cat person

you've probably noticed that i'm a cat person. cats have the sort of personalities that appeal to me. they don't necessarily come when they're called. they can take ages to reveal their names to you. they think for themselves. they never ingratiate themselves. when they relax, they are truly relaxed. they play hard and then they take a nap. and in nyc, there's now a cat café for those who can't have a cat (or two or ten) in their lives. i wish i'd thought of that. it would be fun to run a cat café. hmm...what's stopping me from doing exactly that? i have cats and make a pretty mean dessert to go with a cup of coffee. it could be a calling...

do you think it's too late?

...for me to be a naval architect when i grow up?

vocation or calling?

i had a good bit of craic yesterday with a friend on the topic of finding one's vocation. vocation, that's a big word, isn't it? sure a guy like the pope or someone like mother theresa has a vocation, or a calling, but an everyday person? hmm, i wonder if we modern humans find our vocation these days. or if we don't flit too much from one thing to another with our short attention spans to take the time to find out what our vocation might be. would we even recognize our vocation if we saw it? or are we too busy looking to the next thing to even notice it?

i've had moments of feeling that i found my vocation - but what i think they really may have been were moments of flow.  intense concentration in a library, writing when the hours melt away, the words just come and you look up and can't believe how much time has passed. sewing the seams of a quilt. flurries of productivity on a long-haul flight. giving a presentation where you're suddenly aware that it's going well and you can kind of stand apart from yourself and watch. but does it all add up to a vocation? so far, it hasn't, as i'm still not sure what i want to be when i grow up. i've ruled out a few things (after trying some of them for far too long), but the field is still pretty wide open. i'm trying to learn to place myself in those situations where i will feel that feeling of flow, because a vocation has to be related to that. but i think it's hard to sustain.

have you found your vocation? did you follow it? do you even think it exists outside of the vatican?

really good at...

...having ideas.

...putting diverse groups of people together to make magic happen.

...creating events where people really enjoy themselves.

...inspiring people to do great work.

...putting photos with text to underline hidden (and not so hidden) meaning.

...putting disparate ideas together to form a new idea.

...bringing people together in unexpected ways.

...inspiring loyalty.

...getting my way.

...being convincing (how many of you have a nikon or apple computer because of my convincingness?).

...creative solutions.

...interior design.

...shopping (not that that's anything to be proud of).

...critical analysis.

...laughing and making people laugh.

so i wonder what this all means i should be when i grow up? any ideas? anyone...anyone...bueller?

the rain is good for something

when i grow up, i want to be one of the gardeners at legoland. that must be a great job.

thank you all for your thoughtful thoughts on my previous post. i've gotten much less angsty about the whole photo editing thing. as a number of you said, photos have been manipulated since they began, it's actually an integral part of the medium. we're just fortunate to live in a time where we can sit at our computers and do it and not have to putter around in a basement darkroom (tho' one of those appeals as well).

spud brought up an interesting point about it being a bit of a cheat to use someone else's Lightroom presets.  i found myself thinking about that quite a lot of the day. then i realized that i use products of other people's creativity all the time - recipe books, sewing patterns - but what i produce with them ends up something uniquely mine. i see the LR presets as no different than that - after all, the photos i apply them to are my own. at the base of it, i'm a pretty pragmatic person and i don't see any reason to reinvent the wheel. so i thank whoever it was who made that oldskool preset i love so much these days  (tho' most of the flowers above are a new one i found called PH bedtime).

and here's to the beginning of a beautiful week....

secret 19 - when i grow up

as kids we all go through phases as to what we say we want to be when we grow up. we try them on and abandon them for different reasons. over the years, i've wanted to be:

: : a paleontologist - abandoned this idea rather early when i decided that all the good dinosaur bones would be discovered by the time i grew up.

: : a lawyer - this is the thing i assumed i would be for years. right up until i didn't get into law school.

: : a riding instructor - i actually carried around application materials for johnson & wales college in rhode island for this. i think i just wanted a really cool trunk for my riding equipment and i never did really apply.

: : governor of the state i grew up in - yup, i could have been the sarah palin of the upper midwest. or not.

