Girling up at the close of the millenium's first decade.

Sometimes I'm so full of sh!t it hurts a little. Yep. Like f'rinstance, contrary to what I claimed in an earlier post, I'm back on Facebook. Not as bad though. Maybe a break's all that I needed to redirect my focus.

Been feeling a little melancholy - probably a holiday thing, or an end of the year thing, or a making my way through my mid-30's and losing the only currency that society openly values thing. You know what I mean.

Got my cat with me, a pile of books, tea always close by. All the collateral native to a full-fledged spinstery. They give me comfort. I need it, too. Long relationship that hurt my soul (not because it was bad - because it was good, great even, but not what the old vital principle was calling for). Short rebound that did it in. And now back at it. With something like the OCD drive that makes me shop and shop and shop for a stereo till I find a really good one for a really good price. Except stereos don't take time and work and either make you happy or rob you blind.

Regardless, I need to sit down and catch up on the journal that I've been keeping all year, the one I record the events of every day that passes. Haven't written much since before Christmas. During that time, the old tinsel wrapped elephant in the living room, Christmas, damn near trampled me and my debit card to death. One friend slipped away to Flagstaff and another to Phoenix. Danced alone in my room to activist rap and a Tears for Fears cover. Frenzied around the house getting it back in shape for my dear roomate to come home to. Hiked, watched sunsets and climbed a steep hill in horizontal rain without a hat.

All that, I'll write down before I sleep tonight. It's important. It keeps me from being too full of sh!t, from re-writing my own history as my memories drift and reform themselves. No. With my journals, I can look back and trace the blood spilled, the cries I've kept to myself, the ones I've shared and shared loudly. Honestly, those journals would be the only things besides my ugly little cat that I'd take with me if the house were fixing to explode. Not that I know any of the signs of a house fixing to explode. But still, if I smelled gas, I'd grab my cat and journals and run.

So yeah. Melancholy. Time of year, boatload of stress, too much going on maybe. God only knows and she's not telling. Blogging helps me girl up, so expect to hear from me a little bit more often for a while.

And in the meantime, make it a Happy Chrismahannakwanzstice and a Merry New Year.

My integrated spiritual system: Gratitude and Acceptance

"Hello, goodbye." - Heidi Wilson

This morning I got up before dawn to walk and to watch the darkest night of the year fade into its shortest day. There's a wash behind my house. It runs perhaps half the time. Fifty yards up from the house is a grotto I visited frequently through the summer and fall. There's a little spring, coyote willows choking around it, the smell of water in the desert. One day, I sat down and spent time with a garter snake who made no effort to flee.

This morning, I noticed that the willows were gone. Someone and their heavy equipment had eradicated all the vegetation around my hidden spring. Its secrets lay exposed, the smell of its water dispersed over the open ground.

I felt sad and rued the stupidity of the fool who removed the native stabilizing vegetation from a flooding wash. And then I remembered my integrated, complete and user-friendly spiritual system of gratitude and acceptance.

I feel grateful for all those moments of escape and grateful for the time I helped the moth with the moisture-pinned wings escape from the side of a clear puddle. I placed him on a branch in the sun and watched him flutter away a few minutes later. He seemed to resent me with that casual entitledness that's charming in children and animals. We trust, it says.

I feel grateful, deeply so, that I spent that time in that eradicated space. Precious shade gone from the desert. And I accept it. Hello, goodbye. Change happens. Health fails, bodies age, and even the halest among us dies. Life is for living, I heard recently, and no matter the misfortune, most of us live it with gusto. We lack eyes, some of us, love, others. But we keep on living. Our bodies fold into wrinkles and our beauty falls away, and yet the joy of watching children and dogs at play remains. The first bite of a good meal, the subtle, unassailable joy of solitude. It remains.

Until it doesn't.

And until we don't.

Living life out of buckets: Notes from the skinny front

A little over a year ago, I attended Money Camp in Santa Barbara. My stated goal was to be as savvy with one dollar (which was roughly what I had in my possession at the time) as I would be with a million.

The whole premise was that lottery-winners, inheritors, bubble home sellers and the like don't automatically know how to manage their money, and as a result often lose it. I figured if I knew how to manage my money like a true millionaire, I might by default end up there.

What I came away with, in part, was the idea of putting my money (at the time it was of the low-quality, sporadic variety) into buckets. No matter what comes in, it gets divided into the following accounts:

IRA/Healthcare Savings: 7.5 percent
I'm not saving a lot for retirement right now because my priority is paying down a few dollars of debt from my adventures with the magazine formerly known as Read It Here.

Giving: 5 percent
There's some serious happy happy to knowing that, no matter what your financial situation, you have something to give. My favorite place to give right now? Q2 Youth. By knowing there would always be money coming in my account, I was able to pledge $500 to their 2 to 1 matching grant. Which means I was able to give a leadership organization for a segment of at-risk youth the equivalent of $1,500. Bodacious.

Rent/Credit Cards/Extra Money Fund: 60 percent
I keep $1000 in an account at Arizona State Savings and Credit Union that pays 5% on up to $1000. Once I've funded that $1000 (if I've had to dip into it for necessary expenses, like shattered bones, car repair, etc) and I've covered rent, the rest goes to pay those tiny, little, infinitesimal credit card balances accrued by buying entire print runs for my diaphanous formerly-in-print magazine.

Daily Needs/Spending Money: 20 percent
Groceries, shampoo, cat food, $40/week walking around money. The basics we all need.

Sunny Day Fund (Mad Money): 7.5 percent
This was originally my savings fund for a motorcycle, but I decided that small treats like a decent stereo, beautiful original art, and of course, some new clothes (Yay!) might make my life a happier place to be than 8 months of enforced austerity so I could buy a dirt bike. But that bad boy's still in my future - just a matter of time.

If you feel yourself blanching at the thought of discussing money, you're not alone. Most parents would rather talk with their children about sex than money. I, however, am utterly fascinated with the dynamics of money, and sometimes run my budget through my head for self-entertainment. I'm so much into money these days, in fact, that I have been marketing a mutual fund and last week, scored my Series 65 license.

Oh so yay.

A new passion is eating the corners of my brain.

It's pushing 11 pm on a work night and my blogging ideas have been running a bit low lately.

So how about a status update instead?

These days, I'm feeling wicked interested in learning how to write better fiction - which makes reading it both more exciting and more of a pain in the ass.

'How finely formed that paragraph!' I say to myself. 'How the hell does he know to do that?'

So, today being "I do nothing unless I feel like it" Sunday, I went to fellow writer Susan McElheran's Old Sage Bookshop (in the St. Mike's Alley - 928-776-1136) and picked up a copy of Raymond Carver's short stories. Might make for good WC reading next to Good to Great and Emotional Intelligence. And yes, it may possibly serve as inspiration to eventually create a decent short story.

Started working on one tonight, focusing on creating scene and on telling through action rather than description. It's mysterious stuff at this point.

Despite the tens of thousands of words of fiction I've scrawled out in bits and bytes, each of my efforts still feel nascent and tentative. I guess I just need to focus on the journey right now.

One exciting development is my acquisition of a new micro-cabin (I'm now renting just slightly less house than I need) and the certain introduction of a writing desk into said millieu. Perhaps I can work fiction back into my early morning schedule or into my evening unwind.

In any case, leave your bright ideas in the comment section regarding how to create well-formed fiction. I'd be grateful.