writing

“i scratched these words into a black notebook…”: on notebooks.

• by kerri
Despite the increased digitization of everything, I still have a very intense attraction to notebooks. While I have many pretty, brightly coloured, designed notebooks, I sometimes am drawn more to actually writing in plain black ones (of which I have dozens). Of course, they all look the same on the inside, pretty much.
 
“I scratched these words into a black notebook…”
—last straw, jack’s mannequin 
 
 
 
I also have this tendency to abandon notebooks—from the ten-cent coil bound (no, I def didn’t pay $0.90!) to the Moleskines–much like my tendency to abandon projects partway through, notebooks often begin as projects. Even journals, occasionally these notebooks become abandoned with desire to start a new chapter—or because I find it more convenient to write and organize using Evernote (and its notebook/note system). I can also type faster than I can write—and I can certainly think faster than I can type at many times.
 
For 2015, I have started a new Evernote notebook; for the last few days I have been brainstorming a rejuvenation of this blog—mostly post ideas and themes to keep me on track and better motivated to blog. While my friend Scott has said that your blog is your blog and you can do what you want with it (which is, if you want to abandon it for weeks/months/years and return, hey, it’s your blog), one thing that I constantly reflected on in 2014 was that I wished I were blogging more. Once school finished, I felt like I had more time to blog, yet little to say. Once I left my job, I felt like I had even less to say—I began the Quantify This. blog, but even that in the aftershocks was difficult to stick to. So here I am again: with more of a plan, but hoping that I can maintain the low-pressure of blogging while producing more content.
I hope to tell some of the stories that I’ve yet to tell. Some of these stories will perhaps need to be harvested out of old notebooks, and others will just happen when they happen. I’m not going to force it out, but i’m going to try a bit harder on days where I just don’t feel like blogging but am scheduled to post (I’m aiming [flexibly] for Monday/Tuesday/Thursday/Saturday), because writing is kind of like working out that way: getting started can be the hardest part, and once you’re moving, it happens.
 
And, perhaps in the process I will launch a purple or black pen into one of these notebooks… A completely clean break…
 
 
 
…Or reopen this one that I left off at a place of unrest: 
 
 
(Yes, how appropriate.)
 
2015: let’s do this. A time to reconnect, on many levels… And writing more should help me figure out where I’m at on many levels as well…
life

finding the words

• by kerri

i try to speak but i cannot / words were harder than i thought / i tried to run to You but i’m stuck / and i can’t move / but i feel it in my veins / a change is taking place / breaking free the mould i’ve made / i’m starting to move . . .

love you back, addison road

I’ve been trying to find words to write, any words to write, for over a week now. I typically have no shortage of words, and yet, I am at a standstill.

So I write about having no words.

Writing, for me, has been as much therapy as anything. It’s a healing process in and of itself, it’s a healing process in reading back those words weeks, months, years later. It has been that kind of a process since I was nine years old. I write less so to write and more so to find something inside of it–inside of me–later on.  And when I feel like I have nothing to uncover–or nothing I really want to find inside myself–then I unfortunately shove it aside.

Yet, likely, in those moments, I need it then, too.

The stagnancy. The routine.

Things I do not like.

Maybe the words help me break free of that as well.

health + fitness / life / wellness

intention.

• by kerri

The last six weeks was, I am sure, more than enough to make me unsettled (in a not-good way).

Last week, the seventh week, was about reclaiming ground, becoming more settled in my body, knowing things are getting better.

Saturday . . . i had this feeling arise over me. For the first time in a very long time, I felt healthy. I have clung on to that feeling for the past 30 hours. (My lungs still don’t feel right, but hey, otherwise I feel good, I can deal with the lungs. I’m blaming the rain for that).

Finally feeling healthy, though, made me realize everything I need to work on. Things I have the energy to work on. Finally.

Physical Activity.

Exercise is a thing that suffered–which is also a thing that I’ve found keeps me balanced . . . contributing to the state of emotional unbalance on top of the obvious physical unbalance.

Exercise graph

Part of this dropoff was intentional. When my hemoglobin was slipping bad, I was intentionally not exercising beyond walking to and from the bus, because I didn’t want to contribute any to the state of dropping–the reality is, I’ve been sicker than I cared to admit since March. And I was trying to be proactive and my doctor was not engaging with me on working with me on that.

