kellementology

life according to me

Tag: Creativity

  • Hair Truce at the O.K. Salon

    Hair Truce at the O.K. Salon

     

    I survived the salon. I was described as “glowing” by Marco and Jocelyn — before the big equipment rolled out. It must be those hot flashes I endure nightly. People are beginning to notice. I must be singed around the edges or something. Crispy crunchy. It most certainly can’t be my personality, which isn’t exactly electric. Magnetic? Hmmm… Nevertheless, they were glad to see my money —the MoH’s cash —my plastic that the MoH pays for me again. And that’s the RT in the photo. I just wanted to see your jaw drop onto your keyboard.

    No matter how much I try to get the lovely people at the salon to understand that I don’t care what they do with my hair, they’re fairly conservative. I beg for layers. For dark hair. For sassy. But I get, “Blonde works best for your grey areas because it blends as it grows out.” What they’re most likely worried about is whether I have lawyers ready to slap a suit on them for ruining my hair. Paradise, remember? Like a good client — well, except for that 10-month lapse — I give in to their suggestions every time knowing that they really don’t want me to look like Pepe le Pieu. I tell them, “Short is okay.” But I get layers that only I notice. Conservative ones. They must know how much I’m damaged by having to wear underwear on my head when I was little. They must know how much I like hair that goes where it is supposed to go. And they totally understand that I have to have a pony. They probably figured out a long time ago that I’m fairly high maintenance even though I love to suggest that I’m not. Might I lobby for being discriminating instead?

    It was a relaxing catch up session, and a leisurely perusing of Fast Company magazine — my attention captured by an article on Travis Knight, the man who will inherit Nike, and another about Al Gore’s $100 million makeover. I should have been looking at a magazine with humongous photos, because I didn’t have my glasses. But I’m a great masochist — especially with an audience, so why not act like I can see the page? The fact that my arm was extended as far as it could possibly reach most likely gave away my sham, but the ordeal kept me occupied during waiting time between coloring, and accelerating. Shampooing and massaging. Cutting and blow drying. Ironing and trimming. It was a serious challenge to yank the magazine in each time a stylist dashed by to greet a new client. Or cruised by to check on someone’s foils. And if they hadn’t moved me from the spot where I was braising under the hood, my extended arm most likely would have been the cause of one client hitting the deck. The one who caused the whole salon to freeze.

    For about four seconds.

    Then Marco whispered to me that it was only Mary, a mature client who usually arrives for her appointments loaded on OxyContin. Do drop in, Mary! Unfortunate, actually. The salon used to offer red or white wine in addition to hot herbal tea or mineral water, but can you imagine Mary imbibing? Evidently, there was some concern about clients oozing out of their chairs and on to the floor in mid cut. It was thought that might not be good for business to have clients in Paradise laying on the floor with their drawers showing.

    I can’t imagine why not.

    So what do you think?

    Real New Do Is it better than this?

    Before the Cut

    I hope so.

    And you should feel quite special, because it was a bit damp outside this morning on my walk, and damp and my hair don’t exactly mix. I was a veritable fuzzball by the time I got back home. A poodle. An urchin. I had to fix it up again. Just for you. There.

    I’m thinking Keira can have her gorgeousness. I can muster up some glam myself — sans the battery operated fan, of course. Because it would mess up my hair. Not quite Grace in the Fabulous Fifties, and no, not Shelly in the Esoteric Eighties.

    Glam Four Just me, in the…um… ah…well, now. Oh-tees? Whatever.

    So Tah-Dah. Aren’t you glad that’s over? And just in time for Friday. The sky is completely gorgeous today, a soft breeze is ruffling the trees, and an amazing 76 degrees is helping things along — including the eau de dog whiz wafting through the window.

    I’ll have to find somewhere to swish my hair tonight.

     

     

    Somewhere other than this room and for someone other than PhotoBooth. I’m thining the MoH is elected, lucky dude.
    See what happens when you drop out of society? It’s all down hill from here. But with great hair.

    Kind of like dying with your boots on.

