Thursday, September 22, 2011

Bleeding purple ink

Once upon a time, in a land far, far away, there lived an enchanted girl who liked to talk to herself on paper.  She spent hours, days, months, and years chronicling the angst-filled dramas of her adolescence.  

With a candy cane shaped pen that wrote in red, peppermint-scented ink, she filled page after page of a pink, hard bound journal.  She most certainly wrote about crushes and divulged her innermost secrets on those pages, but the distance in space and time between then and now has made her memory of what secrets those pages wore... fuzzy.

Of course, the peppermint-scented red ink ran out, and the pages of the pink journal soon filled up.  So, on she went to another journal, this one bound in blue floral fabric.  

She was no longer discerning as to the color of ink that she wrote in as she continued to puzzle out the questions of her existence within the journal's blank lined pages.  She continued to chronicle her awkward adolescence as if her words would someday matter to her --

And then, one day, for reasons that I no longer remember, I stopped.  I took every journal that I'd painstakingly kept for all of those awkward adolescent days, and I got rid of them.  I can't even remember exactly what I did with them.  I might have put them out with the trash, my imaginative young mind romanticizing the idea of those writings being buried in the local landfill for centuries, only to be uncovered by some future archaeologist and studied.

In truth, I probably burned them in sheer embarrassment at my naivety, both in life and in writing skills.

After I gave up my teenaged journals to the fire gods and/or the local landfill, I gave up on keeping a journal for a long time.  I pseudo-journaled, keeping random notebooks full of thoughts, poetry, and lists.  And then, one day, towards the end of my failing pseudo-marriage, I turned to keeping a journal again.  It was a little spiral bound thing with blank unlined pages that fit neatly into my purse, and I carried it with me everywhere.

I wrote in my new journal with every color of ink I could find -- my favorite being the sparkly purple inked pen that someone had given me -- and I chronicled the death of my marriage.  There are pages and pages of painful things in that pretty little book.  Pages of pain bled out in cheerful colored ink staining the page.

When the marriage ended, I set that journal aside, and I picked up a new one.  It was a gift from a friend, a hard bound, cutesy thing, colored bright yellow, with pictures of kittens on the front.  That same friend gave me a pink gel ink pen to write in the journal with.  And so, I bled out still more pain in pink gel ink all over its blank lined pages as I rediscovered who I was and where I was going next in life.

These days, my ink color of choice is purple.  Yes, in a pinch I will write with another color, but only if I don't have a purple pen within reach.  I even went so far as to hunt down refill cartridges online and shamelessly buy them in bulk so that I won't ever have to go without purple ink again.

These days, I bleed purple ink onto pages filled with things besides pain and angst.  I have a new journal, where I still divulge my innermost secrets and school girl crushes (no, I'm not sharing those).  But, I also have notebooks full of shiny new ideas for stories that I haven't told yet.  I have notes for characters, plots, and worlds that I haven't visited.

In truth, it wouldn't really matter what color ink I'm bleeding out onto the page, as long as I am still writing.

Writers bleed ink, and my blood is purple.

What color is yours?

Friday, September 16, 2011

Dear potential employer....

Earlier today in a moment of what I thought was rather clever snark, I felt the need to tweet this into cyberspace:
Dear potential employer. Congrats on finding my Twitter feed. Your prize is a zombie unicorn. Call me to claim it and schedule an interview.
Yes, that's me making light of the fact that I do, in fact, have profiles on various social networking sites and I am completely aware of the fact that potential employers now use said profiles to determine whether or not candidates for job openings might be a good fit for their company.  (And yes, I am aware that someone reading this at any given point in time might be doing so for exactly that reason.)

The last time I was in the market for a new job, the social network of choice was MySpace, and I had made an effort to keep everything about my profile there disassociated from my real name.  You see, I knew that people had been fired and also denied jobs because of what could be found on their MySpace page.  Not that anything I had posted on my profile was necessarily bad.  That is to say, there were no pictures of me doing naked keg stands, no politically incorrect statements of opinion, and I wasn't selling porn on my blog.  I wasn't all that worried about what potential employers might find.  (For the record, I joined MySpace before MySpace was cool, so please keep your laughing to a minimum. Not only do I gift out my zombie unicorns, I also train them to attack people who laugh at me for having a MySpace page.) 

