Corner of Bourbon & Division

I am numbering the paragraphs to make it seem as though the disjointedness of this post was intentional:

1- Fell asleep when I got home yesterday. Woke up ten minutes before my alarm this morning. Oops. Guess I needed the sleep. That's one of the good things about being single and having no one dependent on you: you get to make your own sleep schedule without worrying about what effect it'll have on the people around you. Feel like going to sleep at five in the evening? No problem.

2- I have a bunch of things bouncing around in my head. I'm in a poetry mood these days, for one thing. A reading mood, rather than a writing mood. I looked for some volumes by e. e. cummings the other day, but only found a slim volume of "collected works," (i.e. not even his own volumes, but rather someone else's interpretation of how they should be put together) which was going for nearly $30. Gotta say, I wasn't impressed. I fear I may have to resort to Teh Intarwebs for my poetry fix.

3- I seriously, seriously miss the country. I am dying to go back, to get away from the city and the traffic and the pollution and the ick. The fact that the weather is getting nicer every day is only reinforcing this (although it's making being outside increasingly pleasant). Unfortunately, I'm on night shift and working overtime for the next three weeks, and two out of those three weekends are thus a wash.

4- On the plus side, I am seeing my godmother today. One of my two remaining godmothers (I had three, but one passed away back in 2005: it's hard to believe it's been that long), that is. This is the godmother who taught me how to knit, and with whose daughters I grew up, so we're very close even if we don't always see eye-to-eye. I am going to show her my Soopar Seekrit Prodgikt and see what she thinks of it, and then we'll talk about gardening and hooking (rugs) and about her daughters who both live in Europe now. It's been over a year since I last saw her, so we'll have plenty to catch up on.

5- I have been mentally redecorating the downstairs apartment in anticipation of the (still theoretical) day I'm to move in. Never mind that I'm still not sure that I can afford it (I have yet to find out what the actual rent is), and that ai731 and t! (who is no longer on LJ) have not actually found a new home yet. I am very excited. I assume that I will be able to afford it: it shouldn't be *that* much more than my current place, and my current place is well within my means, and then some. My imagination is a very expensive place, let me tell ya: there is a *lot* of furniture in the new place that I don't currently own, and a whole bunch of projects in the works, all in my mind's workshop.

6- The fax machine at work is of Satan. That is all I have to say on that topic.

7- I love the new dispatch system with much love. However, I have *no* love for the current set-up, which makes me crane my neck at a 45-degree angle the entire time. I now have lots of neck and shoulder pain, in spite of my best efforts to get up and stretch regularly. I have volunteered to be at the Admin position this week, partly because I have to get used to the new way of doing things with the new system, but mostly because the computers in here are not set up in a way designed to cripple me within a few short weeks.

I gotta tell you: ow.

Someone is supposed to come and make the place more livable (I'm not the only one complaining of neck/shoulder/arm pain), but they've been saying that for two weeks and thus far there has been no sign of anyone. I am not optimistic.

8- Along with my yen for a house, I also yearn for a dog. I miss having a doggie, as much as I adore the cats. This, too, will come. Just a few more years.

9- Fitness!Girl has been accepted as a regular member of the RCMP. This is good news for her, and semi-good for me. I get a bunch of her overtime, and we get to be even more short-staffed, but it also increases my chances of getting a permanent posting here. There was a goodbye party for her on Saturday with the old crowd from Boomerang, which was quite fun. I'll miss her, though: it was nice to have someone I knew around here. Mind you, I'm pretty well integrated here now, so I no longer need to have her as a back-up. I'm very happy for her: she worked very very hard for this and she deserves it.


There's more, but I can't think of it right now. I think I'll try to make a point of going out for a while at lunch in order to get some sunshine. It's very dark in here, as there are no windows. Makes for a non-cheery atmosphere.

Rainy days make me think of Mary Poppins. It rains throughout the film, except in that one scene when they travel into the chalk drawing on the sidewalk. Mary Poppins is the kind of film I would watch when it was raining outside, or when I was sick, or both. We didn't own it, so I have no idea how I managed to watch it so often. I think it's just such a popular movie that it played on television a good deal when I was younger.

I watched Mary Poppins when I was just starting to suspect that things didn't work quite the same way in stories as they did in real life. Watching the children snap their fingers and have their rooms clean themselves, or float up to the ceiling because they were laughing too hard, or having a robin land on Mary's finger and sing (the robin is dreadfully fake, but I couldn't see that at the time)… well, it made me wish I could do that too. It didn't make me believe in the magic, but it made me want it desperately.

In spite of my constant disappointment that I couldn't fly or travel into pictures, I loved Mary Poppins. I grew up in a world that was at once very similar to hers and yet very different. My world was real, and it had parents and rules and the laws of physics to control it, but in my world just as in hers children were allowed to be children, and I understood and appreciated the message. My parents didn't mind when I came home covered in mud and cuts and scrapes, and they didn't expect me to be quiet all day long. Home was not meant to be run with bank-like clockwork precision. That the children's father wanted this was clearly wrong, and the film was as much about his learning that lesson as it was about making the world what you wanted of it.

Mary Poppins had no time at all to waste consulting the laws of reality. If she needed her umbrella to fly, then it would fly. If she needed a chalk drawing to come to life, then it did. If she wanted a bag of holding, then a bag of holding she got. Her world was very simple: whatever she wanted, she got, simply by wanting it.

I suppose Mary Poppins might well be my very first encounter with the "Get up and kill" philosophy embraced by t!.