    Okay, perhaps not.

  • If I want it…

    In the movie Field of Dreams, there is a line that goes something like this: If you build it, they will come. I know the character that mulls over these words is thinking about baseball, but I’m thinking those words apply to life in general. And I’ve been known to bend those words a bit to suit my own purposes saying things like: If you spend it, it will come. But I’m trying not to do that as much as I used to considering the MoH is the one paying the bills. And I have no need for the things I used to. But it’s an interesting concept, don’t you think?

    It implies that if you are someone who is willing to think that there will always be more, then there most likely will be. I know what you’re thinking. There are people who have very little and I’m being glib about something quite serious. Yes, I also know there’s fine line between being a spendthrift and being optimistic. Deciding how you’ll walk that line is another interesting concept. The idea, of course, is to live with an eye to possibilities instead of constantly grousing about what you don’t have.

    So apply this esoteric thinking drivel to my work today. Call it priming my creative pump. Call it learning to love Photoshop. Call it educational: enjoyable, thoughtful, interesting. Time-consuming.

    Call it……Avoidance. Head Soak

    Aren’t most of the tasks we engage in to avoid other, less mesmerizing responsibilities, fun? I truly remember rejoicing in my dust ball collecting when I was writing my Master’s Thesis. Or picking lint off of the carpet while being less than diligent about studying for final exams in college. Grabbing the feather duster to flick away that hard to reach cobweb, or streak of barely discernible dust on the bookshelf. This is no different.

    But it’s worse.

    Purple Glow Header

    I have no real deadline for getting anything done. I’m at my own mercy. I’m armed and dangerous with a real attitude on life about having a frame of mind on possibilities. About knowing that if I think positively about something I want badly, something that matters to me deeply….it happens. It does. Am I charmed? Most likely not. These things don’t fall from the sky.

    What are they? These things, these possibilities? If I peer carefully enough, will I see them now? Are they right in front of me, and I haven’t noticed? What is it I really want?

    Monster keeps bothering me with their less than interesting crumbs. The idea of putting a suit on makes me itchy. Leave the house every single day? It would most likely only take a few days to get used to it again. But giving in to something like that is most likely the real avoidance. Taking a job will keep me from having to pinpoint those possibilities now that I can.

    Now that I have no reason not to.

    But I’d rather play with my Mac. I can’t take credit for the Pig-Big, though. The RT did that. I’ll bet you didn’t know the RT was a farm kid, did you? I told you The Big didn’t really look like a dog.

    I’m thinking a line of greeting cards… See how quickly I can change the subject? Oh, and don’t forget. I cook, too. That’s why I should have a spot in one of these photos for my not-so-sleek self. But you should see my creme brulee….Ooooooo you have no idea how good it was.

    Okay, how about a little cafe of my own?  With pig greeting cards.  And dogs allowed.  You can tell I don’t want a job, right?

    Pig Big Big-Pig

  • Where in Hell did the day go this time?

    Do you know what’s worse than being a dedicated blogger, don’t you? Being a dedicated cook. A cook with a cooking blog. And what could possibly top that? Having said blogs and having your husband at home for a week. It isn’t that he’s here that causes the problem — it’s the hopping and moving and shaking. You know. Going places and doing things. So blogging in general causes the first round of why the hell my house looks the way it does, and the MoH being on vacation mode (a much deserved one btw) really sends the ol’ hacienda over the edge. Over the edge and into the dump. The good thing about all of this? We’ve done every thing there is to do, so now the RT and I can grow roots for the rest of the summer. Trick.

