blissmorgan: (Default)
 Good mornthing!
 
I am trying to do what a very wise friend suggested, which is to treat myself the way I would treat a friend. This is not an easy thing to do - I have always been self-critical, and perpetual self-dissatisfaction is one (very rocky) path through change and growth. But I do not need to be making things difficult for me if all it’s doing is...making things difficult for me.
 
Part of this doing requires a self-awareness of my own thought processes. In a sense, paying attention to my first thoughts, second thoughts and, as Pratchett would have it, third thoughts.
 
“First thought, best thought” is a saying that I have heard and even obeyed at least a little, in letting it help me make some decisions and choices for myself. However, I also recall a Tumblr post where someone pointed out that first thoughts are usually the automatic reactions we have been trained into (by ourselves, by others, by the society and culture in which we grew up, et cetera), whereas our second thoughts are more the thoughts we want to be, the ones that we feel are the right, even if they aren’t our trained-in reactive thoughts. This is useful especially when examining and working to surmount one’s own bigotry. Have an automatic reaction or assumption to/about someone? Your second thoughts are counter to that, and maybe you feel guilty about the first thoughts? The second thoughts are you processing logically and more kindly.
 
And then there’s third thoughts, and I probably could have done away with the entire above paragraph in favor of Pratchett’s quotation about thoughts but it felt important to work through my own, heh, thought process on thoughts first.
 
“First Thoughts are the everyday thoughts. Everyone has those. Second Thoughts are the thoughts you think about the way you think. People who enjoy thinking have those. Third Thoughts are thoughts that watch the world and think all by themselves. They’re rare, and often troublesome. Listening to them is part of witchcraft.”
 
So, mostly this process is Second Thought tier stuff, I guess - thinking about how I think, and working to alter and tweak it through slow and regular deliberation. This morning’s very deliberate Second Thought stuff happened while I was taking the selfie, and I was getting very critical about it - my pose, the roundness of my cheeks, how dry and messy my hair looks, the wrinkling of the flesh on my wrist, it was all displeasing to me and I was getting very sour. But then <user name=johncomic> popped into my head, and I resolved to take the picture and look at it as I would if I were a friend of me, rather than me myself.
 
Honestly? If I were a friend of me instead of me? I would totally have a crush on me. My skin looks so good in this light, and taking my hair for what it is rather than comparing it to how I wish it would look, there’s good volume and color to it and the curls are all touseled and interesting as all heck.My eyebrows, I know another friend who has always envied that they curve like that and require no shaping nor plucking. And those lips! Holy crap. It is perhaps one of the great tragedies of my world that I shall never get to kiss me.
 
So now I like the selfie and am thinking good things and having good feels about me, rather than the previous unhappy alternative.

 
 

Coffee’s ready, and I need to go put up the Nightmare Fuel prompt for the October writing project. I also need to start considering what to write about for NaNoWriMo: I am open to suggestions. Something (sub)urban fantasy, maybe? I would love to get that Protective Bird God of which cipheramnesia​ conceived onto some pages. And I’d also like to write something in which a regular modern American girl gets to go to the kind of fancy masquerade ball that doesn’t seem to exist except, perhaps, for the MET Ball. Also, there should be witches. Oooh, and I need to find that short I wrote with the man who falls up through a koi pond from the otherword that was only fog and water and the eternal bridge that he dove from because Terrance was pissed that his writer hadn’t yet written him into something else already and yes I do owe him some page time. Also also, some witches.
 
I need a central line of throughput to wrap this messy world and plot around, though, so anything y’all wanna suggest in that vein LMK.
 
Hello, Blisstopia.<3
blissmorgan: (Default)

I am trying a thing with my hair. (Have you noticed I just about always mention my hair in the mornthings? It’s definitely a function of how the daily mornthing selfies started, for sure, but I wonder if it comes off as vapid and aesthetically self-involved to folk swho don’t know about that. Then I wonder if I am not, in fact, decidedly aesthetically self-involved. #BitchIMightBe ) One of the things that has really helped my curls work toward being their best selves was dropping $5 at Christmas Tree Shops a year or so ago for this microfiber “Turbie Towel”, a.k.a. a little microfiber thing with a deep pocket at one end for your head, and it gets slender toward the other end, and you plop your hair into the pocket and pull it down around your head and then twist the tail hanging from your forehead until it is a twisty ropey hoobiedo and tuck the end of it into the little elastic tabbything on the back of your head. The idea is that it schlucks the wetness out of your curly hair and lets the curls get mostly dry without a lot of motion and rubbing, which tends to make curly hair go all frizzy the way it tends to make wool get felted.

