bright lights and cityscapes.

[title from Sara Bareilles' Bright Lights and Cityscapes. Just go YouTube it and listen. Not sure why I chose it, but maybe you'll know when you hear it.]

 

Written mostly last night (additional edits added today):
tears included, no refunds or exchanges.

sometimes i feel like i take too much advantage of my family and the people that care about me. we went to a nice dinner for my aunt’s birthday tonight in downtown at a brazilian grill and my dad paid for this expensive buffet and meat rotation that the waiters cut from skewers… i probably had only the equivalent size of a 6-8 oz cup of any meats, 2 mid-sized trips to the buffet/salad bar thing and a brazilian guarana soda. (freakin’ $4.50 for a can!) over $50 later per meal… i had way less than everyone else from the meat rotation because only on a very rare occasion will i eat red meat, and most of the selection was different types of beef. in all honesty, i should have just had the salad bar buffet thing, but based on the description on the menu, i thought there would be a larger range of choices. over a $300 dinner for 4 people just doesn’t compute with what i actually consumed. i feel like i wasted a fair amount of my dad’s money, and while it was a family affair, i can’t help but feeling like i don’t deserve having that spent on me for something i really didn’t take part in. and these days at my job… i’m really not getting enough hours to live on. maybe that’s where this stems from- not being able to even support myself in the day-to-day life. if i can’t even pay all my bills and a damn parking ticket i got (parked in front of my own house!), how am i supposed to afford christmas gifts for my family? i’ve told my dad about my lack of hours, etc, and i’m looking for a new/additional job, but even if i got it tomorrow, it wouldn’t be in enough time for christmas. you know what he told me though? he offered to give me some money to buy gifts with. he has done so much for me already, and i’ve taken advantage of it… i can’t make him pay for his own christmas gifts. his reasoning is that he still wouldn’t know what they were. i just… after all i’ve taken from him, he still is so good me. i understand that i am his only daughter, but the amount that i’ve given him back in any way doesn’t even begin to reach even close to all he’s given me, given up for me. at least that’s how i’m seeing it now… with all the tragedy around the world this past week or two, i really can’t let myself take anything – anyONE, rather – for granted, or let myself take advantage of them… their generosity. and i know that sometimes it’s an act of good faith, or pure love, but even still. i’ve taken/accepted so much that i have to make it stop and reverse somewhere. and i’m choosing it to be here, for better or worse, i suppose… but i still have two hundred dollars sitting in my bank account now, that my dad put in my bank account this morning, that i can’t let go toward bills and living expenses. granted, it still wouldn’t be enough for that, but i can’t use it for that, because i know it’s for christmas and his love and generosity just destroys me sometimes. it’s like the tears don’t stop rolling because i can’t get over it. what do i possibly do to repay him for so much, for so long, and AFTER so long, for some things…? i just don’t know. let me just go cry about it some more and see if i can find any answers.

have a good night, loves…

xo,
.j.

sleep.

[title inspired by what i'm currently listening to on repeat: sleep by white apple tree. also, outro by the same band, and river prayer by jay nash.]

what the title of this post should be:

anxiety.

it creeps in, so unassuming, at night when i try to relax… or am just alone in my room, which is a large majority of the time that i’m home. i never thought, in a house full of eight people, that i could feel so alone. not just ‘alone’ between myself and the roommates, but in general. it’s tough sometimes, especially when all you want is someone to SEE you, and realise that maybe you need a hug, to be held or just time spent, some care. maybe i’ve gotten too good at wearing a mask again… pretending to be fine, all the time.

i don’t really know where the anxiety is coming from… but i am an only child, maybe all these people i now live with are catching up with me. though, in my teens/growing up there was a fair amount of anxiety that i had at my mom’s house, with my ex-stepdad… just tension between us all. he drank too much, was angry (had an undiagnosed anger management problem, i say), felt that my mom did too much for me, and that i was, as i believe he once called me, ‘an inconsiderate little bitch’. he wasn’t violent, just violently angry… (but i always wondered if he’d hit a breaking point – though he almost did on a vacation to NYC). so i learned to be afraid of him in the evenings, to a point. i spent a lot of time in my room, avoiding being downstairs, because it would usually cause some kind of disagreement, or create frustration over something. i just didn’t want him finding one more fault to criticize or question me about, in turn creating a fight between he and my mom.