    So what did I do today with resolve to shower first thing, read the paper to stay abreast of cutting edge news find something blogworthy, exercise, and get some much needed house projects done — which really means make a bigger mess than already exists. What did I do? I’ve been checking out other’s blogs. For TWO HOURS. There is simply not enough time in the day to do what I want to do. I find that to be a problem. I could use an additional six hours to take care of my responsibilities. The list grows as I write:

    1. Revamp my Phoodplan. Let’s face it, I was doomed to failure from the start. But there’s more to it. Does it make sense that for eight weeks I was excellent. On the job — well, okay, four. Four serious weeks, with four more of a dwindling, oozing kind of problem. But still. My VBF did come around again, we did start walking at the crack of freaking dawn again, and after getting within spitting distance (if you’re a weak spitter) of the magical 10 lubs lost mark, I popped up four lubs. So being the human I am, I flipped the flying bird to the Thinner bitch in my bathroom IMG_0963and stopped measuring and writing, and doing everything related to the Phoodplan except walk — a few miles a day at least five days a week. And guess what? I stayed the same. How can that be? So today (after diligently eating branflakes with 1% and blueberries……and later two pieces of raisin cinnamon toast……with butter &@#$***&$@%%%%%…..)I’m going to revise what I said I’d do. And hell no, I’ll not lose 50 lubs by September. But that shouldn’t be the goal. More later. sounds noble, doesn’t it?
    2. Clean my refrigerator. You should see it. Really. We’re at the “shoving it in and slamming the door before everything else falls out” code mold stage of non-Martha-ness with our refrigerator. My middle son dropped by the other day, opened the fridge to get some milk and after lining up a few cartons on the counter asked, “So what kind of a problem are you guys having with milk?” with a smirk on his face. I let him know that it’s not a problem, but simple: whole milk for the ice cream recipe, 1% for my cereal, half ‘n’ half for the MoH’s tea, whipping cream for the creme brulee recipe, 2% for the RT and his addiction to chocolate milk, buttermilk for the sorbet recipe, and heavy cream for the chocolate cake recipe. Okay, so maybe it’s a problem.
    3. Cook and post recipes from less fat laden sources. Not nearly as fun, and often not as tasty — but not always. My body and my refrigerator would be forever thankful. But the dairy council of American will most likely send a hit squad out to get me. Or I’ll have mad cows on my doorstep mooing in protest. On second thought, that may be more conducive to sleep than the army of lawnmowers and hedge cutters outside first thing this morning.
    4. Get a job. Ugh. I don’t want a job. GardenerI’d like to earn some money occasionally, though. Dog WalkerOr even routinely. That might be nice. I do remember it was swell to have a dollar in my wallet once in a while. Bear in mind I didn’t say I didn’t want to work. CookThere’s a big difference between having a job and working. Tutoring I should clarify by saying that I’d like to earn money in a less than typical eight-to-five way. Writers-publish dot comI’m not going to mention too loudly the earn money from home thing, because I could write for an entire week about that racket and its related gimmicks, purple kool-aid drinkers, and downright scum-sucking scammers. I’ll save that story for another day, also. I’ll call it, “How Not to Be the Poster Child for the Work At Home Scam Sucker Born Last Minute.”
    5. Try to get straight all the summer reality TV shows we’re watching. Really. I need a tote board or something. The person who used to scoff at others for wasting their time with such drivel. Me. Sanctimonious moi. “The Next Food Network Star,” “Top Chef,” “Hell’s Kitchen,” and “So You Think You Can Dance” all compete for our time. Thank goodness for our DVR. Otherwise, we’d have to watch….uh…..I dunno? Maybe we could each vanish into separate rooms in the house doing our own thing instead of being together in the family room familying like the good family we are. I haven’t written about any of these shows like I have in the past with American Noodle, but that isn’t because I haven’t wanted to. So much to say, so little time….But I will take the time to say this: I found someone who Giada drives as crazy as me. You know. That woman with the teeth and the cleevage who acts like she can cook. Giada De-Lah-Cookless Check out Jerry’s well executed tirade at Cooking By the Seat of My Pants. I think he’s my hero.
    6. Keep making progress on my pile o’ books. I’m experimenting with sidebar widgets because I less than love writing book reviews. Especially when I haven’t loved the book. It’s like kicking a dead horse. Well, maybe not all the time. But I’ve got to have some credibility, right? Let you know where I am with that pile. What’s shining, and what’s to be avoided — just in case you’re inclined to dash to the bookstore to ready a Pulitzer winner that’s five years old instead of the newest. Right? I just finished this The Reader at Random House and this, and am getting ready to read this The History of Love at Authors on the Web. I just bought it. I know. I said I wouldn’t spend money for books. But I couldn’t resist. It’s a problem. Read, Spot, read. See Spot go.
    7. Catch up and keep up with my food blog posts. They take freaking forever to write. And Typepad loads the photos soooooooo slowly. I have gazillions of photos of food I’ve made and only a fraction of them posted. It’s grueling. Salads, desserts, main dishes, breakfast food. *sigh* I believe I did find in my food blog surfing yesterday, a cool new flickr toy that will make it all so much easier — and eye appealing. I’ll get back to you on that one.
    8. Say thanks to a few people on the internet who have recognized me….
    • Mel at Freak Parade who I miss quite a bit, who has decided that I’m a Rockin’ Blogger. Woot! Rockin’ Blogger I wondered what that rumbling was all about. Does it help burn calories? Mel is an outstanding human whom I enjoy tremendously. Her blog makes me laugh, stirs me to frustrated anger, and makes me cry.
    • Ev, the ever busy and ubiquitous personality behind My Life is Murphy’s Law, has deemed me worthy of an Imaginif award. It was started by Megan at Imaginif, a site dedicated to keeping children safe in all ways. I know my 15 year-old is safe. He’s a house potato like me. Yep, I know what he looks at on line, too. That’s my job! Imaginif Award
    • Steve at Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Blogosphere, 100 Bloggers, and Joyful Jubilant Learning — quite the involved and industrious group of individuals — wrote a great post recognizing my writing which always makes me puffier than I already am from all that food loving I engage in. He found me on the Technorati Billy Collins trail which I have to check out, being the Billy fan that I am. What an interesting way to be found on the Internet. Kind of like a needle in a haystack. But he found me!