: : russian literature professor - got the farthest towards this one. but then life took me in another direction. and i never really liked the teaching that much, what i liked was the writing and the research. and the theory. oh, the theory. still love that.

: : spy - abandoned when i realized that i never really could keep a secret and that if i were to spy it would most likely be for the other side (due to deep and abiding loathing for ronald reagan).

: : writer - i've always thought there was a highly autobiographical novel in me, waiting to come out. it might still. when the conditions are exactly right. it's kinda why we built that whole writing house place in the garden.

: : stewardess - this one never really seems to go away. it stays in the back of my head and although stewardesses are really just waitresses in the sky, i still have some kind of romantic picture of that job in my head (despite how much time i spend on planes).

jobs i've actually done:

: : secretary - a couple of times, once to the vice president of a refrigeration company and once to the head of a foundation.

: : newsroom gopher - at a daily paper during college. spent a lot of time at the courthouse writing down who had gotten all those public intox and public urination tickets on the weekend. i also had to call all the bars and find out what bands were playing where, so i always knew what was going on. that was cool.

: : waitress in my favorite pub - it really was a pub and i was hanging out there so much i decided i might as well get paid for it.

: : eLearning developer - making training materials for a product i knew very little about. ha! funny how that can happen.

: : middle management - responsibility for big budgets and some 200 days a year of travel.

: : journalist - now i'm editing a magazine.

and here we come to the secret...i still don't know what i want to be when i grow up. do you?

forgive me odin...

this picture has nothing to do with anything

i've just been taking my merfish for a walk again

and the paparazzi are always about when i do that.

i really love polly's weekly confessions and have been wanting to do some myself since i first read hers a couple of weeks ago, but all this blog camp excitement kinda blew away any plans for posts that i had. now that it's coming together and settled down to a dull roar (tho' we could still use someone in the US who would/could host a blog camp: US at the same time as our june 19-21 sessions in DK & SA), i feel a list coming on...

forgive me odin, for i have sinned, it's been...well...a lifetime (what with me not being catholic) since my last confession. however, i hereby confess...

~ it's really windy and blustery outside today and as much as i am starting to believe that google is controlling the weather, i sometimes also suspect that i am. because the weather often reflects my mood. and i feel a bit stormy and restless today. so sorry about that, anyone in my meteorological region.

~ i have to do an interview at my former place of work. it was supposed to be today and i was very nearly psyched up/prepared for it when they called and changed it to monday. in a way i am relieved and in a way, it only prolongs the dread of going back in there. because that place wasn't good for me and it's taken a long time to get over it. and i'm actually pretty worried about what just stepping into that stuffy, cold, stiff environment will do to me. and we don't really have any more space for any more structures in our garden, which is my therapy.

~ those little music player thingies that trigger automatically when you visit some blogs drive me up a tree. they interfere with my alanis, man.

~ i have a tendency, despite my new years' non-resolutions, to leave pots on the stove until they become scary and have incubated a new life form that may or may not cause a global pandemic if i then open the lid and release said life form. which is why i don't risk it. and why i'm jealous of extranjera's maid, even if she does break the glassware. wine tastes the same out of juice glasses, i say. and if i had a maid, she could take care of those pots. also the one outside on the outdoor stove. that one's bad.

~ i'm a little envious of extranjera's creative post labels.

~ i totally have stewardess flight attendant envy. i know they're waitresses in the sky, but they're always so perfectly coiffed with beautiful makeup, artfully swept-back hair, pumps of just the right height, perfect nails and great jewelry, probably bought in duty frees around the world. and they travel all the time. i love to travel. and they get to hang out with pilots and pilots are often pretty cute. sigh, why oh why didn't i become a stewardess?  oh well, maybe it's not too late. SAS does stand for Sexy After Sixty, after all.

~ i'm not above threatening to blog about bad service in order to get better service (be watching for a post on this one coming soon, since it didn't really work).

~ i need to stop obsessing about follower numbers. but it's just so much fun. except when someone stops following and they go down. which seems to usually be after i swear too much or tweet about faulty usage of it's/its. dammit.