but now? i just wonder what impact, if any, that dynamic and experience has had on me. this past week or two, for whatever reason, i have just been anxious a lot – at home, mostly in the evenings when most people are home. (throw some panic attacks in that mix, and i’m a regular basket case.) though they (well, we all do, really) keep to ourselves here, generally… it’s an i can’t win type situation that i’m finding myself in. no people/nothing immediately around me, so i feel alone, but i don’t want to be around people all the time, or even most of the time when i’m here (at my house). when my roommates/the rare guest are here – i hear them being loud/raucous (usually when i’m trying NOT to be) and it makes me anxious. those are just the dredges and echoes that tell me there are people here being obnoxious, and i think what it is that gets me, is that i can’t control what they do, how loud they are, what they listen to. i guess it comes down to control… (probably one reason why i like to go drive sometimes… the control factor.) i’m sure there’s more to this, but it’s hard to try and figure it out when you’re the one it’s affecting.

so i guess where i have ended up right now is that me being anxious is from an unseen loss/lack of control? ugh. i never imagined i’d be in this place, or be ‘this person’. how do i fix that? fix me… this anxiety thing is really quite tiring. ):

xo to you lovely people out there.
sorry for kind of a dark post… welcome to my immediate life, eh? thanks for reading.

only shadows

Good morning…

It’s about 10:15a, I just finished breakfast, and am sitting at our kitchen table before getting ready for work- It’s that quiet moment before the house is up and moving that I’m in right now, and it’s amazing. I think I might learn to love mornings like these. Especially if they’re all like this. The table looks outside over the deck and out into a little valley of houses, and trees… The nights here are shaping up to always be long and kind of noisy, so mornings, here I am.

The moment has gone as quickly as it came, but I suppose I’ll have to get up just a little bit earlier, and give myself this moment. Everything lately has been so hectic, and rushed. I commute to work now, instead of my 5-10 minute drive that I had before. I mean, the new drive isn’t that bad, but I have to plan more accordingly. So moments like this are hard to come by, especially in a house of 8 college students.

Time to go find more of my things in boxes (like my wide tooth comb!) and get ready for the day. We’ll see what it brings. 9 hour day today. See yuins tonight.

xo,

.j.

ps: my new obsession and all I’ve listened to since I heard it? (and not at all relevant to this post, or that this post is titled after the song…)

Only Shadows, Sara Bareilles’ brand BRAND new song. (Not available to download/buy anywhere yet, but click below to listen. It is breathtaking.)

monterey – javier dunn

[nothing about the song in the title has anything to do with the post, just maybe the vibe/feel of the track.]

 

hey friends.

sorry i’ve been gone so long. i have come to a place to begin again and kind of start fresh. another new job, i’m moving in with a bunch of roommates tomorrow night, since our house here sold, and going back to school at the end of september. as far as i know, all the roommates aren’t going to be moving in at once, but over the course of a week, maybe two, which will be nice.

with the refresh of my life, comes a refresh of the blog. i promise i haven’t forgotten about it!

i am completely unprepared for moving tomorrow night. the anxiety that i’m feeling right now between that, and something that i’ll post about tomorrow, is kind of crippling. i’ve been busy trying to get everything ready and i’m still not even close. i’m procrastinating though… i only have something like 3 boxes packed. i just have no motivation, because leaving here terrifies me- just the inevitability of never being able to come back here makes me sick. I’m kind of excited, but at the same time, not too excited to figure out how to work, go to school and succeed at both. i get to commute across a toll bridge to work everyday… the gas and toll costs are going to suck.

so instead of packing, i’m writing this blog, and listening to spotify. loving ry cuming, ben taylor, jon mclaughlin lately… (james vincent mcmorrow and gotye too) among quite a few others, but i feel like i don’t get as much time as i’d like to just sit and really listen to music, and things. i have so many things on my list lately- things to do, get, fix, pay for… just not sure when it’s all going to get done. IF it is… ):

oh well, more later… i need to get some sleep for tomorrow.

sigh.

goodnight, love yuins.

