"If I am to show my love of God through love of neighbor, through walking a second mile with a stranger, through cutting my cloak in half in order to share it with the coatless, then I am able to show this love of neighbor only because first I must be able to accept my flawed and fragmented self enough to love myself; and I can love myself only when I can accept that God loves me, just as I am, without one plea." Madeleine L'Engle
With oh so much to do during the holidays: tree's to decorate, presents to buy, cookies to bake, and ugly sweaters to wear, we quickly found ourselves with no addresses and lagging behind producing a physical Christmas card to send out. So....with Christmas now gone we decided that we would shamelessly rip off our good friends over at Team Blocksma, and create a digital New Years Card. In hindsight, it turned out to be a little more work than we thought (iMovie!), but it was also really nice to stop and take a look back at the year that was, something that I often forget to do in the hustle and bustle of daily life. So here it is folks, year 2 of Metz Madness, hopefully the pictures will speak for themselves. Just know that you are all good people whom we love dearly. We'll see you in year 3!
The snow has stopped falling, leaving little Fort Collins in a wintry mess of goodness; except of course if you're driving your dear husband to work in the morning. In that case it is icy death, stress on ice. As of now, I'm curled up on our couch, warming my hands with a steaming cup of tea, and gazing at our lovely fake Walmart tree, filled with eclectic ornaments gathered over 25 years of living. We balanced a beer bottle on top in lieu of a star, at the excited suggestion of my mother on our last morning together over the Thanksgiving holiday week, and I must say it looks a sight! Somehow a Chanukah tune has accompanied my activities all morning, galloping wildly around my head, picking up speed near the song's end. Strange how those songs we were made to sing in 9th grade still pop up at unexpected moments.
"Shalom Aleichem, celebrate the new, peace the whole world through!" (insert boisterous accordion-type music throughout)
Of course my search for the song lyrics only brought me to the wonders of Wikipedia, where I was reminded of the complexity of the meaning of shalom; peace, restoration, unity between man and God, wellness, wholeness, and so on. Our choir teacher tried to impart the significance to us as teenagers, but I am only now beginning to understand the tip of it.
And I've successfully travelled down a vast rabbit hole, oh the wonders of my brain. My main point in updating today was to discuss my dance with word counts and noveling in the midst of National Novel Writing Month. On October 31st, Julian and I both signed up (and probably signed away my sanity and parts of my social life) to partake in the madness of scrawling away 50,000 words in one month's time. And when I say madness, I mean there are whole hours for which I cannot account, where Julian claims a significant amount of events occurred directly in front of me without my notice. Only when writing can I focus so intently, it still boggles my mind, being easily distracted in the everyday.
On day one, Julian and I sat together on the couch and opened our Think Pad and MacBook laptops, and let our fingers do the thinking, having no time to plan or outline. We ended with about 300 words apiece, me with a bumbling girl named Emmaline, and Julian, well, I'm still not sure what he wrote. Each day we were supposed to set 1667 words on the page, and yet after the first, we weren't even a quarter of the way there. Julian quickly lost interest, claiming to be a short story writer at best, and more of a poet at heart, and I sat for two days staring at a blank page for minutes at a time. On day four, I finally snapped back, realizing how far behind I'd fallen, and sat down in front of my food speckled computer with purpose. It didn't matter how ridiculous or silly my thoughts were, onto the page they went, and somewhere after about eight rambling pages I developed a slight bit of plot. And then, soon after, I catapulted into my least favorite part of writing: dialogue. That, too, became less and less difficult, perhaps not altogether fantastic, or even believable, but it was there.
When I reached 10,000 words, I realized quite suddenly that I had propelled myself, unknowingly, into the midst of my fears of writing, of lacking talent, of not rising to my perfectionist ideals. I have wanted to do this my whole life, ever since reading Harriet the Spy at age seven and sneaking around with my journal, cataloguing mysteriously inane events in and around the Eiche household. I also realized that I'm not as a great a speller as I once presumed, having to rely heavily on auto-correct and right-clicking on squiggly red lines. All in all it's been a lovely, if sordid affair, and I regret not one bit of it, even if finishing two days ago cost me several hours of reading and possible moments to spend time with husband and friends. This little endeavor forced me to be diligent, to sit and write every day, no matter how little brain capacity was left after spending days and evenings building language skills with children, or pretending to be a turkey (yes a gobbling, strutting, wing waving, neck thrusting spectacle) to get a few smiles and make the work not so begrudging.
