the august update

I always think of August as the month that begins and ends in the blink of an eye.  It has always been the transition month of "well it's still summer technically but it's also kind of fall already technically... so we're at an impasse."  Imagine I said "impasse" with a French accent.  Because I did.  This transition feeling is compounded by the fact I work retail and in the world of retail, life moves at the speed of light.  By mid June we were getting autumn decorations and next week we will already be setting a floorset with our Halloween merchandise a full two months early.  All this of course due to the beginning of October meaning the start of "Holiday" and that's a just a joy all around!

Yup.

All in all August was good to me, I can't complain.  I could complain but no one would listen anyway so I shan't.  Overall it was hot.  Hot hot hot.  How hot?  Hot.  I ran my air conditioner almost every day and for me that's something.  Of course I didn't run it during the few days the power was out due to the quintuplet tornados at the beginning of the month but you get the picture.

Right after the tornados spun through (pun intended) things started falling back into place for me in a weird way.  I had somewhat of a panic attack early this month and freaked out for a few days.  I kept myself pretty collected at work but when I would get home it just got... uggs.  With the crying and the whining and the yadda yadda.  I think subconsciously I started putting myself back into the "victim" role in life, and we should all know by now I'm not a big fan of being the victim.  I started feeling alone... in this all by myself... depressed... and I felt it was ironic because the photo shoot I did back in May for the Women's Fund in Oshkosh was about ladies feeling alone.  Men too, I suppose.

Harumph.

Having mentioned said shoot, they finally put my pretty face on the Facebook page.  I'm a celebrity ::tosses hair:: and I don't know why the OTHER who was there that day isn't shown.  Guess they chose the best  ::tosses hair again and stumbles::  Whatevs.

I had to start putting myself back into the shoes I filled in 2012.  Namely in the lessons learned.  It was difficult for me last year to reach out to so many people and attempt to get together so many times.  I'm a fairly introverted person and I usually aquiesce when I'm invited somewhere, not the other way around.  That sounds awkward... I'm never the planner, just the invitee?  That's a little better.  But I discovered being the planner puts you in control of the situation and your happiness, and I was really happy last year.  Funny how quickly you abandon the things that make you happy, right?  So I turned it around (always getting better at that) and just took it into my own hands.

I reconnected with Scout.  After our parting of ways June 1st I hadn't seen him (only texted him once, yay me!) or heard from him since and decided that because it ended amicably and no one was at fault, there was no reason we couldn't be friends.  We met for coffee and had a great day.  Three hours talking (found out his mother stalked my blogs for a while (hello if you're reading this now and please stop following me because I know you hate me.)) Something happened to my red bracelet when we were at coffee (I'm working on a blog for that, stay tuned) that also helped with my mindset.  After coffee we parted for a bit but then went out for a couple drinks and a movie at the cheap seats that evening.  It was amazing being able to slide back in to how things were at one point and not worry about "who was thinking what" and "why they were thinking it when."  We just hung out like two dudes.

Can't believe I said that.

After that jaunt I made a conscious effort to start branching out of my social network a bit.  I went to the farmer's market one saturday with a friend named Tina, now referred to as Miss T, and had a blast.  Miss T and I met through one of my former bests and have hung out a couple times alone over the years but never really made the effort to keep it up.  Well it's a new chapter kids because we've now hung out three times!  In two weeks!  That's a record and one I'm going to keep breaking.  I need to be better about reaching out to the people I enjoy and making the effort to actually see them on a normal basis.

It's not rocket science, despite how hard I make it out to be.  Things should be as simple as "hey, I enjoy talking to you and always have a blast when we get together so let's do this all the time!"  They SHOULDN'T be "hey, I enjoy talking to you and always have a blast when we get together so I'll see you in a couple months!"  So dumb.  So me.

Finally the last big notable thing I did this month was pop-it and lock-it on a new headboard.  I bought my bed with that dumb whore I used to date and while I initially loved it, I think said adoration lasted a couple months and then it turned into "nothing special" and eventually just a reminder of something I'd failed at (a relationship, obvs.)  I was poking around Pinterest and came across a reclaimed wood headboard someone had put up that they made out of old barn wood.  Seeing as I don't have access to old barn wood I had to look up a way to stain/distress wood to make it look reclaimed.  And find a way I did!

