It's a miracle it's written at all :)

Note to self: 1) Don't compose a blog in your head, you'll lose it.
                    2) See that little button on the top right of the screen that says SAVE, use it!!!!!!

If you're thinking that I have now lost today's blog twice, you get an icecream as a prize :) I've lost this blog twice now. Once because I composed it in my head while I was walking the much fitter dog around the Gooseponds, and then forgot the whole thing. And just now when some gremlin wiped the entire blog from my screen just as I was about to post.

So here's number 3. The last one was a bit preachy anyway. The first one was awesome, but when I compose something in my head (and it hardly ever happens because I usually have only cloud there that takes form when my fingers touch the keypad) the words leak out of my head and disappear. I guess the words have sunk into the ground around the Gooseponds and maybe they will grow into little word trees or something. Have I mentioned that I'm sleep deprived? In the last blog that vanished I had a very clever line about the reason for this that was to keep you reading to the end. Of course I can't now remember how I did that.

So the whole point of this blog is to discuss boxes, pretty boxes of all shapes and sizes. The other day I had the song Little Boxes by Pete Seeger pop into my head. The song is about the conformity of suburbia, it was first written in 1962 when the cheap suburbs were going up all over America. The song stuck in my head and my mind wandered from housing to people. Because just as modern society is making bland conformist suburbs, it is also making bland conformist people. (Ha! I didn't think of that in the lost blogs).

This is not to say that the non-conformist people are not around, they are. It is more that society rewards a certain type, or at least the media manipulates things to make it appear so. Why does a footballer get paid such a huge amount of money? Why does a model get paid so much to starve herself and strut around like an emaciated stick insect in clothes that a normal person could neither wear nor afford, nor even want to wear? Why does the person who goes to Africa to study a species on the brink of extinction, or to help people who are malnourished due to lack rather than choice get nothing and no assistance?

Okay, I'm going in a different direction to that originally intended. My original point was that society is important, but it should support all people within it, and not just those perceived to be 'successful'. Success is a small word, with a pretty straightforward dictionary meaning - yes I looked it up.

Success:

• a level of social status
• achievement of a goal
• the opposite of failure

But in our personal lives success is far more complex. Success as a dictionary meaning is not necessarily what will bring happiness or fulfilment in our personal lives. Coming back to society and boxes, and my original thought: why must success be considered in a narrow field as the media feeds to us?  People are as many and varied as butterflies. What makes one person happy is not what another dreams of. And why should it be. Variety is the spice of life, yet modern society seems intent of blanding the variety out of us (blanding is a word, it is now anyway). Think of all the wonderfully unique people - the crazy cat people, the hippies, the artists, musicians, writers, the people who eschew the 'normal' values that society imposes on us, and are happy and content. 

The true meaning of success is of course as varied as the people on this earth. It's a short life, some of us know what our personal success is and some of us search for a big chunk of our lives to find it. Success, in our personal lives, is really just another way of saying the meaning of life (without those that have read The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy shouting 42 at you). 

To get back to my point, and I know I'm being long winded about it, the meaning of life is different for all of us. We should all be allowed to find our own personal meaning and to be able to pursue it with the full support of friends, family, and society. Maybe it is to breed a better chicken, or write a song that Bruno Mars sings (because he's cute), or study an obscure slug that lives in the depths of the Amazon. Just because your dream may not be something society considers important does not mean you should give up on it. If it's important to you, and makes you feel that you have found the meaning of your life, then chase it, follow it, give it all you have. Because the true meaning of life is to lie on your death bed with no regrets.

Now why am I sleep deprived? Because this morning at 2am I woke to the sound of dishes banging in my kitchen. I was in bed, the boy child was in bed, the cats were on my bed - so who or what was in my kitchen? I looked at the cats, they were peacefully asleep, the dog was completely silent (this is not a reliable indicator, she was probably asleep and dreaming about food in which case the only way she'd notice a robber was if he was stealing the food) and nothing was stirring except the banging in the kitchen. I was tired, and a little bit  freaked out of my mind, so I lay there and waited for it to stop, which it did. And nothing, no footsteps, nothing. So I lay awake for the next few hours, finally went back to sleep about an hour before I needed to get up and of course woke feeling like something the cat regurgitated (not the cat that eats tinsel, nothing shiny about me this morning). I staggered into the kitchen and it was exactly the same as I had left it the night before. My immediate question was this: if there was an intruder and he/she/it/ghost felt the need to bang dishes, how come he/she/it/ghost wasn't instead motivated to wash the  dishes from the night before that I had lazily left in the sink? And how could I get he/she/it/ghost to do this next time. I bet if I woke  to the sound of dishes being washed and kitchen being cleaned I would smile and go back to sleep no problem.

I will leave you with a photo I took on an expedition to one of the beaches around here. The tide was waaaaaay out which makes it look kind of like a desert if a desert had islands and an ocean. Yeah, sleep deprived, I'll shut up now.

Ever had one of those days, where you reach a point when you realise that you will get nothing done that you had planned? So you throw your hands up in the air, and just go with the flow - or you get massively frustrated and fight against it but still in the end have to go with the flow. Of course if you get massively frustrated the flow becomes more like a raging torrent with unseen rips.

Well for me it's been a whole week of those sorts of days. I have a rising tide of anxiety that is coming from my stomach, squeezing my lungs and making my head feel like it will explode. That is  mostly because I haven't written a word and I had planned to have so much done by this point (one week later). I also haven't done any of the promoting of the book that I need to do. It has been distributed to the major stores, and I will have it up on Amazon just as soon as I have the time to sit and go through the hoops Amazon has in place. In a short space of time it will be available in all the catalogues, so while it is not imperative that I act on publicising immediately, I have to do so in the next few days.

This is  not to say that the past week has been a total write off, it hasn't. I've had some part time work and have earned enough to keep the wolf from the door for a bit longer, and I have had a few social moments - the rest of the time I'm damned if I know just what I did, but I know I was too busy to write or even to read. I have a mind that stresses when I don't read often, I think because it dulls the constant script that flows past the back of my eyes. Yes people, there is a script that unfolds at the forefront of my brain, I see it with my minds eye. It is comprised of my conversations with other people, my conversations with myself, even my shopping list when I write it. Everything I think or say or others say to me flows past inside my head and is viewed by my minds eye, whether I want to or not. That's how I spell, I have a picture of the word in my head and I just look at it. It's how I remember conversations, I go back through the script in my head.

I have spent most of my life thinking that was how everyone processed words. I could never understand why they couldn't spell when all they had to do was look at the word in their head. It's the same as the imaginary conversations I rehearse  before I talk to someone. You know, when you have something to say to someone and you plan what you will say, and they will say, and you will respond. You have the whole conversation planned, and then they don't say the right thing (you do this, right?). Imagine being me, the imaginary conversation running next to the actual conversation, and the real life conversation deviates from the prepared script. Rewrite on the fly! Very stressful.

Well anyway, apparently other people don't have this script inside their heads. It beats me how you all organise your thoughts if that is the case. But then it does become overwhelming, and that is one of the reasons I read and I write. The script goes to the back (I learned this phrase from using PowerPoint!) and the words I am reading/writing are at the front. Plus the noise in my head lessens when I write. Even writing this blog is calming, despite it going in an unexpected direction - again.

Hopefully from now on I can get back on track, and get on with the things that I really need to be doing - sending the book review requests off, checking to see if the book is up on the other store websites, and working on the next book which is downright shouting at me.

In the meantime, I'll attach a photo of The Gooseponds which I took at dusk today while speed walking the dog - she's getting fitter :)