And wow do I take a lot of food photos. Way too many, really. I am somewhat disgusted by the sheer number of food photos I have in each month’s folders (I organise all digital camera photos by date). For some reason, I haven’t been posting the food photos to my Flickr account. I was trying to be a serious photographer, but I’ve recently given up on that and decided to start posting photos of food, myself, and my cat as I was doing a while ago before I tried taking myself more seriously.

My Foodspotting account is still too new for me to even tell if I’ll keep using it or not, but so far I like posting to it and seeing what everyone else is eating lately. Just another reason for me to get a smarter phone too, since I could use it to take photos and then upload them to the site right away and stop being such a disconnected Luddite. For now I’m content with uploading photos from my digital camera. I don’t need to tell people in real time where I am and what I’m eating. At least I don’t think there is, but maybe that will change after we both upgrade our phones.

In other news, I may be taking a trip for work soon. It’s been a while since I’ve had to travel for work, but I think they’re finally getting wise to the fact that I don’t have family obligations keeping me at home. Also, I’ve been here long enough that people actually trust me to know how the company works, and that I reliably get sh*t done. Yay!

Oh, and one more thing! I’ve been knitting again! I thought I was pretty over it, but as soon as the weather turned a bit cooler, I decided I was back for more. We were shopping at one of those outlet malls one weekend when I saw this marvellous knitted scarf/loop. It was a long thickly cabled scarf that was sewn into a loop so that you could twist it around your neck twice. I thought this was a great idea for a biking scarf instead of the regular cowls I’ve been making that are nicely sized, but don’t really cover all that much of my neck/chest. A long one that I could twist around twice would be perfect and cover everything, so I decided to make one. I’m using a pattern for the Cupido Cowl that I found on this wonderful Japanese knitter’s site (all of her knitted items are so bloody gorgeous!). I can’t wait for it to be done so I can block it.

This morning, I approached one such intersection, complete with traffic light, all-way walk signal, and crossing guard that always greets me with a very hearty, "Good morning miss!!" I usually wait for the light and then zip across with car traffic, but this morning I got to the light with 24 seconds still left on the countdown, so I dismounted and walked across the intersection.

I passed by the crossing guard and we greeted each other with the usual "good mornings," but then he said to me, as I was getting back on my bike, "I want to tell you something. You are really gorgeous!"

Oh my, it’s amazing how a random compliment really made my morning. I smiled the entire rest of the way to work.

Body weight fluctuates from day to day, based on a number of outside factors like hydration, the status of your bowels, when you last ate or worked out, etc. Over the years of daily weigh-ins, I know that my weight typically fluctuates within a range of 5 pounds. My weight probably ranges about 3-4 pounds in the course of a single day. After you add in the fluctuations due to the menstrual cycle, it’s pretty clear that the weight number isn’t very dependable.

On top of this, measuring body fat via conductivity is not exactly the most accurate method since it does not take hydration into account. The more hydrated you are, the more conductive you are, and this will decrease the body fat percent the scale tells you. If you could be similarly hydrated everyday, then this method might work well for you, but it’s hard to tell exactly how hydrated you are each day. This number obviously fluctuates.

So even knowing all of this, and understanding that what happens on the scale is (relatively) within my control, why does it still bother me to see my weight fluctuate to the top end of my acceptable limit? It doesn’t ruin my day, but I usually silently call myself fat and will sometimes withhold food from myself based solely on the day’s numbers.

Isn’t this such a "girl" thing to do?

But wait, athletes get obsessed with their weight and how much they workout and consume, don’t they? Back in the day (when I was heavier) I used to think they were so crazy. The wrestlers in my high school seemed to be more obsessed than any other athlete because your weight dictated which weight class you were allowed to fight in. I remember one guy weight one pound too much before his weigh-in, and he put on sweatpants and a heavy pullover and ran around the building in the heat until he’d sweated the pound off. Now that’s crazy.

I’m thankful that I’m not so crazy that the bathroom scale would bring me to tears. I try not to obsess about it, but sometimes when I’m in a crappy mood already, it does make me feel even crappier and I wish it wasn’t like that. Just a number, just a data point, right? It doesn’t make me less valuable if I’m up a pound from last week, and it doesn’t make me cooler/prettier/etc if I’m down a pound. But sometimes, it’s tough to tell myself that.

After all, it’s just a number, and it only has power over me if I let it.

Oddly enough the first roll I finished was of colour film, which takes me forever to develop. I don’t know what I was thinking, but I quickly loaded up a roll of black and white and developed the roll a day or two after I finished it. My developing is pretty shoddy, but I managed to get a few photos out of it that I was pleased with.

So yes, thank you, friend for the new camera.

