currently watching: it's the great pumpkin, charlie brown.
previously watched: the waves at cockroach cove sweep the sand from the beach

which is why my hair is wet, at 7 pm, as I sit and do some freelancing work from bed. Before the ocean, I was catching my breath while hiking Mariner's Ridge and watching the wind sweep the hills of Hawai'i Kai. God's breath was moving with ease; my own was not. Someone is out of shape, and it's me.

this morning i was groggy and unused to waking up at 6. After falling in and out of sleep for an hour I pulled myself out of bed and put on my lucky dress and drove to the doctor's. Not for treatment, but for an interview. At a job I really, really want. It seemed to go swimmingly.

Which is why today was beautiful.

for real i don't know if i've ever been this sick in my life. On the mend, though. But, yeah, sick also equals emotional. I just cry over the smallest things lately--I'm watching Discovery about little Hayley with progeria and I've cried 4 times in the last half hour. Sigh. Mess.

a couple things.

I've been having unnerving dreams since I flew back in to Hon--the sort of dreams where you feel like a stranger who knows all about you is in your room while you're sleeping. So I blessed my room, and rearranged a little, and now there are creepy noises. I may sleep with my rusty machete next to me tonight.

I'm thinking, since I tend to search for "something beautiful" but not find it, of starting up a blog called the Daily Dose of Beauty. And just post pictures or drawings or poems or quotes that I find beautiful. What do you think?

great love

i've been thinking a good deal about love lately. As in, the romantic kind. And I realized that I've been surrounded by great love. Maybe I just didn't recognize it because it didn't look how I thought it should.

My grandpa loved my grandma for 70 years. That's nearly a whole lifetime. Even after she passed, every day was spent looking at her picture, talking about her, missing her. When she was alive, he would've done anything for her. All of his stories were about her, even the ones where she wasn't mentioned.

My mother and father celebrated their 40th anniversary this year. Forty years of choosing to love the same person, when it's easy and when it's hard. I think that your parents' relationship is always an enigma--though you're around them for a significant portion of your life, so much of how parents relate is private. Which, I guess, goes for most relationships. Either way, however their public and private relationship plays out, I think that 40 years together counts as great love.

Love is a strange mix of instinct and choice. The television recently told me that "the heart goes where it wants," which echoes Woody Allen's "The heart wants what it wants. There's no logic to these things." Except, since it's from Ghost Whisperer and not a man who married his adopted daughter, it's significantly less creepy. But I digress. It's the heart that draws us to a certain person, but it's our will that makes us stay. Love isn't just butterflies and knee-weakening eye contact. After your heart has hitched your star to someone's wagon (or vice versa), you have to actively choose to stay hitched.

Sometimes leaving a relationship is the wisest choice, of course. And those are the decisions people need to make for themselves. I'm just proud right now to have two living (even if they're not all breathing...) examples of great love in my life, spanning at least two generations. I'm hoping someday to add my name to that list, too.

i had my first dream about grandpa last night. Well, the first since he passed. It wasn't profound, but it was lovely to just have him next to me. He told me that a belt looked good on me, and then had me wear Grandma's wedding dress--a beautiful, champagne/gold colored lacy tight number. He told me to keep it for my upcoming wedding. Um, don't even have any suitors, so don't worry.

Come to think of it, though, I don't know what Grandma's wedding dress looks like. I haven't seen any pictures of their wedding day... nothing. I know that they had to marry quick--he was on a break from service in the Navy in WW2--so maybe it was a court house wedding? Dunno.

But yeah, it was good to have him next to me. I didn't want to wake up.

(cough cough)

clean slate

my computer has nothing on it, anymore. I have a new hard drive, and with that comes a clean computer. Now, I get to choose what I put on it: the pictures, the songs, the old journals that I want to be taking up space, rather than just already being there.

I feel like my life is like that, now. After something as big as this, there is no way I will ever be the same person. I know it already. So, computer as metaphor for life: now I get to choose what I want to be taking up space in my days. The people, the places, the job, the physical objects... all of that. I like this idea, and though I've been slowly cleaning house for months now, I've decided to really change. To choose change rather than wait for change.

Now, if only I could get over this stupid head cold and start on life...