Of course, now I will not be writing 2000 words daily, especially not after the long and eye-blurring days where I feel my forehead knocking into walls of frustration and lack of erudition. So today, I can sit with my now finished tea, Ranger beside me, and tap out a few more words, a new perspective on my novel devised on a refreshing afternoon walk the previous day. You see my mind is always working, always narrating and spinning webs of words sticky enough to trap me in its fibers and distract me from the present. This is a blessing and a curse, and I'm learning to be patient and work, or to live in the moment and put it away when the time calls for it. It is a process. As for my "novel", I haven't read it yet to see exactly what it is about, probably because I am not altogether finished with it. Last month was a draft of a draft, the first of many, as its file folder is so rightly named, and so away I will chip, until I get close to some idea of what exactly my mind was thinking when I first began to type. Maybe then I'll let you read it, but until that time, you must be patient, my dear ones. Unless of course, you have no interest, and rightly so, in which case this all means nothing to you and I seem like a pompous you-know-what. Either way, you had better watch out, or you might find a speck of yourselves lodged somewhere in my novel, unawares.
That last bit was a joke, or a half-joke, at least. If you do find yourself hiding away in there, it was entirely unintentional and I apologize profusely, hoping all the while that I did your character no injustice. Take heart, so far, most of them live to see the end.
Now enough blathering, I am determined to enjoy this wintery day, having had my afternoon of work recently canceled due to unforeseeable weather conditions as the evening progresses. And now I bid you all a fond farewell and leave you with this parting gift, a favorite Christmas movie:
This year was Ally and I's first time to ever host a big holiday event, the great Turkey Bash of 2011, and with all the joy and goodness of having family and good food in your home, an unknown nuisance appeared, CLEANING. We are by no means dirty people, but the cleanliness, tidiness, and expectations that come with hosting were slightly foreign to us. Our biggest problem: old school books piled high against the guest bedroom wall. Our solution: You guessed it baby, Bookshelf Time!
We thought it would be more fun to build one ourselves, so with the help of our friends (they aren't aware that we call them this) at www.instructables.com we found a bookshelf design that required an minimal amount of tools, which is exactly what we needed since we don't own a home or garage. After a longer than usual stop at the home depot we were ready to rock.
I've been thinking a lot about image lately. I feel that it has become a much more important term over my lifetime than it was years and years ago. Everything now has an image now, from corporations to individuals, and I find the world at large, myself included, spends an incredible amount of energy controlling the image's perception. Today Question 300 passed in Fort Collins banning the sale of medical marijuana via medical marijuana dispensaries. I don't have a particular vested interest in this vote (pardon me as I wipe the cheetos from my fingers), however everything I read from the people that proposed this law talked about the city's image and how the sale of marijuana tarnished its image, which is fine and fair..... I do this very thing when I am getting dressed in the morning, or when I decide what app's to download, or when I intentionally avoid facebook, because I am stubborn and want to be in complete control of how I am percieved, Julian Metz must be brand controlled. But what if.... just for a day...... I could let all of that go and just focus on who I am..... Who I was made to be.... what if I stopped just long enough to see what's really going on with me, and not what I want to be going on with me? Then maybe I could finally work on what really needs to be worked on, far far below the surface.
After a failed attempt at creating my own blog (a look into my inner mind is, I'm sure, a leaping into untethered "quirkiness"), I thought we'd be better off starting a family blog, where the two of us can contribute to content, and nudge each other lightly (loose interpretation here), when we become lazy or too far-fetched. Maybe after almost 2 years of marriage we felt that it was time to venture into the world of blogging; terrifying, luminous, ridiculous, though it may be; perhaps to update unsuspecting or suspecting readers on our daily, well mostly likely weekly, existence in our current home. Readers may expect to encounter anything related to family updates (whatever that may entail), excursions, happenings, interests, joys, sorrows, fears, inner musings, our delight in life and our connection to the stars and the stuff of the universe, to you. Well, plenty of tangents, too, as you may well have just witnessed. In any case, we wanted to include more of you into our life (whoever you may be, those we see on a daily basis, or monthly, or yearly, or haven't seen in years). And so, it is with deep gratitude of the connection we may have with you, however strong or tenuous, that I write this now, we are eternally grateful for your existence. I am ever confronted with the astounding fact that people have souls, are alive, teeming with joys and loves and fears, are not just warm bodies milling this way and that. They have feelings. They are each of them creating some small footprint on this earth. Sometimes I forget there's more than just me, and Julian, and maybe my family. I am selfish and I am sorry. But more importantly, although what can be more important than souls?, I am realizing that we are all formed out of similar matter, from the beginning of the universe; we are a part of the star dust swirling out there in space! We were or are, I suppose, dust; boring, useless, terribly irritating; until light was breathed unto us, and life was birthed.
I'm not too sure where I was going there, but I do know I should probably not write while listening to this:
On a relatively similar note, Everyday Joes, our favorite coffeehouse and community here in town, is hosting Aaron Strumple (as heard above) with full band in December. Joy abounds, we will be there! For a glimpse into what will be occurring:
Now it's off to the store for me to buy salt so people don't die on our icy front steps of doom! Enjoy your weekend, do something wildly exciting, like pumpkin carving or dressing up like a monster (see below)!