    Thanks for the kudos! And apologies that it’s belated. It’s heartfelt just the same. I will begin my thinking on when and how to pass the recognition along….

  • Headaches and Old Photographs

    The RT hasn’t been feeling great lately. I guess “sick” would be an accurate descriptor, and yet he’s trooped through what we’ve had going on. I think this is only the third time he’s ever been ill. Amazing, actually. He had that head-achy, eyeballs hurting when you look one way and then the other kind of sluggish don’t really care about much malaise.

    I have it now.

    What is it about being sick in the summer that makes it seems so much worse than just generally feeling like crap? It must be the warmth, and all that happy sunshine. You can’t exactly cozy up in a comforter, or languish in bed all day. It’s too warm.  So I’ve been up, but not as early as I would have liked since I could feel the drum pounding in my skull at what must have been two or three o’clock this morning with the idea of a cup of hot tea wafting through my delirium.

    The decadent chocolate fudge cake with cream and strawberries left over from the RT’s birthday get together yesterday perked me up a bit while I was reading the paper, but the idea of eating the rest of it just to keep myself perked up didn’t seem too logical. So here I am with you guys. I employed a new technique to claim my seat at the computer this morning by sitting in the chair in the corner of the office, casually looking at the Adobe Photoshop and Photoshop Elements for Teens book I got the RT for his birthday. You do know that book is really for me, right? Sitting in the room while the RT was surfing only lasted about 10 minutes, and then he moseyed into another room, leaving me to think. Scary when my head feels like it’s filling up with something more dense than my brain today.  All those thoughts crashing into each other, making me wince each time I move my head.

    Montage It is a good day to think about all the family photographs my mother has been bringing to our house over the past several weeks with nudgings of, “Go through these when you get a chance and keep the ones you want. Then you can ship the rest to me in Virginia after I’m there.” There are so many of them. So many years, so many people whom I’m related to in some way or another, and so many memories that aren’t always pleasant.

    I’ve wandered past the growing stack of boxes taking the time to move some of them to the landing on the stairs where they wouldn’t be such a reminder of something I need to do that I’m not always especially fond of doing. Even the good memories are tinged with a bit of sadness now that so much time that has passed. So many changes have occurred in a face, or in one’s smile — eyes that had a different kind of wistfulness than they do today. It’s hard for me to look and to not notice. To sort and choose. And to ache a bit for what used to be, or could have been.

