~OR~
Busy, Busy, Busy!!!
Guess what, Friends?
I love chia! Who knew, right?
I could drink it probably forever; it is just that texturally pleasing.
Guess what else, Friends?!
I am working harder than ever! Blogging for my Garden City committee and for GNZAP and doing outreach at 7am with Bonnie (pictured above, sunny as always), Rachel (not pictured), and Dees (pictured NOW):
Guess what’s more, Friends?!?!
I’m going to South America on Friday. For 3 1/2 weeks.
Yup. Busy, busy, busy.
…Love the One You’re With
I have a very rainbow-centric job…
…and I kinda dig it.
Truth Time: remember when I was not digging it? And not dealing well? (Here ‘s a refresher. Also here.)
And, really, I was pretty all over the place with most things. Emotionally. Some days my jobs were okay, some days I liked my friends, some days I felt like MAYBE I’d made the right choice…but other days I was just hanging in there. Like a cat on a tree branch.
But…then I decided not to make any more plans. Because making plans was stressing me out. See, making plans meant making A DECISION, which naturally involved re-assessing all past decisions, in an effort not to eff everything up again. But it also meant trying to figure out the future, and what I might want a month or a year from now.
And I just don’t know that, Friends. I just don’t know.
* * *
So. No more plans. Just here. Just this. Some other quote from Rent…
Seriously, though, letting go of the past AND the future has done wonders. Guess what? My jobs are awesome. I love kids. Even when they’re little shits. Okay, especially when they’re little shits. They’re just so bad ass. Look at what my kiddos did for the storytime craft last night:
A metaphor:
You know how some times everything sucks and your friends are flaky and your family doesn’t understand you and your job is killing your soul and you don’t want to do anything and nothing is ever going to get better? But then really it turns out you just needed to eat?
I guess I just “needed to eat.”
A Sarah Custen Guilt Trip
Let me just start off by saying that I don’t even understand why people pass up the chance to gather, eat, drink, and be merry. I do not accept excuses of upcoming tests, family obligations, or illness. I demand that good times be had by all, whenever the opportunity presents itself.
I am a highly-biased reporter, is what I’m trying to say.
So for those of you who simply could not make it to the wonderful and magical and cooperative LEO Holiday Party, here’s what went down.
There was food. Delicious food. I personally enjoyed two different types of ham, some sort of marinated tofu magic, corn-n-veggie salad, and roasted cauliflower. Also rice. But that was so much more! So many epicurean delights! I ask you: why would anyone pass that up?
There were desserts, plural. Myriad, really. Maybe you feel like this doesn’t apply to you, because you are lactose intolerant, or celiac, but did you count on…
…dairy-free, gluten-free strawberry-coconut cupcakes?!?!? Because those were there. I know, because I brought them. And did we enjoy these treats in isolation? Did we stuff our faces and then run home to our DVRs? No we did not!
We socialized! Oh, man, we socialized so hard…it was CRAZY.
Also Whitney Houston played. RIP, Whitney.
Also there was booze, and afterwards, there was more booze, at the Red Door. That’s what we call an after-party.
Then after that I left to go out dancing. Lately I have a need to dance bordering on clinical.
ALMOST AS GREAT AS MY NEED TO SEE ALL MY COWORKERS’ LOVELY, SHINING FACES AT THE LEO PARTY. And you wouldn’t want to deprive a girl of camaraderie, would you? THAT’S WHAT I THOUGHT.
See you next year!
~OR~
The Part of My Job That I Like
I like the part of my job where I come up with ideas for zine-making workshops, write up the copy, plan out the details with my coworkers, gather supplies, set up shop, and then spend a quiet afternoon cutting, pasting, chatting, and listening to music in the sun-lit basement of a SugarHouse library.
Pretty much everything else about my job right now is driving me nuts, though. Except the part where I can work on my blog at work. Like right now.
More Zine/Graphic Novel/Alternative Press info a photos here.
~OR~
I’m So-oh-oh Tired
Because I am just going with it, living in the moment and going with friends to late-night bars, where we indulge in late-night bar food, juicy secrets, and the honest truth.
And because I work an early morning job now, all coffee and sunrise, so I am up and at ’em by 7 at the latest, sometimes as early as 5:30.
And when I’m not staying up late with friends, I’m staying up late baking, and doing laundry. That’s life, I guess–it can’t all be chicken wings and beer.
But I am also very calm, which is a new and strange thing for me. It’s partly due to exhaustion, and partly due to something else, unnamable. Some sense of grace that I’d so long hoped for, and I am feeling more grown up of late. I feel prepared for 26, whereas I dreaded 25, didn’t think I’d earned it. Wasn’t ready to grow up.
Not that I’m ready now. BUT, I am calm. And strong. The days pass by in little slivers and I appreciate most everything. Making a salad for work…
…how delicate and tart and fresh and pink an apple can be…
…and taking a moment to snap a photo, even in the middle of a whirlwind-busy day. Because it’s the right thing. Suddenly the right thing seems so obvious, if I only slow down enough to listen. Today it was: buying a little gift for my Dad, just because, and baking bread for the staff meeting.
It’s strange, because last week I was feeling so dis-jointed, so distant and isolated and irritable. (Probably also due to lack of sleep). But…I just let it go. I let it go, and I think things are going to be fine, and everything else is out of my hands, so I will probably just eat a salad and bake some bread and read in bed ’til I fall asleep about it. What else can I do?
