Financial stress is the worst. In fact, I can say that, across the board, things would improve by 100% if I wasn't laboring under the financial burden that I am. I better not owe any taxes this year, because I figure that whatever color you're supposed to be "in" (i.e. red or black)...I'm in the opposite one of that. I am excited, however, about getting my certificate of completion of the paralegal's workers' comp course and expanding my business out to those kinds of files. Then I'll get some personal injury and some family law courses and I'll be much better rounded. Real Estate can remain the expertise, but it's much too volatile a marketplace to depend on it. That, and I have too much debt to pay off to wait statically for it to rebound. We need to move so Doodlebug has a yard to play in and I won't be worried about drive-bys. So send good profit thoughts my way, light an abundance or prosperity candle for me. Let's have a party for the dollar...or rather, not the dollar, but a party for the work that will earn the dollar.

This little camera letter looks awesome.

Just...one...more...file...

I am probably one of the few people in the world who actually gets more stressed about going on vacation. I have to be dragged away from my work with my fingers embedded and leaving claw marks. Even then, I get up at 6am in order to get a little bit of work done before the vacation day starts. I really enjoy the vacation day once I'm into it, but I think it's just part of my brain complex that I can't help but fret that somehow I'm going to lose a client by taking some time to myself, if that time comes in spans of more than a day or a few hours. Sometimes I don't even realize that I've been waiting for something terrible to happen, until the sky doesn't fall on my head, and then I inhale. I'm working on this, because hey! - we're going on a Disney cruise to the Bahamas next year, and I can't be trying to sneak Wi-Fi to work from afar when I'm on a cruise. I think that is probably under the definition of crazy in the dictionary.

Who are you again?

I've pinpointed what the issue is. (At least, one of them.)

What made running e-zines and then blogging easy when I was younger, was the anonymity of it. That's what I need to get back to, kind of, is feeling as freely inspired now, as I did then. Back then, you didn't worry about what you put up for publishing on the internet because hardly anyone was on it. Even when the digital diaries were really peaking, you were still under a pseudonym and for the most part, hidden from all of the immediate peers of yours who may have begun stumbling around the worldwide web. Now, everybody is on Facebook, it seems. The internet has no privacy, anymore.

(As an aside, it astounds me that the acronyms we used in chat rooms have become text speak and put on public titles, but sometimes people say it out loud - which is just bizarre. Whenever I hear some "omg" or "lol" come out of someone's mouth it makes me want to chloroform myself immediately.)

When I was younger, since no one I knew was online at the time, it was easy to write down thoughts and inspirations and art. The fact that a stranger would come to my page and be presented with this self-exhibition of the most private nature, and would, possibly be inspired and respond in kind with their artistic presence, was invigorating.

Now, although I have many thoughts, and ideas and arts dancing around in my head, I rarely ever write it down. I feel like I'm on filter now and anything might possibly be found offensive by someone close to me, basically family, gets monitored out and shucked away, even if I love it.

When I was younger, I always said I could never stop writing for someone. Love makes us grow and time makes us wise, if we let it. I have stopped some of my writing for many someones, and I am learning to work within those parameters as well as is possible. Hey, even race horses train with blinders, right?

It's the discipline that matters. To have a disciplined art of many things.

How do you hold hands with the virtual?

Being a reader, I get asked a lot about owning a kindle, or fire(?) or whatever other e-reader unit there is out there. I really have no urge to own one. I get that it is far more convenient to carry 10 books in a slim piece of technology, than to stuff them inside your pillow case in order to smuggle them on your trip with you, but I like the tangible nature of real books and real magazines and real newspapers. Even Pinocchio knew that even if he walked/talked/lived like a "real" boy, he still wasn't one.

Lately, it seems that everybody is in a rush to get to the convenient, which is normally whatever is seen as less of a physical burden. But what, really, are we doing to our selves with all of this lack of physicality? It seems to reflect a general minimalistic and surface approach that seems to have grown over the way we live our lives. Everything must be sparkly and light and convenient. What is this going to do to our stories?

I remember (the old-timer begins) when altavista was the place to go search for sites on the net. It seemed so easy to find these beautiful webpages, mostly put together by teenage/early-20s girls, who would drape poetry all over their sites, mixed with journal entries, mixed with links to neat niche stores where you could buy japanese tea sets or mixing bowls, handmade zines or jewelry. Now everybody feels like their voice is important and it's so hard to even have the patience to look through all the myriad blogs/diaries/journals to find those gems of inner-to-outer dialogue that once ruled the web. Not to mention how much "text speak" aka the anagrams we made up in the beginnings of chat rooms that have turned into a verbal kudzu and overtaken the foliage of language some of us find so dear.

I think we need to play with more glitter and paste, send more cards, go back to making mix-tapes and sending paper stories to people. I want my daughter to feel the pride of creation, actual tangible creation.

I'm trying to express a longing and a sense of loss here that I can't even find the vocabulary to adequately define. Don't get me wrong, I am all about technological advances, and I am all for the internet. I've been here, riding the edges into the future, for about 2 decades now. I dig it.

I just don't think we should, as a society, be running so fast into the virtual forest that we forget all the real trees around us, so to speak.

Everybody - stop being so afraid to take up space with your Self and its accessories.

I know you:

I really want to write more, but I find myself at odds with this word presentation. Not at odds with the words themselves, I'm fine with them, always will be. It's more that I'm not sure about this little niche I'm trying to carve out here. It was easier when it was just my strange, volatile artistic friends and the random recommended stranger reading my ramblings. It was easier when I wasn't measuring myself as a mother and I just said/spelled whatever random thoughts crossed my psyche, regardless of how disturbing they might be to a general populace, or a close family member. It's self-censoring at its finest.

I wanted to mommy-blog, kind of, but I'm not sure I'm cut out for it. Don't get me wrong, I love my little Matchstick Girl. She just turned one. She's walking a few steps at a time now and has learned to play in the toilet when her Daddy forgets to shut the lid and the bathroom door. I could rhapsodize about her for hours, most likely, because every minute little thing she does just thrills and fascinates me. I know, however, that in a lot of ways, these small treasured moments are very personal, and I can't yet figure out a way to present them in a way that can convey what they mean to me.

Another thing: even though I find most of Facebook to be consumed with boring, mundane, trivial, trite, annoying blathering coming out of people, every  now and then it shows me something about someone that I cherish. One of these people is my cousin, Leslie. She's around my baby brother's age and even though my baby brother and I are extremely close, I've never been close to Leslie, or her younger sisters. To be honest, I don't even really know how to connect with them. Or, at least, I didn't. But Leslie is something else; I had no idea how talented or artsy she was. I'm really proud of her.

Openings are important. I keep reminding myself to take the time to walk through them and take a look around.