Today I...

• ...woke up mad early (like 6:40 am) due to sundart having to be at work at 9. She was feeling industrious, and whipped up some of her famous whole wheat pancakes. Cue early morning pig out. I had such a bereft childhood, deprived of such things as real maple syrup...
  
  
• ...left early for work for once, due to a distinct lack of bike. Had a lovely walk through campus and downtown. Would have been even lovelier if my Nomad's batteries hadn't died on Seelye lawn, with twenty minute of walk to go. Need to be better about charging that thing.
  
  
• ...Got a shocking amount of work done. Of course that's easy when one of the things you did manage to do with your Nomad in the morning was download the kickass mix you made the night before. Awww yeah.
  
  
• ...revelled in the fact that mysterious back pain seems completely all better. To celebrate, hit the bike trail and did the eight mile thing again before meeting sundart's bus. That trail is going to be fucking gorgeous when all the leaves turn. Which in all likelihood will be in the next couple of weeks, considering the area's under frost advisory tonight. I fully expect to wake up to a riot of color in the morning. You hear that, universe?
  
  
• ...walked home with sundart and discussed some plans to incorperate our true callings back into our lives. Damn it, we're writers. Why the hell aren't we writing?? We're going to fix that.
  
  
• ...sundart's making mashed potatoes, I think. in any case, she's making something that involved me peeling a cubic buttload of potatoes earlier, and now she's boiling them all in a pot. Signs point to mashed.
  
  Whoa, that was an interesting bit of sudden deja vu. I suddenly remembered the last time I was an active participant in a mashed potatoes making type of thing... I was helping mash a huge pot of them in our old kitchen with timarok and I'd asked him to sing something for me, and this gospel number in this shockingly bass voice rolled out of him. I think I was too dumbstruck to actually actively mash anything.
  
  Anyhoo...
  
  
• ...talked to gossamer_gull when she called me at work this afternoon to see if I was amenable to kidnapping tonight. Considering the idea seriously. :)
  

The rest of the evening seems like it will be a good one, if fairly quiet. :)

Depths

Interesting how an evening can turn out...

sundart and I totally blew off making most of dinner (and a hearty apology again to beatgoddess and primitive_boy because we got into this conversation about writing which turned into this megadeep conversation about childhood traumas (mostly sundart's, but it did dredge up a few of mine as well).

During the course of the conversation it occurred to me how much I don't share, how much of my past I bury and hide from in untter unwillingness to deal. What's a little frightening is that I'm honestly not sure how much is buried up in here but there's quite a bit, as signalled by the very tight knot my stomach turned into when she said something about how it is liberating to take some painful aspect of your past and get it the hell out of your head - talk about it, write about it, anything - it was like a crowd of parts or something all rose up in this big ball of "Ack! Threat! Run Away! Run Away!" And then there was this very quickly flashed sequence of vignettes of bits of my childhood that went by too fast for me to hold on to any of them. Whoa.

Thinking about it later in the shower, I just found myself thinking about how much of myself I keep hidden from everybody, things I've never told a living soul, thoughts I've had that I've immediately squashed or suppressed or somehow kept myself from expressing, lest someone find out what or who I really am. And I wonder - what's so goddamned bad about me at my essential core that I have this unwavering conviction that everyone who peels back enough layers of masks that I wear will run screaming as far as possible in the other direction? Why am I so scared of other people hating me that my first instinct is to lie like hell? There is so much that I am and that I do and that I think that I refuse to own or be honest about becuase it would hurt someone elses feelings/make others despise me/because it would be "betraying the family"/nobody wants to hear about this/blah blah blah.

I think the writing exercise sundart and I have more or less agreed to get together and do every once in a while will help, but right now I'm a little boggled by how much work on me I have to do.