barely functional today.  The question is, how do I set myself right?

My options are:

• get out work to-do list and panic over it until I cry
• paint my toenails and watch a movie
• get back in PJs, back in bed and read until it’s time to get ready for work
• pick around and find an unfinished craft project and finish it for the satisfaction of it
• sit and stare

I ate a healthy, not too salty, protein filled breakfast.  It was okay.  Mildly disappointing because I woke up thinking about donuts.  Real donuts.  Voodoo Donuts.  Top Pot Donuts.  I assume because yesterday I saw this. Um, it is nearly my birthday.  I’m just saying.

Among the myriad of other things I have to do today, I was going to pull out the lighter spring bedding and pack away the heavier winter stuff. Of course the weather isn’t having this.  It’s supposed to be just at or right below freezing tonight and tomorrow night.  Even as I type this the temps have dropped so much from yesterday that my hands are slightly stiff with the chill.

I was going to pack away sweaters and pull out cute skirts and blouses too.  I might still do that as I always have hoodies to wear and I am seriously so sick of my winter clothes.  Yes, I have to take stuff to charity today anyway, I guess I should sort out the sweaters while I still remember which ones I never wore.

This weekend we spring cleaned.  It is so clean in my house!!  Of course you can’t really tell as the clutter still lives and much of the cleaning was under and behind things.  But I know it’s clean!  Hurrah!  Clean!  Also Libelle purchased a $10 painting for the that one weird wall that runs betwen the kitchen and the dining room.  It’s is hideous.  Hilariously so.  And really, it looks better than that wall did before.  Maybe even the painting isn’t so bad, though the colors are a little garish (I admit I helped pick so part of that might be my fault) and the frame is awful but the overall effect of all of it is quite cheerful.  I guess I should just post pictures, huh?

Last night I had a continuous string of dreams about being stuck somewhere or trying to get somewhere or being lost. Stress, stress, stressy stresserson. Bleh.  The only good part was small bit where tiny Queen Mab was already walking, talking and incredibly smart.  Everyone was shocked she could do these things so young, but she was just ready to go and be part of the world.

Yesterday was Libelle’s birthday.  I hope she had a good day, I did what I could.  Of I’d like to draw it out as much as possible, as April is BIRTHDAY MONTH. What with Libelle’s at the begining and mine at the end, I declare it a month of celebration.  Hurrah!!

Now we have bacon and coffee.  Well and quiche, but that just there so I won’t have eaten just bacon and nothing else. Let the celebrating continue!