Castles in Spain
Feb. 26th, 2003 02:54 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mousmeOne of my favourite things to do in the world is plan stuff. Not actually do it, because my plans are always for "in a year," or "when I grow up," or "when I have money." But it's still fun.
It's building castles in Spain, as the saying goes. Don't remember where it comes from. I realise I haven't built that many castles in this LiveJournal, mostly because some part of me is really afraid of being laughed at or being told that my dreams are unreasonable or silly, or being told to quit thinking about a nonexistent future and concentrate on the present.
Building castles in Spain is my favourite way of not thinking about my problems.
I've decided to throw caution to the winds and build some castles today, in–between reading applications for![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
aparecium_rpg. While I'm at it: WOULD SOMEONE PLEASE FOR THE LOVE OF ALL THAT'S GOOD AND HOLY APPLY FOR HARRY POTTER?!?!?!?
Okay, momentary rant over. ;)
One particular castle at the momentis actually a castle. Well, not quite. But I've found myself getting a stronger and stronger hankering for a house. Yes, ironic for a girl who finds it hard to keep a four–room apartment clean, but I keep getting this weird nesting urge to have a house.
I miss having at least two floors where I live. I miss having a real library: not just a couple of bookcases, but an entire 20 x 30 room with floor–to–ceiling books like I had in my parents' house. I want a sunny laundry room where I could have my washer and dryer and a clothes line and a rack for hanging clothes so I wouldn't have to hang all my stuff in the bathroom from the shower curtain rod.
I want to be able to wander up and down the stairs and have plants everywhere and be able to design all the different rooms the way I want. I'd like to have a project room in which I could have a dozen half–completed projects that I could work on intermittently when the urge struck: knitting, sewing, writing, carpentry (yes, I know that I wouldn't even know where to begin, but this is a fantasy), scultping my little clay figurines.
I want to have a large sofa in an equally large living–room where I can curl up and read or watch television. I want to have large comfy leather chairs in my library so that I can read in there if I want. I'd love to have a writing desk, one of those tilted ones that you can open up and keep all your letter–writing stuff in there. My parents have my grandfather's old writing–desk, and I covet it every time I go to visit them.
I want a house that's filled with light and huge fishtanks and cats and maybe a dog and definitely some birds. Maybe a bunch of canaries so that they can fill the air with happy trilling. I've always wanted to build an aviary (or have one built) and house lots of birds in it.
I also want a garden. A beautiful garden with different levels so I could plants all sorts of different flowers and green grass and definitely a balcony or a patio of some sort so I could sit out there in the afternoon or the evening (or the morning for that matter) and watch the birds at the birdfeeder (because of course I'd have a birdfeeder), keeping track of which birds come visit with my Peterson's Field Guide.
Some day, when I have lots of money, I'm going to build that castle in Spain.
There are so many hobbies I'd like to take up seriously. Sadly, unless you have a lot of money, you really can't have more than one serious hobby. Hobbies have become expensive. At least, the ones I'm interested in. For one, I'd love to keep fish: more specifically, I want to have huge tanks where I could build coral reefs and keep tropical fish. Sadly, I don't have thousands of dollars to spend on tanks and fish and food and filters and all the other stuff that's needed for that.
As I mentioned above, I'd also like to have a small aviary. White bars, at least eight feet high and five to ten square feet, filled with birds. I want to have canaries and lovebirds and finches and a parrot. The parrot obviously would have its own space and not live in the aviary. An African Grey parrot that I would name Madison.
I'd like to be really good at arts & crafts, too. This is a case of lacking A) natural skill, B) proper teaching to make up for lack of natural skill, C) time to practise to make up for lack of natural skill. I want to be able to look at something and be able to draw an adequate representation of it. I'd like to be able to take the pictures in my mind and put them down in a form that won't disappoint me when I look at the final result. I want to be able to knit and sew and crochet and do needle–point without having to unpick the whole thing because it doesn't even closely resemble anything useful.
When I was younger I started designing doll house furniture and rooms, and once again lack of money intervened with turning it into a serious hobby: doll's house furniture is incredibly expensive, as are the tools for actually working with such small materials.