Last week I felt like I just didn’t care anymore, about anything. I didn’t freak out about it, I just let it happen, submerging myself completely in the feeling. Like swimming through a lake, and now I’m on the other side. Not sure where this is, exactly, but it feels new, and real, and good, and calm, and utterly blameless.
A man just came to the desk where I’m working and donated the remainder of his clementines from a meeting in one of our public rooms. I have been craving citrus lately.
Artwork by a young patron. A gift. Okay, it was a barter.
~OR~
I Get Older, They Stay the Same Age
Dinner at Sister Natalie’s last night. Vegan deliciousness and Harry Potter V (Order of the Pheonix). This is the one where everyone cuts off their shaggy Goblet of Fire hair and gets ripped, where the boys become men. Pectorals and cheekbones, Friends. And that brings me to a phenomenon that needs discussing:
Sometimes I’m attracted to adolescent boys in movies, Friends. Don’t freak out. Let me explain: It’s just something I’ve never grown out of. Like, at one point I was a pre-teen and then a tween and then a teenager, and I had appropriate teen-y movie star crushes. Benny from The Sandlot. Joseph Mazzello from Simon Birch. The entire cast of Newsies. Then I got older, but I never fully shed those feelings. The years passed by, but the crushes remained the same.
And while some of you may be reaching for your phones to contact the authorities right now, I can assure you I am not alone. I know there are ladies out there who’ve got my back, 20-somethings who still freak out about how cute JTT is. It’s like the crush never goes away, even though we grow up and develop more age- and legally-appropriate attractions.
My Susan friend has had a mad crush on one Ronald Weasley since forever. Crushin’ HARD. And is that so wrong? I mean, if guys can talk about how hot Hermione is, why can’t ladies squeel over Ron and Harry? Or Cedric?
We can, and we do. We are the Lady Pedophile Film Society, and we meet monthly to watch movies from the 90s and remember our first crushes. Is that so wrong?
In other news: I have been drinking lots of wine lately. And last night I put some blueberries in it, what? I AM IMMUNE TO YOUR JUDGEMENTS. I WILL DRINK AND CRUSH AS I SEE FIT.
I don’t know what point I was trying to make with this. I feel tipsy right now, but I’m not! I’m at work! Blogging about drinking and pedophilia! That’s appropriate, right?
As is THIS.
Hey, folks. Hey, Friends. I’m about to do that thing where I post a lot of things in the past. Retroactively, we call it. I know that’s not your favorite. Your favorite is when I post new, exciting things with lots of pretty pictures every day. Hell, MY favorite is when I post new, exciting things with lots of pretty pictures every day.
But we can’t always get what we want, Friends. We can’t always get what we need (in my case a Macbook). But if we try sometimes, we find…a lot of retroactive posts. Indeed.
I’m not sure if I want kids or not, and lately I’ve been leaning towards not. When I was in high school, I couldn’t wait. In fact, my high school boyfriend (the first one) and I used to fantasize about having kids together, even going so far as rubbing my puffed-out belly and pretending I was already pregnant!
(PS – One of Life’s greatest reliefs is that we didn’t act upon this particular impulse. Seriously, I thank my lucky stars about it ALL THE TIME.)
Add to that a lifetime of babysitting, nannying, teaching English to kids, working in a children’s library…and it would seem obvious that I’m destined for maternal bliss. But I don’t think so. I’ve got a five-year-old sister and (as of today) FOUR nephews to hang out with and exorcise my arts-n-crafts, sing-a-long demons. I think that’ll be plenty. Plus I like my time and money and would prefer not to give that all away to an irrational egomaniac, or “toddler”.
My Dad doesn’t believe me, though. “Oh, you say that now, but you’ll see. You’ll change your mind. I felt the same way when I was your age, but it’s one of the greatest joys in life. You’ll see.” Lots of grown-ups say this to me, actually. This is because when they were my age they were lawyers or some other professional type, far removed from the harsh reality of small children. They didn’t have to deal with this on a daily basis:
This little act of misconduct was carried out by a team of brothers (I’d guess 2- and 4-years-old), while their mom sat planted in front of one of our “kids only” computers, on Facebook.
Right after cleaning this up I had to give a stern-voiced “STOP IT.” to another set of brothers; one was kicking the other in ribs while he lay curled in a fetal position. Hearing my reprimand, their father glanced up from his computer with a look of shock and disapproval, as if to say “Don’t you talk to my kids that way!”
Later, while begrudgingly helping me clean up a cluster of wrinkled magazines splayed on the floor (“He was just reading, what?”), the mom of the first set told her 2-year-old “Shut up. Nobody wants to hear it.” in such a cruel and condescending tone that I almost couldn’t take it.
…And this is what I’m talking about. This is what my mom calls “free birth control,” and it works like a charm. If I were a fellow parent, I might be tempted to understand and empathize with these parents. But I don’t want to. I just want to go home, eat dinner, watch my programs while working on Accomplishments, read my book, and go to bed. And since I have no children to call my own, I’ll be able to do just that, no interruptions, no hassles.
Why would I want to ever change that?
What I want most of all is to be forgiven
I am only human, after all
I think I like Día de los Muertos better than Halloween. The meanings, the rituals, the imagery. The colors. Every year I see more and more people dressing up as calaveras (those painted skulls), and I think “good.”
little sarah Big World 