After a quick (not quick) and normal (never normal with @markstyleme) trip to Home Depot, I walked away with my supplies for a price of about $60.  One can of ebony stain, one can of dark walnut stain, one can of polyurethane, three cheap paint brushes, and twenty 1"x4"x8' cheap pine boards.  In the end the actual project took about twelve hours of physical labor but I am so pleased with the results.  After laying the boards out (top left pic (below)) I sanded them all down, especially the corners to soften them up.  Then I beat the fuck out of them (top right) so get all of the knicks/scratches/scrapes/bangs I could that you would find in an oldoldold floor.  I had to work the next day so the following I was able to start the staining process (middle-left and center.)  You can see how despite using just two stains, almost none of the boards look alike.  And it was quick!  I think it took a total of two hours to stain all 23 slats of wood in the various methods I adopted.

I was so pleased with the staining process in fact that when I started the polyurethane I panicked because I didn't like how it looked.  As I went along though and painted more of it on I absolutely fell in love with what I was creating and I couldn't wait to install it the next day.  The installation went easily but slowly.  Being an army of one (my preference, because then I can be even more proud of my work) I had to figure this bitch out on my own but I had a blast doing it.  I listened to some good tunes, drank some good lemonade, and chatted plenty with my cats while drilling right into that headboard of the past.  You can kind of see the stack of movies I used to make sure they all started at the same height.  What a genius I am!

So there it is, my first homemade piece of furniture.  It immediately got me to thinking about what I would want to do next in terms of furniture because I am so excited to just keep going.  And if I keep up with the inspiration, I think I'll start taking orders.  And who knows... maybe I'll actually start accepting orders for my paintings, too.  Never too late to take on a new venture, right?

I'm sorry I don't have a better message/theme this month.  Like I started this thing with, August is just that weird transition month.  It is what it is, gets you from summer to fall, and I suppose that's what this blog did.  Pretty soon I'll post about what happened to my bracelet and then we can all gossip and chat about how exciting it was.

Or wasn't.

So what else happened in August?  Went to Noah's Ark for a SECOND time this year, saw a friend get busted in the face by his iPhone, and survived five tornados (I'll never stop saying that, either.)  Got super excited for the next Fast and Furious movies after what the 6th one revealed at the end, decided I like apple ales, and finally started losing weight again.  Held hands (more than once) with a new boy, officially decided on my Halloween 2013 costume (you're gonna shit,) and bought tickets to see the Naked and Famous in concert this October in Chicago.

Oh, and I grew a beard.  Much to the chagrin of some, and of course to the adoration of others.

Toodles!

just a little power

Dr. Grant: "Their radio is out too: Gennarro said to stay put."
       Ian Malcolm: "The kids OK?"
Dr. Grant: "I didn't ask, why wouldn't they be?"
       Ian Malcolm: "Kids get scared."
Dr. Grant: "What's to be scared about?  It's just a little hiccup in the power is all--"
       Ian Malcolm: "I didn't say I was scared.
Dr. Grant: "...I didn't say you were scared."
       Ian Malcolm: "I know."

I think it's only natural for me being such a huge fan of Jurassic Park to immediately recall lines from it during rain storms.  Or thunder storms.  Lightning storms?  Let's settle for tornado storms because hell, that's what it ended up being.  It took the news 24 hours to decide it was two tornados, and then a day later to settle on five.  And granted four of them were EF 1's on the Fujita scale ::pushes up nerd glasses:: one of them was an EF 2 and that's a little more substantial.  The damage they did was certainly substantial and caused Grand Chute to declare a state of emergency.

I woke up randomly Tuesday night in a weird panic (I hardly if ever wake up during storms.)  I could hear the wind and the rain on the side of the building and then the door to the office SLAMMED shut.  I jumped out of bed and hurried in there because the window was open and already my chair and the carpet a few feet in from the window were drenched.  Got the window shut (noted the CRAZY lightning) and then hurried to the living room to shut the door to my balcony.  Almost as soon as I shut it the power went out; it surged back on for a second and then it was out again.

The lightning wasn't stopping for even a split second and it illuminated the rain blowing sideways.  Not at an angle, totally sideways.  I should have believed Forrest Gump when he said he saw the same over in Vietnam.  Right away I was bummed that I had chosen to park outside but that came second to the fact that my metal chairs were skidding across the balcony and slamming against the railing like they were on puppet strings.  I wanted to go out and grab them but I was still so disoriented from waking up the way I did that I just stayed inside, hoping they wouldn't fling OVER the railing and slam through the windshield of someone's car.

That'd be a whoopsie.

Now, I'm not one to be afraid during storms.  I never have been (save for once or twice as a child I'm sure.)  I would be the first one at the window to watch and the last one to come in from riding bikes when the sky turned green to signify a tornado was possible.  I love them; the bigger the storm the better.  However, me now living alone with a storm that seemed just a little more powerful than most before it... that's different.  And scary.  Most of it was probably due to the power being out and me being a little disoriented, but hearing the building groan around me was a pretty sobering thing.  Almost (but not quite) to the point where I wanted to grab the cats and hunker down in the bathroom.