Since I only had one roll of from this film and my canister takes two 35mm rolls, I magically found another roll of the same film, exposed at the same speed, so I developed them together. Turns out these photos were a bit older, from February 2011. Really reminded me of how much I missed shooting film, how much I liked seeing how the photos turned out a few weeks (or months) later. Again, I was pretty happy with these photos, which really pleases me.

Obviously, now I think I have to start shooting more.

I started a lot of entries; obviously, I didn’t finish any of them.

So this is where I decide to start figuring everything out, or at least to wipe it all clean and start all over again, because I’m not even sure where to start.

I guess I’ll just start. And I’ll use "we" because it really does encompass the two of us, not just me and my own life.

We spent a lot of our energy working towards something, but then it dropped out of our reach, and now we’re figuring out how to fill the void, how to finish the mourning period. It sounds a lot more dramatic than it is, but it really is a kind of mourning. No one died, but it was the death of possibility that is what we’ve been working through. Throughout it all, we’re trying to remember that we have each other, that no matter what happens or doesn’t happen in the future, we have each other to lean on. We don’t both have to be strong all the time. We can let ourselves be weak if we need to be.

We’ve learned a lot about our relationship and about ourselves. That being open and honest, even if what you’re saying is disagreeable, is still the best way to go. That letting another person see your weakness is not a bad thing. That feelings don’t have to have reasons, and that sometimes it’s most important just to feel them and let them work their way through your system instead of ignoring them.

All that anger, fear, hopelessness… it has to go somewhere right? You can’t just let it sit and sit, while you smile on the outside and push it all aside to get on with your day. That’s definitely not the best policy because it only seems to hurt more later on when you do finally face things.

And so I’m wiping the slate. It’s my birthday today, and I’m going to look at the upcoming months as a new time. I could have picked any upcoming day to make meaningful. It didn’t have to be on my birthday, but as it is, my birthday falls fortuitously and therefore I will give it some gravity. Well, some gravity, and some lightness as well.

I still feel empty inside. For months, I’d put so much of my energy into something that I no longer have, so it only makes sense to feel sad about it, to mourn what could have been. I’m not silly enough to think that emotions go away so quickly, that feelings just disappear like wisps of smoke. It’s going to take some time to fill that void back up again, to figure out that the future is endless and just because one door closed doesn’t mean I’ll be stuck standing out in the hallway forever. There’s a path out there somewhere. I probably can’t see it now, but it’s there.

We’ll figure it out.

(I’ve tried to write about this several times, but I haven’t been able to. It may be that I’m finally feeling stable enough that I can without degenerating into hopeless blathering and a general woe-is-me-so-feel-sorry-for-me.)

But yes, I’m feeling especially grateful today, on this last Friday in July. Time hurtles forward, with or without my consent, and I’ve had a bit of a hard time accepting this recently. O-bla-di, o-bla-da, life goes on, brahhhh. We just have to live and learn and maybe figure out how to handle things a bit better the next time. Always forward, yes?

This past week, I’ve been grateful that:

1. I was able to donate blood this week
I’ve donated (or attempted to donate) blood steadily over the past 2 years. About half the time, I get rejected, usually for low-iron. I’m very happy to say that I marginally passed all the tests this past week and was able to donate a nice pint.

2. The Presidio makes for a great evening bike ride
Had a chance to finally take a mostly solo ride through the Presidio this week. It’s been a while since I’ve had the time and energy to take a ride there. A little solitude in a quiet place is good for me.

3. Frannie and I continue to consciously make time to be together
The past week has been busy for both of us and we’ve not had much time together in the evenings or the mornings. I typically leave for work when he’s still sleeping, and sometimes I’ll go to bed before he comes home at night if he has a late hockey game. We’re both aware that we haven’t spent much time catching up with each other, so we both make an effort to have a dedicated date night where we have dinner together and maybe do something fun. Sometimes I want to spend all my free time with him, but I know that our relationship is better when our lives are balanced, when we’re spending a good chunk of our time apart developing our individual lives. We love each other and love to be together, but we also know how to stand on our own two feet.

4. I’ve been able to enjoy some time alone
When I’m feeling down in the dumps, all I want is to not spread my doom and gloom around my friends or have to deal with trying to be socially acceptable. Also, listening to whiny friends is extra draining when I’m not feeling so hot myself, so I tend to cut myself off for a little bit while I work on feeling better. It’s been so great that I haven’t had to attend many social events these past few weeks, and the ones I’ve chosen to attend have been nothing but good for me and everyone else. I feel so grateful for having the option to choose to spend my time with people who are positive, fun, and supportive. I don’t always have the option to make choices like that (obligations to family and friends), so I am especially grateful that I’ve had that freedom these past few weeks.