The same story can be repeated for model trains. I loved the idea of creating an entire landscape for my model train, but I lacked the knowledge to make it look the way I wanted to, and I couldn't afford the ready–made sets, which I didn't want anyway as they were all made of plastic which I thought looked hideous. I think that if I were to start up again I'd go for a Wild West look rather than an English countryside look, if only because I've since developed more than a passing interest in that era, and I can fit my English countryside passion into other areas of my life.
My other castle in Spain is far more embarassing, as far as these things go: I want to stop working, completely. Unlike most people, it seems, I don't feel like I'm "not being productive" or "not contributing" when I don't work. There's nothing I like better than having unlimited amounts of time to do what I want to in. I like reading what I want to just because I want to, I want to be able to wake up in the morning and decide on the spur of the moment to go to a museum or to a movie.
I actually like keeping house when I don't work. I like keeping things clean and orderly, but when I get home from work I can't even contemplate getting started. I just put it off, put it out of my mind, because it's my "time off" and I want to do things that I don't normally do, like go out and catch up on the computer and other things. But when not faced with all the outside pressures of work, I really do enjoy the results of cleaning up, and the cleaning–up itself doesn't actually feel like work.
In other words? I want to be a kept woman. I want to fall in love with someone who won't mind my being a stay–at–home Spousal Unit. How bad is that? Here I am supposed to be a liberated woman, insisting on my right to equal pay for equal work, and all I want to do is lead the life that would have been considered conservative in the fifties. I feel backwards, like a traitor to the cause.
More to the point, I like to work, just not at a conventional job. If I could write proper fiction and were reasonably successful at it I would no doubt spend hours and hours every day working on novels and short stories and what have you. My problem is that I don't think I'm very good at it. I can write decent short stories, but I haven't got the wind for long novels. Well, I did when I was thirteen and fourteen and fifteen, but those novels (which were lost with my last computer, unfortunately) were so bad and lacking in anything like a plot that I cringe when I think of them. The only thing they proved to me was that I am able to produce a lot of prose in a relatively short amount of time (as you have doubtless noticed in the pages of this LiveJournal).
I wish I was able to write beautiful prose and poetry. My writing always seems to me to be boring and pedestrian at best, even though it's usually grammatically and syntactically adequate. I don't seem to be able to master the art of marrying unusual words and making it sound lyrical. At best, it sounds trite and contrived.
I want to write The Great Canadian Novel. I'd love to write something like The Life of Pi (which is incredible), or Solomon Gursky Was Here, which still haunts me now.
[Side note: I found the word I was looking for. Towards the end of Solomon Gursky, a Jewish boy gets stranded in the Arctic with his father and his friend. His father dies on impact when their snowmobile crashes, and to survive the boy eats his flesh, while his friend refuses. When they find the boy, he's eaten almost all of his father, while he hasn't touched the body of his friend, an Inuit boy, who died of starvation. When asked why he didn't eat his friend too, he replies indignantly: "He was treyf!"]
I wish I was really capable of the twisted thinking that produces great novellists like Mordecai Richler or T. Coraghessan Boyle or Salman Rushdie. Or anyone. My mind just doesn't seem to function like that. My main characters are too Angst-ridden and flat, my plots uninteresting, my secondary characters contribute nothing to the plot. It's very disheartening. I have tons of good ideas, ideas that in someone else's hands might even prove to be genius, but under my fingers they turn to dust. They just don't come out the way I pictured them in my mind.
If I could draw I'd want to write children's books, but I can't draw, and I don't trust myself to work with an illustrator, because they probably wouldn't be able to convey the images I have in my head. I cringe every time I look at the illustrations to the two sequels of Jacob Two–Two, because the illustrations of the first book were so beautiful and the two sequels have hideous cartoony caricatures instead. I couldn't bear to think of any book with my name on it having that kind of illustration, but working with an illustrator means working as equals, and so I wouldn't be able to impose my vision on them.
Usually, I assume, it works the other way around: an illustrator has a fabulous idea and they ask a writer to help them add words to the story. Or else two people who trust each other implicitly come up with the idea together.
Iwant need to learn to draw.
I think this is long enough for now. I'll build more castles later.
It's building castles in Spain, as the saying goes. Don't remember where it comes from. I realise I haven't built that many castles in this LiveJournal, mostly because some part of me is really afraid of being laughed at or being told that my dreams are unreasonable or silly, or being told to quit thinking about a nonexistent future and concentrate on the present.
Building castles in Spain is my favourite way of not thinking about my problems.
