Epiphanies, of a kind

• Happiness is a big red wool-lined coat, with fur around the hood and a leather beaver applique on it’s pocket. How could a person ever be unhappy in such a garment?
• Wintery weather makes me very dry and papery, like a lizard princess. It’s right to invest more time in applying moisture to the scaley lizard skin. (For serious, right now my skin feels like the outside of an onion, like you could take great swathes of it and peel them off. This is the dryest I’ve ever felt in my whole life and it’s not my cup of tea at all, let me tell YOU).
• After a conversation with Mon the other week: There are so many opportunities to retrain and to investigate and explore different careers... As oppose to feeling one HAS to choose between the many many things that can be done in the world, it’s more a matter of deciding which one to do first. So, I can be a counsellor or an archaeologist or a novellist if the whole web architecture thing doesn’t work out, or when it becomes boring or a chore. Why not? But also: one thing at a time, and do it wholeheartedly.
• When Virginia Woolf picked up her diary again in 1917, after one of her bouts of illness, she wrote without ego: that is, without the word “I”. This is a pretty interesting experiment, especially for a blogger and compulsory journalist such as myself - it’s not always easy, but interrogating the need for the word and whether the same sentence is written better without it is a pretty good challenge. Creates less lazy writers. You should give it a go, even if it’s just in your own diary or journal and not online... that way it’s easy to just elide the word entirely and not worry so much about sounding off a peremptory sentence. Writing challenges are good.
• Finding and listening to new music is one of life’s little pleasures. You should try: Get Back Guinozzi!, The Living Sisters, The Eversons. “Low File Tropical” by Get Back Guinozzi! is my favourite track at the moment and is pretty much permanently on repeat. The Living Sisters make me think of Jenny Lewis and the Watson Twins. The Eversons make me think of Best Coast and drinking at Happy.

And darlings, that’s all I have for today. Your scaley lizard princess bids you adieu, and expresses a hope that we’ll be back to some kind of regular blogging program beginning next week.