I feel ill-defined today. The parameters of who I am right now are all shifting and translucent. Memories are quick to pop up and take over. I’ve stayed sane with cookery books and by trying to make a beef chunk style veggie-lump with soy mince and my special-meaty-combo of seasonings which aren’t meaty, obviously. I ended up with something that tasted pretty sausagey, so it’s a recipe destined to be recycled as herby meatballs for a nice pasta dish. Benny liked them anyway.

Anyway, I get to see Watchmen this evening. I ate the comic/graphic novel (sorry Gord, he hates the later phrase), last weekend and it’s so long since I went to the cinema it seems like it might be an adventure. Monday night should be pretty quiet too I’m hopin.

Better go smartin myself up a littleen bit.

oh the sun is blazing behind me, tractors and cars and hot engine sounds find their way through the open window – little shimmer lines of heat ripple on the window behind me, reflected on the frame of the computer screen. The dust dances, my neck is hot, when I put away the books I’m in a fantasy of summer, eyes squinting, sunlight caught in bubbles in an ice-cube filled glass, so hot, so splayed out, you might be in a bath, or in the womb, that only-half-there meditation in hot sunlight… blades of grass, a tiny cloud a million miles up in a sky so blue it must have taken all the eyes of the planet to paint it that vibrantly…

back to work.

I have the window open behind me in work today for the first time. There is a little bird singing his heart out in the tree, in the sunshine, beneath the bright blue sky. Aaaahhh….

When I woke up, (still not feeling 100%), the sun was blazing in the window in the hallway casting a slant of hot gold across the floorboards in the bedroom. Behind the curtains I could feel the blue sky and the sunlight winking on water and car windows. I needed a new ‘wallpaper’ for my mobile phone (mine allows for photographs, as do most these days I assume), so I opened the curtain and without looking, pointed the lens at the sky behind me and took a picture. The result is the most beautiful, fresh, invigorating blue little square of delight that I get to look at every time I look at my mobile. Makes me smile, makes me feel like Spring is definitely here. I heartily recommend it – if the sky is blue where you are, put a piece of it in your pocket

Got horrible projectile vomiting thingy on Monday, fever, writhing, stomach still broken, worn out, no appetite (lost weight in my face though – yay). En route to bed, just wanted to let you all know I’m not dead (quite).

Love and hugs, x

You know I wish I didn’t have to post so I could leave that picture of Jack at the top my blog to greet me for a little longer. Titter. *Curls hair around finger*.

What about today? Today was tiring, but there are daffodils everywhere and I drove with the car window open on the way to work and in the twilight this evening after dropping home some friends from the library and their forlorn pussy-cat (he did not appreciate the trip to the vet). I could hear the birds singing their evening songs, spring sounds, so close to summer sounds. It gave me an insight into what summer will be like driving to and from work. I love that drive. I love the rolling fields, the mountains in the distance, the houses, the green and blue and white.

I read a lovely little book today, don’t read too much of the review on that link though, I read it not having a clue what it was about and I feel that it probably works better that way. I amen’t mentioning the title directly because it’s linked with this, and I don’t want any traffic I’m just saying, if you happen to see it somewhere, pick it up, it took me about an hour and a half to read it and it’s a pleasure, smart, simple, insightful, emotional, page-turning.

Early to bed, to clear off the last of the hacking and rattling and nose-blowing.

The picture is from a little gift shop in a museum in St Petersburg, wherever I go, I take pictures of pussy cats.

Hmm. Y’know, I hadn’t realised there was a similarity – they both have that weather beaten, floppy haired bad guy/good guy thing. (The top one is obviously Mr Kiefer Sutherland playing Jack Bauer from 24, below is Mr Philip Glenister playing Gene Hunt from the brilliant Ashes to Ashes)

Lol, someone else noticed this similarity too (I was going routing for a photo to prove the point but this will do).

And I can’t help but mention Peter Petrelli, if I’m talking people from the telly who linger in my mind after I’ve walked away from the box. Actually, he looks ridiculously like a long lost friend of mine. Ridiculously. So much so that it was difficult to watch him at first.

I have rather a long list of people off the TV and Films I’ve fancied over the years. There’s some weird ones in there too. Data springs to mind pretty quickly, played by Brent Spiner from Star Trek, ha, I just remembered, John D’Aquino from Stargate Dsv was an early one too. I also had a whopping thing for Jeff Goldblum, oh, I just remembered another really old one – and my god was I in love with him – Josh from Casualty, who on reflection looks a bit like Kevin McCloud from Grand Designs, who you wouldn’t really say no to either, frankly. Lol.

I could go on, but I wont. This has been my most childish blog entry ever. Sorry about that now. I have a dreadful cold and I’m bored. Normal service will resume soon.

Horrible toss and turn and cold and hot and cough and blow night. Just horrible. It’s days like this I’m so thankful for my short hours and late start in work. Never have been a big fan of pulling sickies. In fact I can’t remember pulling an outright sickie since I was a teenager. I came up with some excuse that time, if you’re gonna lie, make it spectacular and don’t forget to limp when you come in the next d, ay? Lol.

