Stress management quintessence

This Fall I'm a good girl - as I thought I needed  to go get a pass for the MMA room, I went out and got one. It feels great not to have any major limitations to regularly invest time in myself. And it's much safer too: I only broke a chair back, a towel hanger, a ceramic cow's ear, a couple of baby spoons, a white-out plastic case and probably a couple more negligible items in the past 2 months...

Cooking and listening to Mein Teil. My world is almost in harmony =)

Heute bin Ich gefullte Paprikaschoten.

Midway upon the journey of our life (c)

That is, just this year, I finally gave myself the liberty of believing that certain things are not meant to work well for me, and other things are just not worth to rely on.

Fall is usually time things get better and more adventures happen, and more new people show up in my life. If neither of the latter happens this Fall, at least I will have my karma life, cleaned up, neatly arranged and having more space for more of MY things to fill it with later. Starting with finally putting stuff in storage to its proper use:

And at the same time slowly taking off my black belt in Dead Horse Flogging: one of the coming days I will stop insisting on sustaining relationships with those who do not show reciprocal interest. It is amazing that it is now that this article came along:
http://www.cracked.com/blog/5-ways-youre-sabotaging-your-own-life-without-knowing-it/

Right things showing up at the right time, indeed. Each day of the past few weeks I've been realizing something new about how endlessly lucky I am; I do have an endless amount of various resources that can help me go anywhere I want. Help one way of another.

Apart from that, on the bright side:

Someone who shows up at Thai boxing class

still sick and right before a networking event and a dinner date to follow - is not a very smart person.

That's also me.

****
It's amazing, how the only thing that does not kill me all over my body right now - is carrying and cuddling with Art. Must be one of those amazing things about female bodies that activities with babies do not cause muscle ache :)

When in the gloom of a massage room,

in response to your assumption that the knots in your legs are caused by carrying around a growing baby for the past 12 month, your masseuse says almost under breath:

-It's good that you have kids... I have no one to come home to...

You literally feel that no relaxation effect and no hot stones at that moment could keep you from jumping off the table and speeding off to your car. As is.

When I'm done with this exam...

I'll get a bucket of cobb salad, a box of sushi  and a bottle of wine and will drown myself in bath for half a day with all this and Semenova's Valkyrie.

2 am

and we're sitting outside on the patio.

After a musical with friends, followed by a relaxing walk in the downtown, peaking in at somebody's movie and game night out near 16th St. and having impromptu drinks and appetizers somewhere on Larimer sq.

And now we're outside on the patio, with armagnac, wine, cigar and only missing the telescope - by now we're feeling to lazy to carry it outside.
Listening to the 7th Symphony by Shostakovich on my phone, talking about our plans for future, and realizing that we will never get old.

Tough summer.

The  more I push back the more challenges life throws at me, the louder I yell "No pasaran!" in return - the less time I have.
Maybe all I need to do is really to just let it all go for a while?

On the bright side, I prioritized 2 part-time locations for... when the life begins. Now that I am sure of what I want, let's see what'll become of it.

The biggest challenge right now (and ever) is sustaining self-discipline. All I want to do now is to grab the marshmallow and run, accept one of those Account Manager positions and forget this year-long leap of faith ever happened. Thank God I'm stubborn.

Funny enough, dreamt of one of my old friends last night. An acquaintant of mine and I were travelling to Suisse and at one point I left her mountain skiing at night (!), and paid a visit to my friend. He was not home, so I decided to wait for him and after a while saw a little white board in the corridor where he had a list of things to do written down; among others: do that many sets of crunches or do that exercise that many times... I took a black marker and wrote: Drop 2-3 sizes and buy a corset.
And left his apartment.

Pelevin has a strange effect on me.

 Instead of  getting back to my 16-19 year old life period, playing it over and over again in my head and trying to find the errors and fixing them (mentally, or course, just in case they come up again as life lesson in the future :) )  - coming back to my 15 years, just before all that... ehm... adventure began.

And then again, of course - trying to go over the key events. But were there really so many key events that year, between 15 and 16?

Frescoes depicting my old life

 are fading, cracking, chipping and from time to time pieces of plaster are falling down.

5 minutes ago I felt a sudden urge to check what became of my old Swiss number. I wonder why this never occurred to me before. I dialed it to discover it now belongs to a British woman.

Thoughts of the week

1. I should have read "To kill a mockingbird" a long time ago. I planned to open this book years ago, and while I never had enough time to start reading it, or had something else on my priority read-list, there already was so much from this little girl in me, all these years... And I can't help feeling a bit jealous of having older wise people around you at such a young age, and having a smart older brother. Well, the latter is what I always wanted anyway!

2. I never had time in the past 3 weeks to go over my new phone manual and learn about all its great functions and blah-blah, but I did download Any.do app, and am really amazed at how great it is, being so simple, and how helpful it can be for just the daily tasks. I still wouldn't be able to do without my Moleskine week planner and my goal notebook, but the ability of vocally jotting down a though as it crosses my mind and before it's gone too far, or walking around the house and making a list of things to do or fix - once again all vocally! - is priceless to me now.
Keeps my head clear of junk. Helps simplify my life. That's all I ever needed.

Dehumanization

occurs when instead of "capital purchases" you read "capital punishments":
"Capital punishments are recorded as government-wide governmental capital assets" and without a single thought that the Modified Accrual Accounting just became a bit too cynical - you reflect for a couple of minutes on why they would not be classified as Expenditures instead.

I'm completing my daily re-writing of goals

and at the same time - thinking about how lucky I am to have in my life all those people I have. Or had. Look closely - and every person can teach you a lesson, set an example, motivate you or share enthusiasm and optimism when you're down.

Those who can not quite serve as a good example at this point :) - can still help determine the way you don't want to live your life and things you never want to do, push you to develop patience, acceptance and grow wiser. 

Watch your family, friends and foes - and learn from each one of them, borrow their experiences, examine their mistakes, use their passions and goals. The everyday social environment can contribute so much to enhanced learning, that it would be impossible to fully develop as a human being in social isolation. 

Oh, girly girliness...

About a year ago I showed up at Central City Opera wearing a black and white grand piano case, low heel open sandals, my travel purse - and was feeling a bit shocked to see the crowd that night wearing evening gowns and cocktail dresses, high heels, jackets and cute "theater-style" purses.

A year passed, Figaro was getting married, and today it was me catching up on dressing up,  in my green cocktail dress, matching high heels and purse, and - 90% of the rest of the public - showing up smart-casual at best.
Back to normal.

If I were to commence another experiment right now,

I would go about seeing how much I can accomplish in the next six month performing on just my anger, hatred and despair energy.

I do hope I could do a lot, for it looks like the experiment is already on.