When I went to lay down again I looked at my phone and it was about 12:48; I'd only been asleep for an hour.  Went to sleep, woke up another hour later to all of the fire alarms in the building going off but also to the rain having stopped.  And my closet door was open.

Closed before... and now open.  That creeped the shit out of me.  I managed to turn my fire alarm off and eventually went into the hall with my hunky upstairs neighbor (he was shirtless (I didn't need the lights to see that (hubba hubba!)))  We couldn't get the alarm to turn off though and eventually maintenance showed up to do it for us.  The next day was a big visit at work so I woke up early to get that over with and then in the afternoon toured the devastation around town.  Almost 80,000 people without power, the Northland Mall roof heavily damaged, and several city blocks of Richmond Street with the power poles broken in half (see video below.)  There were tree stumps 20 feet tall that looked like they'd been snapped like twigs.  Houses crushed under huge Maple trees.  And people, everywhere you looked, already cutting fallen trees up and getting on with their lives.


I love storms like this.  Not for the fact that it ruins some people's lives and especially not because of any lives lost (allegedly only one life was lost due to the weather) but because it ends up forming a sense of community.  People come together, and maybe it's not to help each other, but it is to talk about something.  Something that we all have in common, and it's kind of nice that way.  Luckily there was no building damage here, but when I went to the dumpster last night with the (small) amount of my food that had spoiled in the powerless fridge, I was surprised to see the huge amount of food already in the trash.  So everyone loses something in some way I suppose.

I had called my energy company and they said the power could potentially be out until Saturday evening (almost four days.)  Realizing there was no reason to be upset about it, and I really wasn't, I just said "okay, thank you" and hung up.  Things are what they are and seeing the hundreds of WE Energies trucks all over the place made me feel like they were doing what they could.  Not like there was a shortage of shit for them to clean up and fix.  I went to the movies by myself last night and when the show was over it was close to 11:30.

The streets were mostly empty, save for a few cars.  With no power on most of the north side of town, there was so much blackness.  The highway was shut down due to the roofs of storage units having wrapped themselves around roadside power lines so I took the city streets, but not the main ones because they too were closed.  Driving in the pitch black down streets lined with fallen trees and smashed playsets just harkens to the visuals of a zombie apocalypse or whatever people with over imaginative minds like mine come up with.  Of course my building was still blacked out when I got home and once the headlights from the car were off I was surrounded in black as well.  There was something peaceful about it.

Creepy, but peaceful.

I think you start to take for granted what technology provides for you on a daily basis.  I know I do.  I need the light on and iPad playing when I'm in the bathroom, I can't sleep without the fan on me, and I've got to have my phone charging in the cradle all night so that it also acts as a clock for me.  I'll spend hours on the computer daily, writing or surfing the internet or listening to music, blah blah.  In a way it's nicer when none of that works anymore and you're forced to resort to alternate means of keeping yourself entertained.  For example, I finally started re-reading the Harry Potter books.  I'd been planning on doing it for months and hadn't had a reason to, so there it is.

But with today came a new day and when I got home from work this evening the power was still off as I expected.  Just another day of living an adventure I suppose.  I came upstairs, walked in, and locked the door behind me.  Then I heard the "surge" sound of something huge powering up and all of a sudden my ceiling fan started twisting to life.  In a way it was sad that the little excursion of "roughing it" was done, but at the same time I've never been so happy to stand in a hot shower.

Aside from all that, business resumes as usual.  Look for my owl!  I wish 2:06 actually happened to me today, though...  minus the arm thing.

Ciao kids (c;

the old becomes dust

Did you know MySpace officially launched in August of 2003?  I can't even believe it myself that it was 10 years ago this month; I was about to enter my Senior year of high school and thus... I had no idea what it was.  I didn't even know what it was by the time I graduated because back in those days I was still rocking a Nokia 3585i.

The fact that the screen was in color was enough to get me thrilled.  No photo capabilities, no texting, just a cell phone.

I think maybe by the next fall I started hearing more about MySpace because of college (it's weird to write I was in college... hmph) and this new term of "social networking" that had sprouted up from nowhere.  In early spring of 2005 I decided to create an account though I do recall there was very little to do.  I didn't have many friends on the site yet and it was hard to work visiting it into a routine at that point.

the very first profile picture ever (yes, eeevvveeerrr)

The most I did online back in those days was check my daily movie websites for news and then my e-mail (on AOL of course (and not AOL.com, it was the bonafide America Online that was it's own special program on the computer.))  That summer MySpace was purchased by News Corporation and then it really became a "thing" and I ended up turning into a rabid fan.  People could write on my wall!  They could see how I ranked my top friends!  I could fill out nifty little questionnaires and post the answers FOR EVERYONE TO SEE!