5. Creative outlets have become enjoyable again
For me, being depressed means not enjoying my usual creative outlets, namely reading, writing, and photography. I don’t sit around and bemoan, "If only I spent more of my time doing such-and-such." Instead, I just sit around and not do it, and then when I feel like doing it, I make time and do it. No use complaining about not having time to do something, when you obviously have other more pressing concerns that are taking priority. I’m finally starting to feel more excited about making photographs, reading books, and writing my own short vignettes again. Basically, I have enough surplus energy to do these things, instead of all the energy being taken up by feeling depressed or anxious (and yes, it’s a serious energy-suck), and I am so very grateful to feel more even-tempered.

Well that wraps it up for me. What have you been happy about this past week?

(Now, if only I could centre an entire blog about a single topic, I might be getting somewhere… Alas, I’m happy with sticking to a single topic per entry for now.)

To take care of all the word-overflow that’s not made it onto this blog, I’ve been writing more in my private journals that I keep at my bedside. Since I’m so lackadaisical when it comes to using paper journals, I currently have two partially filled journals that I’m working on finishing. One of them was started back in the late 90s. The other was started more recently, at least early 2000s. I don’t have any idea what I’ll do with them when I’m done other than stick them with the rest of my paper journals, but I do like starting a new journal and then (eventually) finishing it. Part of me wishes to burn my old journals, but then part of me likes to flip through them every so often so I can laugh at how silly or melancholy or overly dramatic I was in some entries.

(Some of my teenage journals are so appropriately angst-ridden that they are very interesting to re-read and see how I’ve changed, hopefully for the better, over the years.)

Of course, there is very little censoring happening in these paper journals, so I get to read all the really stupid stuff, e.g., petty complaints about people in my life, small (basically minuscule) accomplishments, and highly embarrassing unabashed bragging. Apparently, I’m pretty awesome, and I’m not shy about it. In the same breath, I should mention that I’m a psychotic maniac prone to crying fits and screaming rages. And I get excited really easily. Really easily.

[Warning: Tangent Ahead!]

I’m not sure if I’ll ever grow out of that kind of stuff, but I’m okay with that. I used to wish that I could change my personality. Ideally, I’d love to become calmer and less excitable in general, but I’m not sure if it’s possible. One month, I tried to be less excitable and honest, it was one of the worst personal goals I’ve ever come up with, almost as bad as the time when I tried to become more introverted. I’m a firm believer that people have some very basic personality traits and while other things about the person may change, those very basic traits may remain the same for their entire lives.

And yes, this means that I think being easily excitable is one of my basic personality traits. What I become excited about might change, but when I am focused on something in particular, everything about that topic gets me riled up. That even includes people! I still get very much overly excited when I get to meet up with friends that I am very fond of but don’t see often. Often after meeting with them, I’ll ride on a high of happiness, causing me to tell Frannie all about our meeting in sometimes excruciating detail. The boy is a saint for putting up with me.

[And this is where we doe-see-doe and hopefully promenade it back to the original topic with a thoroughly ungraceful transition phrase...]

But anyway, I may continue to be easily excitable for the rest of my conscious life (until my brain turns to mush and I become a vegetable), and I’ve come to terms with that. It’s probably the reason why I like to write so much. There are way too many words and stories stuck in my brain and I feel like no matter if I wrote for hours and hours, I still wouldn’t be able to get them all out!

Now if only I could devote as much time to proofreading and structure as I do to spewing raw writing and maybe I could actually get somewhere with this. Until then, I’ll satisfy myself with the meandering blog entries and random paper journal entries instead.

I have very few friends with whom I can do this, but they do exist. Some friends require constant contact, and if either of us lags, it feels a little weird the next time we see each other. I’ve even had a few friends that required daily contact, people who reply to my emails within a few hours, sometimes replying multiple times a day. What I really dislike is when people shoot email replies back to me and reply to my sometimes carefully written dissertations (ha, but I must admit that not all my emails to friends are so long and well thought out) with bullet points or in-line quoted replies. I think sometimes other people don’t understand that I actually care about well-crafted responses from people, preferring to not feel like "yet another business email reply." Sometimes it’s the in-line quoted replies that irk me the most because that really feels like a forum post reply or a business email. You wouldn’t write a hand-written letter to someone and insert quotes from the other person’s letter. You’d more likely say, "To answer your questions about…" to preface your paragraph.

Just a personal quirk of mine. I may not be a writer anymore, but I still care about writing form.

But anyway, I find these constant-contact friends are quite difficult to keep in touch, and often the friendship will deteriorate to the point where we are no longer friends. In fact, I find these friendships so tiring that I’ll sometimes sabotage them by lagging with my responses until contact is lost. Yes. Sabotage. I’ll admit that I do it. All the person needs to do is shoot off a few quoted-in-line emails to turn me off.

