I'm sitting at my window in Metro Pulse, a little more than a week after my first day as "Senior Designer." I'm looking out over a side street in downtown; the building across the way, the Farragut, has ornate stonework proclaiming its name. I see that, and a street light, which from my second-story window is at eye level.
I wrote recently about having a big weight lifted after taking my new job (it starts in three days!), and I wrote that I was vaguely skeptical I could count on it to last. I was suddenly feeling like myself again, after months and months of otherness, and I was only hopeful that I'd continue to feel like me.
Well, I've gotta say ... I think it's here to stay.
The proof is not in continued elation -- I've always been prone to bouts of sadness -- it's in my most recent dip. It may sound strange, but it was the most refreshing sadness I've felt in, I don't know, a year?
When I was in my melodramatic teen years, and then when I was a writer in college, being sad was something substantial. I was thoughtful in my blue periods. Usually a lot of new and good ideas came to me. It's like I knew how to chew on the sadness, even as it felt a little like it overpowered me.
Increasingly over the past year, especially these last several months, the sadness was dead. There was nothing to it except feeling sad. Or bad. There was nothing useful in it, no dynamics.
When I found myself dipping a couple of days ago, I could have dreaded it. But I didn't. I lived in it. I observed things through that lens that drops down during blue periods. Every now and then, I even thought to myself, happily, "This is me! This is my sadness!"
It's not blue. It's indigo. It's not cold and lifeless; it's vibrant; it's a very low, deep hum.
Patrick and I are hitting some great strides with wedding planning, in large part thanks to my Mom, who is getting a kick out of the whole process.
[Let me take a brief moment to thank her and my Dad for being so excited about *whatever* plans Patrick and I have come up with. I've heard other people say, "Oh just wait. This isn't a wedding for you. It's for your parents! It'll get bigger than you expect and there'll be people there you don't even know!" Well, indeed not. Thanks, Mom and Dad!]
This being 2008, and Patrick and I being who we are, part of our wedding is going to be a website, complete with logo. And Patrick and I being who we are, we're going to make both of them ourselves.
Cue logo!
I don't know what got it started, but we picked up a "Go West" theme somewhere along the way. There's something very Modern Storybook about the idea of pioneering the U.S. landscape: exploring, traveling, settling, raising cattle.
It just seems to get us started on the right foot.
The website will be up in the next few weeks. I guess we'll have to start thinking about getting invitations in the mail ...
I have also collected dozens of proclamations that, Starting today! I will actually follow through on my ideas!
Those collected dust, too.
Well, I may just have to face the fact that many, many of my ideas will never see action. And that's what blogging's for! If nothing else, I'm going to start listing my ideas as they come to me. I'll record them here and have them to sift through sometime later, when maybe I'll deem them worth my energy.
I'll call them Brilliant Ideas.
I've already tagged several recipes so far that I'd like to explore. Perhaps the most unexpected is this sausage/pear concoction. It sounds like it *must* be one of those amazing combinations of savory and sweet flavors, and taste as surprisingly good as pineapple and ham on your pizza.
The more I venture into various pop blogs, the more I realize I don't condone Perez Hilton's blog style.
It's not just his taste (he has little in regard to how he covers celebrities). Sometimes his low blows really say something valid about the people he's covering. Sometimes they just seem mean, or like he doesn't know quite how else to criticize someone.
What's pushed me over the edge, though, is his level of journalism. I'm a big fan of attributing sources, and while he does that, he doesn't make it blatant enough that the content of much of his entries is pulled directly from the original news coverage of a given subject.
So it was something as simple as a little pair of quotation marks that's brought on the ban.
A girl's gotta have principles.
Well, I wouldn't have guessed it, but it seems I'm quickly getting back to my old self again.
I'm on the verge of starting my new job as a print designer for a tab-sized paper; I'm just about to shrug off a work environment I haven't loved; I'm finally getting over a wicked cold that cropped up in the middle of all this work news.
Now, it might be that the cold has messed with my head a little (or all the zinc-laced lozanges I've been sucking on), but just this weekend I looked in the mirror and saw *me* again. And you know those indescribable feelings that accompany you on any given day? The ones that lend to an overall good or bad feeling? Well, it was definitely overall good. Not only that, but I had distinct echoes of life in Roanoke, where -- though the rhythm had gotten a little humdrum -- life was satisfying, and I felt engaged. I even remembered how much mini-adoration I had for my little cat, who has been more of a bother to me than anything lately.
So could it really have been that simple? Could my job really have affected my happiness *so* much? The thought boggles my mind a little. And I'm not sure I'm willing to believe it until I've felt like myself again for weeks, even months, on end.
I will, though, hold out hope that it's the case, and that when I really dig into my new job I'll find myself more inspired than I've been in a long time.
That kind of optimism, it's classic Lindsay.
