“Believe with all of your heart that you will do what you were made to do.” -Orison Swett Marden
“The advice I like to give young artists, or really anybody who’ll listen to me, is not to wait around for inspiration. Inspiration is for amateurs; the rest of us just show up and get to work. If you wait around for the clouds to part and a bolt of lightning to strike you in the brain, you are…
I may not have a hubby at my side just yet, but this song will do for now.
Rainer Maria Rilke, “Go to the Limits of Your Longing”
God speaks to each of us as he makes us, then walks with us silently out of the night.
These are words we dimly hear:
You, sent out beyond your recall, go to the limits of your longing.
Embody me. Flare up like flame and make big shadows I can move in.
Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror.
Just keep going. No feeling is final.
Don’t let yourself lose me.
Nearby is the country they call life. You will know it by its seriousnes.
Give me your hand.
(Source: okdunn)
waitress. wanderings.
What to write when I have not dared for months to look closer at my strange creative wanderings? They have been set aside, not for the grandeur things in life, but in an attempt to push things forward, work independently, leave the man to boss someone else around, take the reigns of my life, taste the nectar of of its juicy complexities, wallow in the madness of work and play and work and play and work and play.
I.E. Fuck an office, I’m freelancing and waitressing.
Sometimes, it pours out of me. I’m at the restaurant, taking someone’s order and I can’t help but want to cry. It’s not because I’m an emotional mess but just because, at that exact moment, something strikes me as so amazingly whimsical that the whole world feels like it is lifting me up. I’m in love, but not with a man, with an instant in time. It’s how the older man’s voice at table 24 lilts and wanders around the word meridonale or that in my head all the waiters tap dance while describing the specials or that 7 people in a row have ordered Eggs Benedict and I don’t know why. All I can think is that the universe give us things every day that have a bit of magic in them. So here I am, trying to pour coffee and act normal, when I know something amazing is going on every single day, in front of my eyes.
control
I like to think I’m independent. ”No, let me pay for my dinner.” I can handle it because I am an independent woman who doesn’t need you for anything.
It turns out. I like a man who wines and dines me, as long as I let him.
To Be A Machine
Historical fact: people stopped being human in 1913. That was the year Henry Ford put his cars on rollers and made his workers adopt the speed of the assembly line. At first, workers rebelled. They quit in droves, unable to accustom their bodies to the new pace of the age. Since then, however, the adaptation has been passed down: we’ve all inherited it to some degree, so that we plug right into joysticks and remotes, to repetitive motions of a hundred kinds.
But in 1922 it was still a new thing to be a machine.
-Excerpt from Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides
This and the Staten Island Ferry.
Yesterday I walked to the new corner grocery store to pick up some much needed items. After rounding up the meager amount of food on my grocery list and feeling somewhat disappointed with the food I would be eating later in the day, the older man behind the counter says. “I just made an omlette. Do you want to try?”
First off, what do you mean you JUST made an omlette? Omlettes aren’t like a batch of cookies when someone offers you one fresh out of the oven. They are made to order. I didn’t get it, but I went with it.
Second, who can deny free food, especially free omlette samples at 9am when you haven’t eaten breakfast yet. Definitely not me, and I hope, never you as well.
Then the man yelled from behind the counter if I liked meat. At this point, he was completely hidden behind the counter so I had really no idea what he was up to back there, but I yelled back that I did.
*Question: Do people normally put meat in omlettes? I’ve always been more of a veggie kid, so I was excited/nervous for whatever the hell he was doing back there.
I then heard a few dishes crash (seriously, this happened) and I felt like my life was a sneak peak into a Charlie Chaplin skit. I could totally see this Pakistani man in a Charlie Chaplin costume. All I needed was a dam banana peel and my imagination would be complete in its giddiness.
Finally, after honestly quite a while, the man appeared with an ENTIRE omlette sandwich for me. He told me he hoped I liked spicy food and then winked at me. I’m not a fan of the older man winking at young woman thing, but the man gave me a free sandwich for crying out loud, so I politely smiled and thanked him.
Back at the apartment, I devoured the sandwich with my favorite peach mango juice, and was for at least that moment, pretty dam content with what life has to offer me sometimes.