I've decided to throw caution to the winds and build some castles today, in–between reading applications for
aparecium_rpg. While I'm at it: WOULD SOMEONE PLEASE FOR THE LOVE OF ALL THAT'S GOOD AND HOLY APPLY FOR HARRY POTTER?!?!?!?Okay, momentary rant over. ;)
One particular castle at the momentis actually a castle. Well, not quite. But I've found myself getting a stronger and stronger hankering for a house. Yes, ironic for a girl who finds it hard to keep a four–room apartment clean, but I keep getting this weird nesting urge to have a house.
I miss having at least two floors where I live. I miss having a real library: not just a couple of bookcases, but an entire 20 x 30 room with floor–to–ceiling books like I had in my parents' house. I want a sunny laundry room where I could have my washer and dryer and a clothes line and a rack for hanging clothes so I wouldn't have to hang all my stuff in the bathroom from the shower curtain rod.
I want to be able to wander up and down the stairs and have plants everywhere and be able to design all the different rooms the way I want. I'd like to have a project room in which I could have a dozen half–completed projects that I could work on intermittently when the urge struck: knitting, sewing, writing, carpentry (yes, I know that I wouldn't even know where to begin, but this is a fantasy), scultping my little clay figurines.
I want to have a large sofa in an equally large living–room where I can curl up and read or watch television. I want to have large comfy leather chairs in my library so that I can read in there if I want. I'd love to have a writing desk, one of those tilted ones that you can open up and keep all your letter–writing stuff in there. My parents have my grandfather's old writing–desk, and I covet it every time I go to visit them.
I want a house that's filled with light and huge fishtanks and cats and maybe a dog and definitely some birds. Maybe a bunch of canaries so that they can fill the air with happy trilling. I've always wanted to build an aviary (or have one built) and house lots of birds in it.
I also want a garden. A beautiful garden with different levels so I could plants all sorts of different flowers and green grass and definitely a balcony or a patio of some sort so I could sit out there in the afternoon or the evening (or the morning for that matter) and watch the birds at the birdfeeder (because of course I'd have a birdfeeder), keeping track of which birds come visit with my Peterson's Field Guide.
Some day, when I have lots of money, I'm going to build that castle in Spain.
There are so many hobbies I'd like to take up seriously. Sadly, unless you have a lot of money, you really can't have more than one serious hobby. Hobbies have become expensive. At least, the ones I'm interested in. For one, I'd love to keep fish: more specifically, I want to have huge tanks where I could build coral reefs and keep tropical fish. Sadly, I don't have thousands of dollars to spend on tanks and fish and food and filters and all the other stuff that's needed for that.
As I mentioned above, I'd also like to have a small aviary. White bars, at least eight feet high and five to ten square feet, filled with birds. I want to have canaries and lovebirds and finches and a parrot. The parrot obviously would have its own space and not live in the aviary. An African Grey parrot that I would name Madison.
I'd like to be really good at arts & crafts, too. This is a case of lacking A) natural skill, B) proper teaching to make up for lack of natural skill, C) time to practise to make up for lack of natural skill. I want to be able to look at something and be able to draw an adequate representation of it. I'd like to be able to take the pictures in my mind and put them down in a form that won't disappoint me when I look at the final result. I want to be able to knit and sew and crochet and do needle–point without having to unpick the whole thing because it doesn't even closely resemble anything useful.
When I was younger I started designing doll house furniture and rooms, and once again lack of money intervened with turning it into a serious hobby: doll's house furniture is incredibly expensive, as are the tools for actually working with such small materials.
The same story can be repeated for model trains. I loved the idea of creating an entire landscape for my model train, but I lacked the knowledge to make it look the way I wanted to, and I couldn't afford the ready–made sets, which I didn't want anyway as they were all made of plastic which I thought looked hideous. I think that if I were to start up again I'd go for a Wild West look rather than an English countryside look, if only because I've since developed more than a passing interest in that era, and I can fit my English countryside passion into other areas of my life.
My other castle in Spain is far more embarassing, as far as these things go: I want to stop working, completely. Unlike most people, it seems, I don't feel like I'm "not being productive" or "not contributing" when I don't work. There's nothing I like better than having unlimited amounts of time to do what I want to in. I like reading what I want to just because I want to, I want to be able to wake up in the morning and decide on the spur of the moment to go to a museum or to a movie.