The other part is that I simply could not do things. I would walk home from the bus and have to take breaks because it was too hard–my heart would pound inside me with even small amounts of moderate exertion. I would get short of breath and it wasn’t the asthma. I was a mess for a lot longer than I admitted to many people, but what else was I supposed to do? I didn’t know better that what I was feeling would become as bad as it did down the road.

This, I need to rectify.  Back to paying attention to the fitbit, and doing some TribeSports challenges to bring my focus back to where it should be.

Nutrition.

It is not so much the fact of micromanaging the micronutrients that I need to work on, it is just simply making healthier food choices. Leaning away from all of the stuff that I know I don’t feel good from or about after eating, and having all that stuff on a less frequent basis. It’s a fine line, and I know myself–and I know that I have a hard time balancing this stuff in the most basic way.

Creativity.

Writing has for as long as I can remember been my release. I started journaling and writing lyrics/poetry in the fourth grade. These things have been the sole methods of getting me through so much of the tough stuff in my life.  2013, having the theme of Make Yourself, I want to expand on that. I’ve been trying to make a more focused attempt at journaling–“and i scratched these words / into a black notebook”.

Words have always been my weapon. Music has been a second.

Visual art? Even farther, yet still something I have gravitated towards and wanted . . . but seldom wrapped my fingers around.

Friday . . . I started to transform that with a quote inspired from one of Andrew McMahon’s tattoos.

Winnipeg-20130623-00647.jpg

my intention / a bullet / my body / a trigger finger / . . . and my pen is a pistola.

my secret arsenal is an infinite, ageless inkwell / it’s a fountain of youth and a patriot’s weapon of choice.

pistola, incubus

I’ll be capturing that process on deviantART.

Balance.

I’ll be honest here. It’s a paradox: when my health is at its worst, the things that keep my body and mind balanced are the first to go in the effort to simply survive. I’m realizing now that this is incredibly backwards, yet . . . it feels incredibly necessary at the time.

when dark clouds cover the sky / like there’s no hope, You are my light / You tell me to live. / when i’m all by myself / and i’m scared about my health / You tell me to live. / and when You heal my broken wings / yes, You heal my everything / You tell me to live.

You tell me to live, the rocket summer

Be intentional.

This week . . . I am rolling back onto Operation Intention. Getting back to making better choices . . . for all of me. Body, mind and heart.

Recovery.

#hawmc

my outta style is coming back – #hawmc day 15

• by kerri

–my out of style is coming back, matthew good band

HAWMC_2012_dayprompt-15.png

 

 

I don’t proofread. I read it as I go along but I never give it the final read-over before I hit Send to Blog in MarsEdit. Planning is not my thing, and thus, #hawmc may be the death of me–or at least my BEDA mojo. Actually, I’ve already failed the BEDA bit, but fortunately #hawmc is a bit more liberal with the get-out-of-post-free day bit.  I am bad writing with prompts, because if I’m not feeling it, I procrastinate it, and then end up with posts like this one that I’m writing at 11:23 PM on a Sunday after spending the majority of the day studying, the majority of the evening studying, and the last hour reading Butch Walker’s book Drinking with Strangers.  The evidence of the lack of planning is right in that last sentence on the segway into Butch Walker.

I edit as I go, not after. For example, edit was just typed as “edi t”. My brain goes way too fast for my fingers, which I’m sure is sometimes evident in the lacking of cohesion within these posts.

Titles are sometimes my worst enemy or my best friend. They always come last. Half the time they’re quotes because that’s how much I suck at titles–I used to have a livejournal where every single effing entry was titled with a song lyric. It was ridiculous (also the journal itself sucked). When I use quotes in the beginning of an entry, I’m thinking of ’em before I even start writing, so that was there from the get-go. If they’re in the middle, they came about then, and if they’re at the end . . . well, you get it.  I’ve been told that I write how I talk, but I’m not sure about that. 90% of the posts in this blog, if not 98%, have been written at my kitchen table, probably, but my favourite place to blog is from a hotel room because I know I’ve been doing something cool and have stories to share.

