Month: March 2014

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Learning to Change

thThe R on my keyboard sticks. In fact, every single time you see an R in this blog post just know that I’ve typed it in repeatedly before it showed up. I’m not quite sure when it started, but it was probably about three weeks ago. It was subtle, too, at first, so that I merely found it mildly annoying. In the beginning. Then it began truly bothering me this past week. With a vengeance.

I thought about prying the key up and trying to figure out what was happening underneath, thought about being the keyboard doctor, but I stopped myself with one very real fear: what would happen if I couldn’t get it to go back on? Then not only would I be without a perfectly working R key, but I would then have also maimed my keyboard to no avail. At least it’s not my space bar.

When it began messing up my Facebook posts and responses, that’s when I knew it was more than just an inconvenience. I mean, it’s Facebook! That’s probably an extension of my anal retentive nature, needing everything to be perfect, and being extremely disappointed when it reveals itself to be different from my ideal. It’s why I’m hardly ever satisfied, even when things go as well as they can possibly go. I’m always looking for that perfect scenario, that fluid R to complete my keyboard.

When I was young it first manifested in my bedroom while I was counting bars on my window. I would sit on my bed and stare through the glass at those thick black bars that made me feel like I was in prison. I counted them over and over again, even though they never changed. There were eight in total, and it eased my mind to have such a solid footing. I knew there were eight, and everyone else who counted would have seen eight as well. It was soothing in its way.

Continue reading “Learning to Change”

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The Absence of Her

I still think of her sometimes, even seventeen years later. She comes to me in dreams every few months, looking just as she did then, with a questioning look in her eyes, before fading away yet again. But she also slides into my thoughts in the daytime hours, while I’m doing mundane things, like driving … Continue reading The Absence of Her

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Reflections

  I am reflected in my mother. She gave me life and a lot of my personality. She instilled in me the love of reading that has served me well all these years. She always put me ahead of herself and always gave me opportunities to be me. I am reflected in my daughter. She … Continue reading Reflections

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That Glass Slipper

Fairy-Tale-Cinderella-1At first glance, the story of Cinderella reads like a true “happily ever after” tale about a girl who rises from oppression and the underclass to become a princess and have everything she could have ever wanted. She gets the man of her dreams, who just happens to also be a prince, and rich, and apparently extremely good looking too. What are the odds? But let’s dig a little deeper and see what we find in this tale.

First off, the one we hear Disney tell is not the original from Grimm’s Faerie Tales. Instead it has been prettied up to avoid most of the gruesome nature of that tale, and to make it more suitable as reading material for the young and young at heart. The infamous glass slipper was not in fact glass (it was golden), there was no fairy godmother (it was a pair of magical birds instead), and we get some mutilation as part of the original tale that does not factor into the Disney version.

But I think children would learn a lot more from the original tale, even if it frightens them at first. And maybe adults would learn a lot more as well.

First off, Cinderella’s mother dies, but instead of mourning she spends all of her time being kind and overly optimistic in the face of hard times and a lack of appreciation from the people who were supposed to be closest to her. Her father completely ignores her, preferring to call her the serving wench instead of his daughter, and he marries a woman who is by all accounts horrid to the girl. He much prefers his two stepdaughters, who aren’t ugly at all on the outside, but who are completely black and evil on the inside.

Which is when the real story begins, or at least when the real begging begins. Continue reading “That Glass Slipper”

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Six For Saturday

Today was my sixth straight day working, and my brain is just a little fried with the lack of a break, but I have made progress with several endeavors outside of work. I also dealt with some personal issues, ate quite a bit of cheesecake, exercised a lot to work that off, and got a … Continue reading Six For Saturday