I actually like keeping house when I don't work. I like keeping things clean and orderly, but when I get home from work I can't even contemplate getting started. I just put it off, put it out of my mind, because it's my "time off" and I want to do things that I don't normally do, like go out and catch up on the computer and other things. But when not faced with all the outside pressures of work, I really do enjoy the results of cleaning up, and the cleaning–up itself doesn't actually feel like work.
In other words? I want to be a kept woman. I want to fall in love with someone who won't mind my being a stay–at–home Spousal Unit. How bad is that? Here I am supposed to be a liberated woman, insisting on my right to equal pay for equal work, and all I want to do is lead the life that would have been considered conservative in the fifties. I feel backwards, like a traitor to the cause.
More to the point, I like to work, just not at a conventional job. If I could write proper fiction and were reasonably successful at it I would no doubt spend hours and hours every day working on novels and short stories and what have you. My problem is that I don't think I'm very good at it. I can write decent short stories, but I haven't got the wind for long novels. Well, I did when I was thirteen and fourteen and fifteen, but those novels (which were lost with my last computer, unfortunately) were so bad and lacking in anything like a plot that I cringe when I think of them. The only thing they proved to me was that I am able to produce a lot of prose in a relatively short amount of time (as you have doubtless noticed in the pages of this LiveJournal).
I wish I was able to write beautiful prose and poetry. My writing always seems to me to be boring and pedestrian at best, even though it's usually grammatically and syntactically adequate. I don't seem to be able to master the art of marrying unusual words and making it sound lyrical. At best, it sounds trite and contrived.
I want to write The Great Canadian Novel. I'd love to write something like The Life of Pi (which is incredible), or Solomon Gursky Was Here, which still haunts me now.
[Side note: I found the word I was looking for. Towards the end of Solomon Gursky, a Jewish boy gets stranded in the Arctic with his father and his friend. His father dies on impact when their snowmobile crashes, and to survive the boy eats his flesh, while his friend refuses. When they find the boy, he's eaten almost all of his father, while he hasn't touched the body of his friend, an Inuit boy, who died of starvation. When asked why he didn't eat his friend too, he replies indignantly: "He was treyf!"]
I wish I was really capable of the twisted thinking that produces great novellists like Mordecai Richler or T. Coraghessan Boyle or Salman Rushdie. Or anyone. My mind just doesn't seem to function like that. My main characters are too Angst-ridden and flat, my plots uninteresting, my secondary characters contribute nothing to the plot. It's very disheartening. I have tons of good ideas, ideas that in someone else's hands might even prove to be genius, but under my fingers they turn to dust. They just don't come out the way I pictured them in my mind.
If I could draw I'd want to write children's books, but I can't draw, and I don't trust myself to work with an illustrator, because they probably wouldn't be able to convey the images I have in my head. I cringe every time I look at the illustrations to the two sequels of Jacob Two–Two, because the illustrations of the first book were so beautiful and the two sequels have hideous cartoony caricatures instead. I couldn't bear to think of any book with my name on it having that kind of illustration, but working with an illustrator means working as equals, and so I wouldn't be able to impose my vision on them.
Usually, I assume, it works the other way around: an illustrator has a fabulous idea and they ask a writer to help them add words to the story. Or else two people who trust each other implicitly come up with the idea together.
I
I think this is long enough for now. I'll build more castles later.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2003-02-26 01:55 pm (UTC)*hugs*
no subject
Date: 2003-02-26 02:00 pm (UTC)have you ever thought of just writing a book full of short stories. david sedaris (who wrote naked....at least i think that's his name) has made quite the living off of this.
and i always thought that fighting for women's rights was so that women could do what they wanted. so you're really not a traitor at all for wanting to stay home. at least i don't think so.
no subject
Date: 2003-02-26 07:58 pm (UTC)as for the castles, i'm totally with you, and will likely mob you once this all comes true (and it will, i'm certain of that)
Fish
Date: 2003-02-27 10:06 am (UTC)Re: Fish
Date: 2003-02-27 10:09 am (UTC)I also know that they have an alarming tendency to die on short notice, since there's no way of telling how old they are when you first get them in the pet store, and they're so very susceptible to disease, changes in temperature, changes in the pH of the water, etc.
Still, once I have lots of money and time I'll be more than happy to make the effort to keep them. :)