.j.

breathe.

Holy shit, guys.

It’s been HOW MANY months since I last posted? Yikes.

So… I have these things called a MacBook and an iPhone AND now (from Christmas) an iPad… Yeah, you’ve heard of them, I’m sure. It just means that I have no excuse for not blogging. So I’m sorry. I can’t believe people are still even visiting my page… (Newsflash, you’re not.)

Well, since the last time I was here, I have obviously ditched my Droid for an iPhone 4, I have gotten a new job that, unfortunately, isn’t quite what I had expected… But on another front, I bought a new fucking car!! Ahh!

Meet my ’09 Acura TSX:

Photo from the dealer.

I love it to pieces (Not to say that on very rare occasions, I don’t miss my little BMW though). I don’t necessarily love the payment or the insurance, but it could be worse. I got a good deal on it. (:

Someday, I’ll be puttering ZIPPING around LA and up the coast in this rather sexy little car. (if I do say so…) I miss LA constantly… Especially with not living up so much closer to Seattle anymore. I’ll live there soon enough. Just gotta save my pennies, so to speak.

Here in about a week or two though, my next endeavor (speaking of living near Seattle) I’m going to be moving back up there to my dad’s house and commuting for awhile, since right now I’m living with my mother and grandmother here, and it is getting to be just a little bit TOO MUCH. I love my mom dearly, but everything is piling on top of everything else, and it’s getting overwhelming. Maybe a little distance will help. Maybe to give me a little different angle, a bit of a different perspective to have.

I want change constantly, it seems… Traveling, different things, jobs, whatever… Restlessness. A kind if discontentment though is coming with that restlessness at this point in my life. I want to experience things for myself and not be tied/pinned down by things, people, rules, or let my actions and feelings be dictated for me. I need to figure out how to define myself, by myself. Learn things how I want to, at the speed I want.

 

*Sorry for the kind of repetitiveness of this post… I had this one and the previous one going at the same time, but now I’m just saying fuck it and posting both. Ha! xoxo

tangled in the morning sun…

[title inspired by Venice, CA and Summer is Over by Jon McLaughlin (feat. Sara Bareilles)]

One of these days, i’m just going to pack up my things into boxes, load up my car, and drive away. Granted, I don’t have enough money to do so at this point, but I’d figure it out, right?

I want to live somewhere that I want to live, not letting who I’m stuck living with dictate where I live, because of money. I don’t want to live here.

I want to live somewhere beautiful, and with different weather. (Not so much damn rain and grey!) But really, I want some freedom and solitude in my own space. All my things with their own places… I’d know where everything is at any given time — because I put it there.
I think in these coming weeks, i might start packing all my things into boxes, and go back to my dad’s. It was a mistake to leave, and a very stupid one at that. I mean, now he and I laugh about it, but at least now I see his point-of-view, and how ridiculous I was being, but I guess it’s experiences like that one that have to happen in order for you to see what should have happened and where you really want to be. ‘Learn from your mistakes’ they say, and shit, if that was EVER a mistake…

I think I need to do me for now. What I want to do, take a leap of faith or two and do what I really want to do. Me, I want to travel and be free and independent, and i’ve never NOT lived with a parent. But in that, it’s different living with my dad versus my mom. Living with my dad, I have rent to pay and freedom. Living with my mom, I have no rent to pay, and no freedom, BUT within that ‘no rent to pay’, there is a stipulation that I have asked about… If I did pay rent, would it make a difference in my personal freedom in my own space (my room/bathroom, etc)? My mother wants things a certain way and with her, they WILL be that way or nothing. And she has told me such, again and again. Even if I did pay rent, it wouldn’t matter she has told me, so I don’t pay rent. There would be no point other than wasting my money on her, for what? To pay her for what little I even use at the house? The only thing that I would be apt to pay for would be is the rest of my phone bill since she has switched to AT&T for herself through her work. But I already make my own car and insurance payments.