Ok, enough of the ranting and raving about email penpal etiquette, or rather my own very rigid ideas about ‘acceptable’ letter writing anyway.

Now that June has come to an end, I’ve come to a few conclusions that I feel the very selfish need to share.

1. Keeping your nails manicured is difficult (see point #2 below).
2. Learning guitar is really difficult. Also, it mucks up your manicure.
3. I can ride my bike for long distances, but I think my enjoyment goes down after 5 hours of riding, so I’ll try to stick to <5 hr bikerides in the future.
4. Being honest with someone can be very helpful, but it can also be very hurtful. Choose wisely.
5. Keep a variety of friends close to you, including the one that makes you laugh or distracts you when you’re down, the one who understands and doesn’t need to say anything, and the one who’ll hug you when you cry. Also, make sure you turn to the right one when you want a certain reaction. It can be disappointing when you ask someone for something they can’t give you.

And just because I like making lists, here are 5 things I am very grateful for this month, just to remind myself of some good things in my world. In June, I was grateful for:

1. The library for having interesting books on the display shelf.
2. My girlfriend making plans to visit us.
3. The generosity and good will of people I don’t know well.
4. Supportive friends who are excited for change and new beginnings.
5. The freedom to choose how I spend my free time.

So of course this is where you ask me, what kind of girl was she? And this is where I open my mouth to speak, but nothing comes out, because there’s no way I could possibly focus on one thing at a time. She was a swirl of everything, and I can never remember one specific thing about her before I’m pelted with all kinds of memories of her. So let me just tell you about my memories of her and maybe you’ll catch some sort of the essence of who she was, now that she’s gone.

Her feet were smaller than mine, but she was still quite tall; I could just see over the top of her head. We measured ourselves against each other once, our backs pressed against each other, our feet bared on the blonde wood floor with the heels pressed against each other. I remember the way the back of her calves pressed against the back of mine, how her elbows jutted into my side as she tried to pull herself up to be taller.

She was stubborn and single-minded. Once, she and I walked home from the ocean, across an entire city, because she refused to have to take a bus to get home. "Why do I want to pay $2 to get home so quickly, when I can walk and see everything around me," she would ask me. I didn’t have an answer for her so we walked and walked, our feet becoming sore, our shoulders tiring from holding our bags.

This girl that I loved, she had a lot of favourite things. She had a favourite handkerchief that she washed every other day in the sink after she got home, squeezing all the water out of it so it would dry in time to use the next day. I still remember her pulling it out of her handbag to dab at the edge of her mouth or to wipe the corner of her eye. She had a favourite bench at the park and a favourite drinking glass at home. Actually, she had one glass she preferred for water, a different mug for coffee, another glass for drinking beer, and a stemless glass for wine and liquor. She had a favourite dress that was slightly torn, but she didn’t think anyone noticed, so she kept wearing it until the material became so thin it started to tear. Always a creature of habit, once she decided to love something, she used it until she broke it or it was lost.

She told me once that she thought the way my left eye crinkled when I laughed was nicer than the right eye. I wasn’t sure if I should feel happy for my left eye, or sad for my right. I suppose it all cancelled out in the end though, so I felt ambiguous about it, but every time I laughed, I tried to see if her smile favoured my left side over my right.

She let me worry about the small things like that, the details of our lives, like the way our hands folded together, her cool fingers nestled between my warm ones. Her palms and fingertips were always calloused from some reason or another. She played the guitar for a while and built up a thick set of callouses on her left fingertips. I liked to feel them scratch against the back of my knuckles.

When I close my eyes, I think about the feel of those rough little fingers pressing into the valleys between my knuckles. I think about how her neck always smelled like a mixture of skin and lavender conditioner, how her hair was unruly and curled in only one direction. She used to bake cookies on a whim, humming along while she scooped out the dough onto the sheet. Rushing through our flat, she’d leave behind the faint smell of her perfume, bunched up socks under the coffee table, a few hairs shaking loose from her hairbrush and collecting on the bathroom floor.

I miss her loud laugh, the soft padding of her feet running down the hallway, the way she shook her hair and hips to music, the way she kept her torn stockings just in case they’d be useful. I even miss the way she rolled over in bed immediately upon waking and reached over to rub on my hair. It was always the first thing she did each morning, her legs stretching under the covers. And I remember rolling my head towards her and cracking open my eyes to look at her face. The first thing I see is her hair spread against the pillow, sticking up in funny ways from sleep, but even now, I can’t remember her face entirely. I think I see her, but then she disappears, replaced by all the snippets of my memories. I remember her, and yet I never had her. She was never mine.

Where have you gone, my love? Come back to me.

Some people (including myself) will think you mean something else entirely.