    So I’m going to treat my heavy head to Inventing the Truth: The Art and Craft of Memoir edited by William Zinsser whose books on writing have been favorites of mine over the years. Books like On Writing Well, and Writing to Learn. No, this book isn’t one of those on my stack. It doesn’t count because it isn’t fiction, and I don’t read nonfiction the same way. I scan the titles, notice the contributing authors — Anne Dillard, Frank McCourt — and skim until I settle on something that catches my eye.

    Reading what others have to say about memoir will take up time. Call it avoiding setting about the task myself. You can imagine that if it’s challenging for me to look at years of pictures, that writing about what’s behind some of those pictures will be something I have to force myself to do.

    With respect to memoir, Zinsser writes:

    A good memoir requires two elements — one of art, the other of craft. The first element is integrity of intention. Memoir is the best search mechanism that writers are given. Memoir is how we try to make sense of who we are, who we once were, and what values and heritage shaped us. If a writer seriously embarks on that quest, readers will be nourished by the journey, bringing along many associations with quests of their own.

    Who we are, indeed.  Inventing the Truth

    In my time deciding how to go about starting, or at least think about starting, I’m sure I’ll return to Phillip Lopate’s The Art of the Personal Essay: An Anthology from the Classical Era to the Present. James Baldwin’s “Alas, Poor Richard” begins this way:

    Unless a writer is extremely old when he dies, in which case he has probably become a neglected institution, his death must always seem untimely. This is because a real writer is always shifting and changing and searching. The world has many labels for him, of which the most treacherous is the label of Success. But the man behind the label knows defeat far more intimately than he knows triumph. He can never be absolutely certain that he has achieved his intention.

    So what would my actual intention be to write down all that I’ve kept in my head for so long? To purge myself of it? I wouldn’t want that, because it has become part of me, and not holding onto it would be similar to cutting a hole in the center of me. So then might it be so others can understand? If so, what might they understand? That you can choose to either dwell on what happens to you in life and let it mark you, or acknowledge that it’s now a part of who you are, and turn it into something you can leap from inventing yourself.

    That would be a good place to begin.

    I like the jaunty tone of Wendy Lesser, though in “Overture,” the first of her pieces in The Amateur: An Independent Life of Letters. She writes in a pointed, but less pedantic way of the choices we make in life, and who we are as a result of them:

    The autobiographical mode implies the justification of a life, but that is rather hard to do when one is still in the midst of living it. Also, it is not clear exactly what in the life could justify it. The plan you conceived and executed? A laughable chimera, believable only when you are nineteen years old and deciding on a college major. The choices you made? But if they turned out well, you don’t necessarily deserve the credit, and if you try to take it, you will merely sound foolish or smut. Do you, in any case, make the important choices, or are they thrust on you?

    Thrust? A more gentle word than I may use for some of what I am compelled to write.

    Subjected to? Withstood.

    Never resigned.

    I need to go lay my fat head down before I topple out of this chair. My eyeballs ache. But if I stare straight ahead at my books, quietly reading, it’s not so bad. And then I can read and think about writing, instead of writing.

    Instead of sorting through those photos.

  • Genetically Meandering and Goal-Free, or Something

    Funny how a subtle change in a suffix or hyphenation can significantly change the connotation of something. As in goal-less or goal-free. One clearly implies not only lack — but a negative one at that, and the other, a sort of liberating, non-shackled state of being. Sort of the difference between:

    • the sad sack who hits the alarm button in the morning with a mental list of, “get up, take a shower, feed the animals, take the car in, pay the bills, defrost the Thanksgiving leftovers for dinner, label my linen closet…” and

    • the ebullient chap who bounds out of bed each day exclaiming, “Yes! The whole day is ahead of me and I can’t wait to find out what amazing things will come my way!”

