Tag: food

I’ve Been Outed

My deepest, darkest shortcomings have been outed yet again by someone sharper and more insightful than me.

To be fair, I did submit one short story to a competition in the past year.

It did bupkis in the contest but the editor/readers did say good things about my submission. It did encourage me to submit to other contests.

That’s something, I guess.

“I have a young friend who dreams of becoming a novelist, but he never seems to be able to complete his work.

According to him, his job keeps him too busy, and he can never find enough time to write novels, and that’s why he can’t complete work and enter it for writing awards.

But is that the real reason? No! It’s actually that he wants to leave the possibility of “I can do it if I try” open, by not committing to anything.

He doesn’t want to expose his work to criticism, and he certainly doesn’t want to face the reality that he might produce an inferior piece of writing and face rejection.

He wants to live inside that realm of possibilities, where he can say that he could do it if he only had the time, or that he could write if he just had the proper environment, and that he really does have the talent for it.

In another five or ten years, he will probably start using another excuse like “I’m not young anymore” or “I’ve got a family to think about now.”

He should just enter his writing for an award, and if he gets rejected, so be it.

If he did, he might grow, or discover that he should pursue something different.

Either way, he would be able to move on.

That is what changing your current lifestyle is about.

He won’t get anywhere by not submitting anything.”

Ichiro Kishimi

(Book: The Courage to Be Disliked [ad] https://amzn.to/4aAyXmO)

Work Party

After today, I can say emphatically what a work party isn’t.

No cake, no candles and definitely no balloons.

Slog work. But fun and useful and productive slog work.

Guest bedrooms are dressed and settled. Mostly.

Paintings were hung. Cabinets were arrayed with my husbands’ blue china and other pretty things. His hand-woven Iranian carpets were laid down in various rooms.

The oak display cabinet was filled with my husband’s airplanes. I won’t call them models (though that is what they are) as I don’t want to suggest they are child’s toys.

They are models of the planes he flew as a pilot, both in the military and as a commercial airline pilot. They mean a lot to him. He doesn’t fly any more these days.

Today was a day of consolidation and integration. Me and my work party made strides in pulling together the collective remnants of two lives lived separately until only recently.

These strides are both a physical and emotional milestone for me.

It has been hard for me to make a “home” and make it stick. I moved around a lot when I was younger under the delusion that by changing spaces I could ditch my demons.

It took a long time to learn that didn’t work so well. I have owned houses and heaven knows, I tried to turn them into HOMES. But it has always been difficult for me to land and stick.

Not an abnormal reaction given a perpetually unstable childhood. So the quiet satisfaction of putting a house together that aligns with my vision is unfamiliar. Pleasant but unfamiliar.

So with the willing hands of two ladies from my church and the equally willing effort of two good friends we tackled a chores list that was a page and a half long. We got through almost all of it.

Things I’d hoped would happen – like my husband’s planes proudly on display – were accomplished. Gratifying.

I see how much my decorating taste has been influenced by my Asian travels. And by long days sitting in leather and oak soaked libraries surrounded by books. And Masterpiece Theatre on PBS.

Alistair Cooke would be perfectly comfortable and at home in my current living room.

Friends visit from the frigid North next week. I’m almost ready. I look forward to their company.

I am equally enjoying getting ready for their visit.

I am finally pulling my living environment together. It has taken awhile for me to settle in to the process of home-making.

It has more creative elements to it than I had imagined. Can we talk about the process of choosing wall colors? I went navy blue on one room. I middling mango in the other.

If I could only convey to you completely how risque and out of character these bold color choices were for me. And how well they work!

I didn’t really appreciate the whole house decorating process much before now. Certainly not as much as I do now. I was more of a dabbling dilettante. But I’m changing.

I’m just learning to appreciate a lot of things that were either foreign to me or out of reach when I was younger.

I may even doing some baking in anticipation of their visit. Nothing says loving like something from the oven, I’ve heard.

Holding a successful work party with friends and fellows was not something I expected.

And I certainly didn’t expect to enjoy it quite so much.

Keep living, keep learning.