I started reading an interesting book this evening – The God Part of the Brain. I’ve been giving myself a bit of a hard time over the Buddhism thing over this past few weeks and rather than wait for the answers to come to me, I put my hand out and took the books off the shelves. Sure the ones I picked might not give me the exact answers, but I need things to chew on, I think I’ve circled enough in my own mind, I need to look further a field for a while.

I’ve actually been looking at this book on the shelf in the library for quite a while. I haven’t believed in God since I was a young teenager and I’ve been happy enough with the things that I’ve worked out for myself. Not having read Richard Dawkins I probably shouldn’t comment, but the phrase militant atheism always comes to mind and doesn’t tempt me to go looking for a fight with him, I thought perhaps this book might be similar. While I worked out why I didn’t believe a long time ago, I never went down the science worship path and I’ve also always been one of those people lucky enough to have enough strange experiences to keep paranormal occurrences in mind, but at as safe a distance as possible. So this book has been teasing me for the past couple of months, it’s title turning up in my mind at odd times. Buddhism throws up a lot of issues for me, and though there is no God involved, there is some hairy shit that I doubt the sceptics would be too impressed with.

Y’see, when I read that 2012 book back in October (?), I realised that for me to expand my horizons a bit (and so embark on a new phase of understanding life, the universe and everything) I needed to hang my very logical, very sceptical coat on the hook for a while and loosen up some of my ideas. I couldn’t have gone to and participated in the group meditations otherwise – it just wasn’t my style to sit weirdly and repeat Tibetan and make odd monosyllabic noises (ritualistic religious stuff = Sunday mass as a child = a complex ball of negative associations and feelings). Of course, it’s not that weird to me now, having a deeper understanding of it all, but, for me to go in this direction in the first place meant loosening my grip on some of the beliefs/ideas which had become a little bit too solid in my own mind. In college I learnt to seek out and give a lot of energy to that side of me that always asks, ‘but why is it like this, why do they think that, why is this what is accepted as normal’ etc. – out of college for a long time, some thoughts had congealed a little.

So I had to remind myself to be open minded, to suspend disbelief for a while – see the world in a broader way – face the fear of not sticking to my own set of rules and so on. I’ve done pretty good with that, but in the past couple of weeks I realised, by virtue of thoughts that I just couldn’t shake, that I couldn’t leave the coat hanging there forever – I had to reconcile the old way of thinking with the newly-adopted ‘very open-minded’ approach. Can’t split myself in two, as the theme of many a recurrent dream of mine goes

Anyway, the book has been sitting there on the shelf, it’s idea calling out to me – is my venture into Buddhism, my desire to seek out answers about spirituality, afterlife, looking through the chink in the stars, all just a function of my brain? The logical side of me jumps at the idea. The spiritual hippy-dippy side thinks, ‘that’d be shit’. But I can’t indulge either side too much, I must find the balance. So today I said, fuck it, I’m reading that book.

Anyway, this is running me into going to bed too late…off I pop, happy weekend all, x

Hurrah. I am a human snot factory. Sorry. It’s the nicest way I can describe today. Benny’s slight recovery this evening gives me a little hope though, I thought it was going to be a really bad one but he’s been brightening and getting more ‘with it’ as the day has gone on. He’s two days ahead of me on it though, so we’ll see who has the tougher constitution.

Nope, four minutes of writing then disregarding sentences and it’s time to call it a night, I’ll just pop in a nice picture here and then it’s early to bed with a cocktail of decongestants, painkillers and vicks vaporub. Sexy.

I never liked writing postcards, and as such, writing “I did this, I did that” sometimes just plain turns me off writing here.

Coming up with a witty frame, a novel thought, something I want to muse on every day isn’t always appealing either.

This past couple of weeks I’ve been chewing over Buddhism, money, and friendship (among other things, obviously), alongside working three six day weeks (again, not really complaining, just, bleah) and having an interesting (at times upsetting, but that’s another nights discussion) and adventure packed week off. I think I’ve been a little highly strung at times, falling into the hyper-analysis thing, as I am wont to do.

There was an interesting line on Battlestar Galactica last night, it went something along the lines of “sometimes lost is exactly where you need to be, just because you don’t know the direction you’re going in, doesn’t mean you aren’t already heading there”. I liked that. I’m feeling a little lost you see. Though that doesn’t quite describe it. I’m doing my usual thing of trying to understand everything immediately, an old habit to ward off the wool I fear may be heading in the direction of my eyes. I was taught young, being as naturally naive as I was, to always try to defend myself against appearances which turn out to be deceptive. Most of the time my tactic is to imagine everything bad that could possibly happen (along with gathering every ounce of information I can) and work it over and over in my mind until it’s so ground in there I wont miss the trick that will save me from getting hurt. Obviously the process isn’t all that negative, I check myself against going too much in either direction.

I would probably need to write the rest of this at t’other place. I probably need to go to bed too – Benny has a really nasty chest infection and my throat is itching, so, early night and all that.