    Okay, well, maybe the contrast is a bit strong, but I came across this site not too long ago, and am probably one of the few who didn’t learn about it on Oprah, because I sort of forget to actually watch Oprah. Yes, I’m home. No, I just don’t think about it. The television doesn’t usually go on until about 7 or 7:30 so we can trash our brains family style watching things like Jeopardy, So You Think You Can Dance, Hell’s Kitchen, and — well, you get the idea. We are sort of in the “goal-free” category of television viewers. We “meander with purpose” to borrow Stephen Shapiro’s phrase.

    My mom often tells me she hasn’t had a goal in her life. This admission often comes after we’ve been discussing “stuff.” The stuff can be any number of “things.”

    Things like life.

    Not so small a thing, or even closely related to stuff. But if I listen carefully, the goal issue usually connects to the idea of planning on, organizing for, going through, and/or getting a career. Not a job or work. A career. Why other things don’t seem to be considered that took her determination and perseverance is beyond me.

    IMG_0892 I’ve noticed that people have a tendency to lord it over those who haven’t jumped through life’s hoops. Like there are a set of rules somewhere that we have to follow so that we can be recognized at the end of The Road. Kind of like a graduation. You get there, someone reads your name, and then there’s a list of what you’ve “done” with your life. Career seems to be at the top of the list. Especially a career that is connected to education. A formal education. One that was obtained at an easily recognized and even prestigious institution.

    But what if you haven’t done those things? What happens if you have a completely different set of rules that you live your life by? What if your life is goal-free instead of goal-less? More importantly, what if your goals have always been things like:

    • keep your children clean, fed, and well clothed;

    • be relentlessly productive because it is an end in itself;

    • teach your children to be practical;

    • make sure your children do their homework, and clean their rooms;

    • be extremely organized and tidy;

    • make sure your children understand that manners are important, and that they are a reflection of the entire family while in public;

    • focus on functionality;

    • teach your children how to cook, sew, garden, and take care of the house;

    • take time to grow, appreciate, and smell flowers;

    • pay your children an allowance even though you shouldn’t afford it, and teach them how to save that allowance;

    • buy musical instruments and pay for lessons when you know you can’t afford it;

    • tolerate inane jobs to earn a paycheck to feed your children;

    • make sure your children understand that nothing in life is free, so working very hard is how you get ahead;

    • have a day job and a night job;

    • make sure your children understand that education is important;

    • try different jobs when you no longer have to worry about feeding your children;

    • keep reaching because you know there’s something out there for you, just waiting, if you could only see it more clearly, and so many other things didn’t get in the way, distracting you, making you wonder if you should be afraid of reaching.

     

    Yes, what if your life has been filled with those kinds of things?

    Are you goal-less, or goal-free? The whole concept fascinates me because it is easy to line up a few people we can all identify as being successful without too much analysis. We default to the “who’s productive and wealthy” criteria that is so often the crux of  our society. But then, after assembling these iconic individuals, we have to examine whether they’ve all jumped through those hoops I mentioned earlier. Often, they have not. What we learn is they had their own set of hoops, and that the hoops were of varying sizes, movable, and sometimes intentionally avoided, or dismissed as being a waste of time.

    Hoop-less, or hoop-free? Maybe you think it’s all just Hoop-lah.

    What do you want to do? What matters to you? What is important? What will sustain you — and not just your bank account? Because I think that’s the key. If this whole business of making lists and setting goals is never going to be more than crossing off the things on your list, or checking off those boxes, then all you’ll end up with is a list of things you crossed off. Or maybe not.

    What if that list says things like:

    Travel around the world?

    • You have to want to do this, of course…

    • You have to at least think about how to begin or where to begin

    • You will need to consider how much or little to take with you

    Read untranslated works of Gabriel Garcia Marquez?

    • You might want to consider learning Spanish…and practicing a lot

    Be famous?

    • This is relative considering the guy who just got caught for spamming up our emails. Okay, so infamous. But still…

    • You can’t just sit and wait around for it to happen.

    • You have to at least learn what spam is and how to make everyone else miserable with it.