Fast forward to present day.

I am once again in the job market.  You can still find my all but abandoned MySpace page.  You can also find me on Facebook, Twitter, Google+, digg, last.fm, StumbleUpon, deviantArt, LiveJournal, Amazon.com, LinkedIn, and now here on Blogger.  I'm sure I am missing a few sites, and that's okay.  I'm not on these sites because I'm looking to impress potential employers (with the exception of LinkedIn, of course).  I'm on these sites because I like to write, I hope to make a living doing so someday, and I like to connect with like-minded people.

And I'm not worried about what potential employers might find on any of these websites for two simple reasons. 

I have a rock solid work ethic AND a great sense of humor.


Ask any of my former co-workers.  They want me back.  They begged me not to go.  My boss wrote me a letter of recommendation suitable for framing.  You probably have it in my application package. 

Dear potential employer... congratulations on finding my blog. Your prize is a zombie unicorn. Please call me to claim it and schedule an interview, so that we can discuss mutual interests and how your organization would benefit from hiring me.

You won't be sorry!

Technorati ref. # - WNXWP8G4K9QK

Tuesday, September 6, 2011

Better late than never

I like to think that with any luck, I will manage to be late for my own funeral.  That's not to say that I'm not a punctual person.  No indeed!  I pride myself for being on time.  If I set a time and say, "I'll be there!", come rain, nor snow, nor dark of... oh, wait.... I'm not a letter carrier.

Anyhoo.

My name is Marie, and I have a procrastination problem.  I doubt very much that a twelve step program can save me anymore, because I'm getting too old and set in my ways.  And so, I've resigned myself to my fate.  I will forever be stressing over deadlines, whether they be outside sources or self-imposed.  My favorite thing to do when I have said deadline looming is to jump on the information highway and surf teh shiny interwebz until my eyes fall out research my chosen topics, but I tend to get distracted. 

Often.

Which in Mynx time, is something like every seven minutes, give or take.

And so, my day goes something like this:

  • Wake up and go directly to the coffee pot.  Do not pass Go.  Do not collect $200.
  • Log into classes.  Peruse discussion boards.  Get bored.
  • Log into Twitter.  Peruse tweets. @reply and retweet the more interesting tweets.  Get bored.
  • Log into Facebook.  Peruse news feed.  Get bored.
  • Return to classes.  Check for discussion posts.  Write down upcoming assignments that are due.  Get bored.
  • Check for blog subscription updates.  Read updated blogs.  Consider posting a new blog.  Get stage fright.
  • Check Twitter.
  • Check Facebook.
  • Read a lecture for class.
  • Lather.  Rinse.  Repeat.

Now, it might sound like I've got ADHD or something similar, and maybe I do.  (Note to self: see doctor as soon as you have medical insurance or when hell freezes over, whichever comes first.) 

Lack of self-discipline?  Oh yes, but it goes deeper than that.

Fear of failure?

DING DING DING DING!

We have a winner!

What would you do if you knew you COULD NOT FAIL? 

Have you ever seriously thought about the answer to that question? 

Well, I have, and for starters I'd buy a winning lottery ticket.  If I knew I could not fail, every lottery ticket that I bought would be a winner, right?  Right!  Immediately upon collecting my winnings, I would start a chain of coffee houses to rival Starbucks in both their commercialism and their price gouging ways.  I would then proceed to travel the world and blog about it, becoming a viral sensation on YouTube overnight.  I would write a best selling novel based on my experiences, star in the blockbuster movie based on my life story, and finally retire to my own private island to live out the rest of my life in peace, doing what I really wanted to do in the first place, which is die happy buried underneath a pile of my favorite books that I have read and re-read until they have literally fallen apart.

*sigh*

A girl can dream, right?

My point being, we all have reasons for procrastinating, but until we really understand the reasons behind why we procrastinate, we are doomed to an ever-repeating cycle of non-productivty and stress.


So, what would you do if you knew you could not fail?


Me, I think I'll finish school, post the occasional blog, and finally get around to writing that book I keep talking about.