I feel the most free when I’m off on my own with only a phone line as my connection to my parents. I would love to have my own place, but I really need to find the right kind of job for ME. And unfortunately, my dream is to live in California, but I need to be educated before I can afford anything down there, really. Washington has the highest minimum wage in the US, I think. They just raised it to $9.04, from $8.55, at the beginning of the month. At my job, I got a $0.04 cent raise! Yippee! Haha. /:

So it’s now 2:30am on the 12th, and I’m can’t think of anything else to write right now. I’ll look back over this later. I’m just so tired of things how they are… Goodnight. xo

Birthday, working out, to-do’s and LA…

Hey, what’s up?

I know, I know, I haven’t been around much lately. Sorry… Not that apologising to you will somehow bring me to post more… But you can have a cupcake? How about that…? (:

Yummy Cupcake.

In other news, HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO ME! I’m ooooold!(er.) My birthday is NOT today, it was the 26th, and what do I have to show for it? Not a thing, really. That cupcake right up there? Made yesterday for one of my mom’s co-worker’s birthday’s. Not for me, but I ate one anyway… I think even though I requested cinnamon-sugar pie crust for my birthday, I should still have gotten a legitimate cake or even a cupcake with the whole candle and ‘let’s sing Happy Birthday and humiliate the birthday-ee’ deal. We went to dinner at El Gaucho, though, and OH MY GOD. It was fantastic. Just about as fantastic as I remember The Met being. So I guess I take that back, I got a DAMN elegant and beautiful five-course dinner for my birthday… Though, unfortunately, the actual gift I was going to get fell through. But with dinner… I was really wishing for a good glass of sparkling red wine. Ahh, if only I were in Europe… (or Canada).

Course One – Hors d’œuvre; Escargot, in garlic-herb butter, of course. (Brings back wonderful memories of Paris… Ahhh.)

Course Two - Salade; I had an absolutely phenomenal caprese salad. (I wonder how long the balsamic vinegar was aged? So very good, and a little sweet.)

Course Three - Le Plat Principal; My order was Filet Medallions Oscar, (‘Oscar’ meaning topped with crab and béarnaise) with asparagus, an ‘El Gaucho’ baked potato (was shared with my mom), and a roasted corn dish with chipotle-honey butter (for the table).

Course Four - Le Fromage; A grand, very tasty fruit and cheese plate.

Course Four - Dessert; Banana Bread Pudding. The creme anglaise was unbelievable. I ate most all of it… It was so, so good.

…And if I didn’t need to go to the gym before, I really do now. I’m pretty sure I love food way too much, but I really need to hit the gym, ASAP. Not kidding. I really miss the more in-shape, skinnier me circa about 2008. Come to think of it, I probably weighed the least I ever weighed, then, but I was a lot more fit, so it wasn’t freaky-skinny. But there are a lot of things on my work-out agenda… Wanna hear? Yeah? Read on.  No? Well, you get to anyway!

- Stretching and yoga
- Running and endurance work
- A good amount of core-work, maybe crunches, etc.

And what I’m mostly excited about;
- Doing some MMA type work…
- Kickboxing…
- I want to learn Krav Maga (Israeli hand-to-hand street-type fighting – Girl’s gotta learn to defend herself!)
- I want to mix it up a little and learn archery for sure, maybe do some rock climbing?