    • Or lose a lot of weight eating Subway Sandwiches instead of home-baked chocolate cookies with macadamia nuts.

    Winged Victory

    People who want to do things just do them. That’s why Nike tells us to “Just Do It.” What they really mean is, “Shut the funk up and get off your arse. Go brush your teeth and quit stinking up the air space with your monotonous jabbering about what you’re going to do or want to do or wish you could do if only you could do it.” Nike knows us. Well, they really just want us to pay a fortune for their products made for a fraction of a penny on the dollar in third world countries, but that’s another topic. So their marketers know us. Or get paid to act like they do. A lot.

    The problem is, when your head feels like it’s going to pop off every minute of every day because you’re just trying to make ends meet (whatever ends are pertinent to an individual’s life) heading in a semi-focused direction beyond survival can feel a tad bit overwhelming. Making that list may seem easier than doing something unfamiliar. Articulating those goals make seem like organizing for action. Being industrious and productive can look great on the surface because you’re “getting things done,” but that just takes up time. The rest of it is horribly messy and doesn’t really fit in any kind of a list, so you never really have to do it. Right?

    And when you run out of time at the end of the day, you can get into bed and dream about what you’d really like to do, if only you had the chance.

    I am a meanderer. I waver toward whatever I am interested in. Detour here, wrong turn there. Learning and taking notes along the way, but rarely with the journey being described as the shortest distance between two points. The plan would be to get there in the shortest amount of time, but there are just too many shiny things I have to wonder about and understand along the way.

    So probably more goal-free than goal-less. But always purposeful.

    Unflaggingly. Thanks for the genes, Mom.

  • If I Dream It, They Will Come: Bird by Bird

    The whole spider dream thing has been on my mind since early yesterday when it woke me up. I hear others talking about their dreams, and it’s always interesting to wonder why we dream about what we dream. I almost always remember my dreams, so it seems like second nature thinking about them. Although they can often be quite strange, I don’t have memories of issues dreaming about bugs or snakes, or creepy creatures. So it was a completely perfect distraction for me to investigate yesterday while I was reading through the Word Press codex on headers to also have alongside a variety of windows open to learn about what others think about dreams featuring spiders + babies + moms. Who knew!

    Well Dave did, because he chimed in before I could finish my research, let alone draw my conclusions. Now, I’ve suspected for a while that Dave is a seriously deep thinker, but a soothsayer? Whoa. How cool is that?

    To begin with, this source slotted spiders in the bug category, which is a problem to begin with. Cockroaches are bugs. Spiders are spiders. It’s that whole six legs versus eight legs thing. Anyway, the source indicated that seeing a spider in my dream was a toss up between:

    feeling like an outsider in some situation, or that [I] may want to keep [my] distance and stay away from an alluring and tempting situation.

    Okay. I confess. I do often feel like an outsider of sorts when I visit blogs that have a gazillion devoted followers who gush over them daily. I feel like an outsider when I add my pithy comment to the preceding string of 247, like, they’re gonna read mine? Not.

    As far as allure and temptation are concerned, I’ve succumbed. I ate three of the chocolate cookies left over from the ice cream sandwiches I made a couple of days ago — after I ate one of the ice cream sandwiches. What can I say? It was phoodplan weigh-in day, and I didn’t like my numbers. So I treated myself to my baked goods. Yum.

    Back to the dream analysis…

    The spider is also symbolic of feminine power. Alternatively, a spider may refer to a powerful force protecting you against your self-destructive behavior.

    Feminine power and chocolate are somewhat synonymous, aren’t they? And I guess the spider was supposed to be a warning to step away from the cookies, but because I hadn’t read the helpful information yet, I was stuffing cookies in my mouth while I was reading and clicking. They washed down quite well with the ice cold glass of whole milk I poured to accompany them. I need calcium, you know.