There was one other thing, too... something called a blog.

I'd heard the term of a blog before and probably thought it was a fancy acronym for something, kinda like "lol."  At that time I had never (faithfully) kept a journal, I just had my books I'd written.  I finished writing the first draft of my second novel during that summer and when it was done I thought I'd take a stab at one of these "blogs."

I was hooked right away.  I don't know if it was the fact I could write about whatever I wanted and do the provocative thing in letting the world read it, or the fact that people were ACTUALLY reading it.  You could track pageviews even then and I generally only would get a dozen or so per blog, but it was exciting.  Now I get excited for every hundred I cross but... with age comes beauty I suppose.  That doesn't make sense but I wrote it anyway.

I would write blogs randomly but at times it would be once a week for several weeks in a row.  Maybe a couple in a week.  There would be some that were just surveys I was answering ("What's Your Dream Guy?" "Everything About You in 200 Questions!") or some when I was venting about my parents or certain friends (who weren't tech savvy to MySpace yet (and never were.))  I would write about the funny things that happened during the day or an update on my life at work.  There were stories about my first love, Joe, and the adventures I took with random people I could no longer name if I even tried.  Bad dates, great trips, and even once or twice my broken heart.

The point was that I was writing outside of my books and enjoying it.

Some of the best things I ever wrote were on MySpace... experiences immortalized in my words and locked away for safe keeping.  Looking back on it I was freer to say whatever was on my mind because there were no consequences for it.  I could bitch and whine about anyone and everyone due to the chances of them stumbling upon it were always slim to none.  And I bitched a lot.  I bitched about anything and everything because that was the thing to do.  The naive nature of social media at that point wasn't "once it's out there, it's out there for good," it was "do what ya want!  Go NUTS! No one will see this anyway!  Waddya mean it's saved forever!?"

Eventually I did stop writing blogs, capping them off somewhere north of the 100 mark back in 2009, right when I moved out of my parent's house.  That was when I stopped using MySpace as well because by that point I'd gotten more involved with the entity we call Facebook and everything it entails.

Namely being relevant.

A couple years passed and I don't think for a hot second I missed writing blogs.  I had things to do in my life, eventually a cheater to keep an eye on, and thus no time for whining about how hard or how good things were.  I always intended to (and told people I would) go back to MySpace and print off all of my blogs.  Three-hole-punch them and stick 'em in a binder for the days I needed a good laugh!  Last year I logged in to skim through some of them and revel in the past, just because I could.  MySpace had updated itself with a new look, one that incidentally didn't catch on, but I figured I could take my time still.  It'd be easy to copy and paste each blog into a Word document and save it to a folder but I was probably in a hurry or feeling too busy to be bothered.

Flashing forward to today, I was thinking while I was at work about how little drama I have in my life.  Nothing really bad has happened lately (knock on wood,) I haven't had any huge fights or breakups or anything of the sort.  It got me to thinking about the old blogs and how dramatic I USED to be (capitalized for dramatic effect) and that maybe I should go home and finally save them.  After all, they had meant so much to me at one point, much like these blogs do now, and it was important I document them.

MySpace, however, went through another redesign.  And incidentally all 100+ blogs I (and anyone else) ever wrote are gone.  There was no warning they were getting rid of them, no announcement of "hey, your words/ideas/laughs/tears/whatever are getting the boot."  It's just gone.  A quick google search indicates they are not completely deleted and some day MAY return, but that some day isn't now.  It might not, and probably won't, be ever.

And it makes me so sad.

I know the past is in the past and looking back on it means you're trying to hold onto something already gone, but I don't think it's ever bad to remind yourself.  Remind yourself of where you've been, where you're still going, and maybe how much it took for you to get there/here.  Having the option taken away is something else entirely and it makes me feel that ugly feeling I rarely indulge in.  Regret.

I know they haven't been read in years, even if you count my perusal.  I know they were just sitting idly in the corner of the internet, hidden by shadow and waiting to be discovered once more.  But now they aren't words, and worse they aren't even old words.  They're just dust.  There are a million shoulda-woulda-couldas that come to mind with these ordeals but in the end I have to sigh and try to let go.  "It does not do to dwell on dreams and forget to live," as Albus Dumbledore so eloquently said.  Things are what they are.

Besides, still no one likes MySpace even AFTER a third "rebirth" so they can just sit and spin for all I care.  Fuckers.