And that brings us to Los Angeles. Becaaause, while I’m there (beginning in about TEN DAYS), I’m hoping to kick-off this work-out plan I have with morning running along Venice Beach. Ooh, just realised that running in the sand would be a great workout! However… I need new running shoes. The last ones I had were shit to begin with. The COMPLETELY wrong thing for me, though they were nice shoes. We have a great little place in Mar Vista that we’ll be staying in… Thank God for vrbo.com. You see… My favorite thing to do when I go places, is to go and NOT really be a tourist, whereas my father… He wants to go places and do the tourist-y things… (Uhhck.) For example, he suggested going to Universal Studios AGAIN, and he suggested that we might go to Six Flags? I don’t know… My philosophy, at least with LA, is that ‘I’d rather go do the tourist-y things (like Six Flags) once I live there’. I do have some things on my list, though. I want to go to the Natural History Museum (ahem, Bones, anyone??) and I really want need to go back and spend a day, and have lunch, maybe do some writing, at the Getty Museum. God, I love that place, and I’ve only been there once. There’s just something about it…
The best part, though? It’s free!

I have so many things on my to-do list before then, including doing the ‘birthday dinner’ thing with my dad, and his side. It’s insane… I’m not going to get into that all now, because I’m sure I’ll just stress myself out further… But shoot, I really need to decide on a place for dinner. Harumph. Decisions, decisions. (;

Well, it’s late, – early? - so I am signing off for now.

Hugs. xo

ps; Remind me to write post tags for this post later!!

Of Castle, hopes, dreams, and… haircuts?

To be honest, the last thing on my mind right now is this blog post, because I am still in absolute SHOCK at the Castle Season Finale from tonight. I am at a complete loss for words with it… from it. September could not come sooner, in that respect.

At any rate… Hola friends! (Therein lies the extent of my Spanish. I’m kidding!! I know one or two other phrases… Hah.)
Well, I got a haircut today (well, really it was “yesterday”…). It’s good, but I chopped off my ‘bangs’ (they lost like 4+ inches… they were past my chin- they weren’t really bangs anymore)… and they’re a little on the short side of what I wanted, but hair grows, right? I’ll get it fixed up. I’m just (rather) impatient. Just like I wish my hair were like four or five inches longer than it is, too, but again… Oh well. Anyway. I’ve had this post written… It’s still in a partial state, but there’s enough there to MAKE it a full post. With that, though, I’ll hooopefully be adding some things to it.

Sound familiar? I said I would be adding things to that food list I made, and thaaaaat hasn’t happened yet, so I would advise not putting too much stock in hopes that I’ll update this post. Hah. Sorry about that.

So here’s the post I mentioned, because I know that’s what you read this thing for, no?

-Hopes & Dreams-

maybe i’ll go to cooking school. maybe i’ll become a CSI-type person, despite all the math. who knows, maybe i will end up in music… though i’m not too sure. maybe an investigator of some kind. i’m quite a good searcher, and finder of things- information, etc…

there are plenty of places where i hope i might end up, geographically speaking, and i wonder where i’ll end up first. or how far i’ll get. the things that have stayed clear to me though, are these… i’ll end up somewhere and have my cute little house, and maybe an apartment in my second favorite place… a “second favorite home”… and a dog, eventually. MY dog, my unconditional lover.

i’ll keep in touch with friends, and have nice dinners, and actually be able to let go sometimes, and go enjoy myself- go dancing, bar-hopping… and other times just stay in, make dinner, and enjoy time with my dog. maybe some tv, or maybe i’ll have a hot tub at my disposal, or just relax in a bath with a good book and a glass of wine. that sounds pretty good to me.

i’ll have in-house speakers or some type of music players all over my house… music is all-over in my life. i’ll have a place for my piano and guitar and whatever other musical instruments i acquire by then.

i’ll have a good desk and chair- and actually make myself use them- because i need to break these current habits. i’ll have a couch long enough for sleeping on- and comfortable enough, too! i’ll probably have dog beds- dog areas- everywhere. Haha.
That’s all she wrote for now…

xoxo.

Yo!

It’s the twitter bird! Holla!

Not at the computer… Posted from my Droid.

My apologies…

So, I’m sorry to any of you out there that read this, that I haven’t posted in awhile… I have a written out post waiting in the wings. I will hopefully get it posted soon. Thanks for being patient. I feel bad for not posting! (:
Xoxo to you.

Not at the computer… Posted from my Droid.