    But I’m not being exactly forthright about the information I found on dreams about spiders. My dream specifically contained a tarantula. Not a skinny, bald spider; a large, hairy, black tarantula. Of course, one site tells me that dreaming about spiders means that fortune will come — except if the spider is a tarantula. What are the odds? There have got to be thousands of varieties of spiders and I have to dream about a tarantula. Specifically, this site claims:

    To dream of a spider, denotes you being careful and energetic in your labors and fortune will be amassed to pleasing proportions. Domestic happiness.

    Conversely:

    To dream you see a tarantula, denotes disagreeable prospect for health or for pleasure.

    Fine. I’ll just have to walk even farther tomorrow to rid myself of those choco-cookie bombs. It will be a disagreeable prospect to trudge with my VBF knowing that I’m defeating myself by snorting sugar during the day instead of nibbling on celery and plain lettuce. Or crunching on ice cubes. Or macking down carb-free rice cakes.

    But there’s hope because there was also a baby in the dream. You know, the one I passed to my mother while I was in bed?

    To see a baby in your dream signifies innocence, warmth and new beginnings. Babies may symbolize something in your own inner nature which is pure, vulnerable, and/or uncorrupted. Babies may represent an aspect of yourself that is vulnerable and helpless…

    Yes! Uncorrupted new beginnings! Tomorrow is another day that I can begin to avoid — or, just flat out avoid shoving unnecessary calories into my face as if tomorrow, all the world’s food might evaporate.

    And mothers in dreams? That’s a bit strange to weave into this mix — at least from the sites I was distracted by. The idea of mothers being nurturing, offering comfort and guidance seems pretty basic to me.

    So in attempt to put it all together — because I have nothing but extremely long stretches of time to waste create with daily — I kept looking until I found this:

    Spider teaches you to maintain a balance — between past and future, physical and spiritual, male and female. Spider teaches you that everything you now do is weaving what you will encounter in the future.

    The spider awakens creative sensibilities. It weaves a web of intricate and subtle fabric, as if to remind us that the past always subtly influences the present and future. The spider found within the web reminds us that we are the center of our own world. Spider reminds us that we are the keepers and writers of our destiny, weaving it like a web by our thoughts, feelings and actions.

    Spider is the guardian of the ancient languages and alphabets. Many believe that the alphabet was formed by the geometric patterns and angles found withing the spider’s web. To many this was the first true alphabet. This is why spider is considered the teacher of language and the magic of writing.

    No, there wasn’t a web in the dream, but I can make some sense of all of this now, without joking about cookies.

    My mom’s appearance in my dream supposedly represents my wish for reassurance about the way my life is going. Even though I am content to “not work,” there is sure to be work on the horizon — because I want there to be. I’m a worker. Or, better said, I create. The issue is to grapple with the temptation to be very practical about finding “work” instead of finding time being willing to devote the same amount of time to create. And people who see themselves as workers or “do-ers” can struggle with the idea of taking time to create, which isn’t often seen as being productive. So I guess, with respect to my dream, I have to keep listening to “my mother,” and not make hasty decisions about what my “work” will be. I will get there.

    The baby represents something that is new. An opportunity, a beginning, a new mood of optimism. So the idea that I’m handing the baby to my “mom” is significant because it means I have to really nurture that seed of a what if that I’m growing, instead of worrying about it. The motherly reassurance will help it grow.

    And the tarantula? Not sure about that one because most sources I checked stated:

    To see a tarantula in your dream, signifies enemies are about to overwhelm you will loss.

    I don’t even know who my enemies are. That’s a pretty strong word for my world. Don’t you have to be in a particular frame of mind to even consider what an enemy is, let alone whom?

    Ohhhhhhhh……I get it. My “enemies” are those doubting voices. The ones Anne Lamott writes about in Bird by Bird. The voices that play on KFKD who tell you that you suck, and that you’re a loser, and that you can’t do anything right. The ones that play incessantly no matter how hard you work, but that you just have to turn the volume down on so that you can hear what matters. Because you have to hear the stuff that matters.
    The stuff that is the seeds of possibilities that need to be attended to, and nurtured to grow.

    If you build it, they will come. Right? I really, truly believe it with all my heart and soul whether they’re wearing baseball suits or not.

    Do you?