I never simply “write a post”. I’m always doing more than one thing at a time. In the span of this writing about writing thing, I’ve checked Twitter, Facebook, the wegohealth blog, my BlackBerry, glanced at my notes on proteins, and been tapping my feet around. See, the cohesion thing, people. This is an overflow.  This is also the reason I have an issue getting any actual non-blog writing accomplished, because I’m just doing too much at once. I’ve been trying to write a book for six years–totally hasn’t happened. My creative process is just so scattered that I get distracted within a few sentences and it takes hours to get a page done. Of course, it’s still a goal.

So, like the above quote. . . I blog, and people read it, but it’s definitely not fully-dressed.

Except we call ski-caps toques.

life / wellness

thoughts on lent, wellness and trusting the process

• by kerri

I’ve started journalling again. It’s my Lent Thing this year, I think. Not that I have any serious attachments to Lent or whatever, as I am 1) not Catholic, and 2) not uber traditional, and 3) not a huge fan of the “religion” thing and 4) feeling a little more divided than usual from all my typical pondering on what it means to be a Christian, but since it kind of happened simultaneously, I think it’s a good time to be intentional about these kinds of choices.

The journalling thing was a bit of a production. The thing is, since I was like ten when I started journalling, I’ve always just used scraggly kicking-around notebooks. Apologies to anybody who bought me a diary with a lock and a pretty front at any point in my life, because they just don’t work for me. I rock the Dollarama-Notebook or the 40-Page-4-Pack-Notebook or, in the case of the notebook I pulled out yesterday, the Black-Dollarama-Notebook-That-Has-Been-Kicking-Around-My-Room-For-Over-A-Year-And-Is-Beat-Up-Before-I-Even-Started-Writing-In-It.  These are the kinds of notebooks I use, and I have no idea why.  Even when I was searching out a notebook in my abyss of a bedroom on Wednesday, I found some really nice notebooks. Like glittery flowery butterfly-y ones, but I couldn’t justify using them to journal in.

I have no idea, honestly.

The thing is, I think that this simple action has set me up for what was coming today.

First, I will start by saying that I am twenty years old and I have a financial planner.  So because of this financial planner business, I get e-mails all the time from his Events Manager [I forget her actual title] inviting me to things like free IMAX with free popcorn in exchange for attending a seminar about retirement.  These, despite the free popcorn, are the kinds of things I opt out of seeing as I have only actually had a job for two years and therefore have another at least twenty five, and a whole lot of school, to go before I retire. [I am toying with the idea of amping up my 3-year kinesiology degree to a 4-year, because this seems like a good idea, except more difficult and will take me another year to get through, at least].  So maybe considering I will be in school for the foreseeable future, it is a good thing I have this financial planner guy on my side.  He is a triathlete, so once I found that out I thought he was pretty awesome. Like “Hey, this is a guy I can trust with my money.” [I didn’t actually think that, but I mean, triathletes have to save money to maintain their bikes and buy running shoes and swim gear and consume GU and enter Ironmans and travel to Ironmans right? Anyway, triathletes are awesome.]

It turns out he has a Life Coaching-esque business on the side, and he hosted a Wellness Symposium today. Granted, if I didn’t have the background that I do, I would have had no idea that wellness is the holistic meshing of a variety of domains of health: physical, social, emotional, spiritual, environmental, occupational, because this was not explained at the symposium. So when I got the e-vite to this thing, I got my friend Tara on board and we decided to go on the notion that there might be free fruit, and there was (also my mom came too).

What does my obsession with not-pretty-notebooks have to do with this?

To summate my 2012 goals, I think this is what it is: it comes down to being intentional.  For setting myself up for success.  Over the next 40 days, my life is going to fill that notebook. The good, the bad, the questions, the decisions, the goals, the process. It’s the coming together of the choice to be intentional about what I am doing.  It’s something I feel that I need to be more focused in, and if I’ve been doing the journaling bit since I was ten [sporadically, I might admit], then it’s gotta be of some sort of therapeutic value in my life, even if subconsciously. It’s gotten me through a lot.

It’s an intentional call to be still in the midst of the chaos that is life and actually experience it for what it IS, and hopefully not what it could be. [That is another focus for another night, the being in the moment stuff. Because I am apparently becoming all wrapped up in psychology for a kinesiology major.]

It’s not about the ending, it’s about the story.

It’s about trusting the process.