Now, the turbie towel itself is not new. As I said, I’ve had it going on for a year or so. Slightly newer, acquired over the summer, is the dark blue do-rag I picked up at the dollar store. I meant to use it for sleep, and it works on approximately the same principle: Gatherplop the hairs into the pocket, tuck it in around, tie it down, and go to be knowing that my restless ass can toss and turn and my hair isn’t turning into a felted mat rubbing against my pillow.

One morning a couple weeks ago I was getting ready to go meet a new friend for coffee, and I didn’t have the turbie towel on hand because I’d thrown it in the wash. ALAS! So when I got out of the shower I gently squeezed the water out of my hair with my hands and then put the do-rag on, and went about the rest of my readiness routine. I took it off right before I left, and turned up the air in the car to let it finish my hair drying as much as possible.

Holy crap, but my hair looked good. Dark and shiny and curly. It’s what I dream of my hair always looking like, and I had to point out to my coffee companion that my hair never looks that good and to not get too used to it. (They have seen several selfies of it since, so they have realistic expectations with regard to my hair.)

So this brings us to today - when I am wearing both. I put the do-rag on first, because it has even less texture than the turbie, and therefore is even less likely to frizzify my curls. The turbie is on over it to catch and collect the moisture slowly coming out of the hair.

I will have to do a secondary selfie later, to see how it turns out. Because the only difference between fucking around and science is writing shit down. #HAIRSCIENCE!
 

Me, with a hair turban on my head

 

In non-hair news, my car goes into the shop today. I am hoping for the best (a quick and easy fix) but planning for the worst (it has to stay there for the weekend which would mean borrowing Secret Agent Lover Man’s car to shuttle Eldest Spawn to his father’s and also to get to work tomorrow). In the meanwhile, since Bosslady gets me, I am having the car place shuttle take me in to work even though I am not on the schedule. Spending the middle of the day working and earning monies and being with people whose company I enjoy hella beats sitting around in the car place waiting room trying desperately to ignore the TV that is playing morning daytime talk show stuff.

I feel like I was going to write more but my brain has TL;DR’d out. Time for coffee and catching up on other folks’ posts!

Hello, Blisstopia.<3

blissmorgan: (Default)
 Y’ever watch a movie where something tumultuous happens, something utterly catastrophic, and there is an uproar of people jostling and yelling and making plans that are at odds with one another, and nobody’s quite listening entirely to each other long enough to really pull it together, and one quiet man (it’s always a man, isn’t it?) just kind of detaches himself to the group, strolling to the side or a quieter room or whatever, and there begins development of what ultimately becomes The Plan That Saves Them All? On the one hand, I quite enjoy that narrative trope, for what it is. Taking a quiet moment is a valuable tool, and outside-the-box-thinking has led to countless momentous developments in human history.  Yet that trope is rooted in and encourages our very American sense of American exceptionalism, the lone wolf man, the superhero, the superior guy who is going to change everything by dint of not being like the other girls guys.

Some very fine things can be achieved in solitude but humans are, overall, social creatures. A thinker alone is well and good, but never forget the second part of the trope - someone notices our quiet man has gone. Then they chase him down, or he returns to the group, and plans get implemented together.

Saturday is an early day for me, and me alone in the house; it gives me a lot of time to contemplate solitude. Today has had given me the sharp reminder of the fact that if I do not shift my Saturday work prep - or, at least, the shower part of it - to Friday night, then I am looking at a winter of miserable Saturday mornings. I stepped out of the house with wet hair into the 40-degree pre-dawn light, and my head was thoroughly chilled by the time I got to the car.

Later today I am going to a meatspace friend’s birthday party. Her favorite singer, Susan Werner, is going to be performing, and I amvery much looking forward to it. Werner is talented and funny, like a somewhat more political Christine Lavin. Perhaps I will dig up some choice song/video links tonight. 

For now, I go earn the monies, and enjoy this delicious maple walnut coffee. I am very much into trying out fall coffee flavors this year. 

Hello, Blisstopia. <3