I wrote this a couple of weeks ago and I thought I had posted it. I also thought I would get back to the A-Z challenge. Things don’t always go the way I hoped. I am getting better at being okay with that.
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So, on Tuesday past, my oldest son, a.k.a. The Boy, was diagnosed with diabetes and we spent the rest of the week in hospital learning how to manage this new part of our lives.

Obviously, the A-Z challenge took a backseat to that.

He is okay, we are home from the hospital and getting used to our new normal.

This post is part of the A to Z Challenge. I am super sleepy so I hope this makes sense!

G is for green.

Green is my favourite colour. It hasn’t always been, I did a yellow phase at one point and probably some other colours before that. I really settled into green in the past maybe 15 years. In a way I think it’s kind of silly to have a favourite colour but there’s something about the colour green that just speaks to me.

I have a green tattoo, I feel better when I wear green clothes or jewelry, my bedroom is green and I own a lot of green things. In fact, I have so many green things I actually feel a bit strange when I go out in the world and I’m not wearing anything green. I’m not sure if that’s about my connection to the colour or if it is about me feeling like I am not being ’truthful’ because I am not wearing any when so many people know that it is *my* colour. It (oddly) feels like I am misrepresenting myself as someone whose favourite colour isn’t green (yes, I am very strange).

Anyway, so green is my favourite colour and when I go to the stores and I see something that I like say office supplies in green I also feel like I have only just as a matter like a testimony to it being my favourite colour and to my sisters or my son will often point things out with me that to me and think all that one must be your sweater- it’s green- or there’s your stapler – it’s green- and, even though they are joking, sometimes I find it really hard to resist buying that green thing.

Meanwhile though, I don’t fit in very well with green as a metaphor. I am not particularly naive – at least as far as I know. I can usually figure out the subtext in a given situation and I usually don’t get in over my head. So I am definitely not green in the sense of being unfamiliar with the way that the world works.

And, I am not particularly environmentally inclined, so I am not green in the planet saving way. Don’t get me wrong, I am all for being environmentally conscious and I think those issues are important – but I only have so much energy to give and I pour mine into other areas. I will recycle and try to reduce and reuse and I will act when I can, but it isn’t a driving force for me.

I do love the way the colour green makes me feel though. My green coloured notebooks vibrate with extra energy, my green jade necklace feels like it brings me back to myself, my green scarf feels imbued with power. I love it when I can put a touch of green on anything at all.

And, recently, I bought myself a green tiara so I could feel like I was channeling two different types of power at once. It’s silly but hell, it serves me well, so I will use it.

What about you? Do you have a favourite colour? What is it? Do you find that objects that colour feel different to you?

*It’s kind of odd for me to have favourite for anything actually. I don’t really have a favourite meal or favourite book or favourite song. I have lots of things that speak to me for different reasons or that I go to for different reasons. Some things remind me of certain people and then they are my favourite in that moment, but I don’t have an overarching favourite in many many many many categories.

So I find it very complicated to pick something that’s my favourite and I often try to avoid the question or add qualifications about why I need to be able to have multiple answers. Interestingly, my sons have the same problem. When they are asked in school for their favourite part of the book or their favourite character they are often reluctant to answer the question. I asked them about it and they have the same trouble as me with the idea of a favourite – it seems so final and they don’t want to give a ‘wrong’ answer or one that is less than completely true. I had to remind them that the point of the exercise is the writing, not the accuracy of their answers about their favourites, and I have to remind myself the same thing a lot of the time.

The A-Z Challenge takes a break on Sundays so I am posting a teensy story instead. And no, I am not the narrator here. I didn’t own a shredder in the first place.

Broken

It was lying on my desk when I got in this morning.

A single red rose that I am sure he thought I would be swooning about all day.

He has never realized that gestures like that are merely the icing. If you don’t have the cake – the kindness, the respect, the day-to-day dependiblity – the icing will make you sick.

Meanwhile, it turns out that jamming a rose into the paper shredder is terrible idea. It makes a huge mess and it breaks the machine.

Makes sense in a way, don’t you think?

This post is part of the 2016 A-Z Challenge and I am looking forward to posting something new every day in April.

Just is case you thought that this was going to be a month full of insightful, introspective thoughts on my part, let me put your mind at ease by talking about a character from the movie Mystery Men.*

Sci-Fi on the Rock starts today and I don’t know how cons work in other cities but this is our biggest one and it is not limited to Sci-Fi characters, people dress up as all kinds of different characters from books and movies and comics and shows. As you may know from last year, I’ll use just about any excuse to wear a costume somewhere so I always look forward to creating something for SFOTR.

Aside: I don’t think I could rightfully call what I do cosplaying though because that implies an attention to detail and a level of commitment that I don’t quite have. I really respect how cosplayers labour over their costumes to get things JUST right and how they try to source specific materials and the like so I won’t call my approach cosplaying. Mine is much more ‘head to the thrift shop and then get other pieces from the dollar store and that’s good enough’ – for me the fun is in the invention and getting the spirit of the costume rather than focusing on every specific part. Most of the cosplayers I know find joy in the details but that would suck the fun right out of it for me. I only add details until it starts getting on my nerves.

ANYWAY, on to the topic of the day THE BOWLER!

Determination for the win!

The Bowler is a character played by Janeane Garofalo in Mystery Men. She’s a former grad student who is avenging her father Carmine’s death so she joins Mr. Furious’ team of ‘ragtag’ superheroes to fight Casanova Frankenstein’s evil plans. I like how snarky she is and I love Janeane Garofalo and her costume allows her to be fully dressed** and still be kick-ass, so it’s perfect for me.

I bought myself a black wig and green hair extensions, and a corduroy jacket and made myself a few patches out of felt. The challenge was in making her bowling ball with her Dad’s skull in it. We are exactly at the wrong time of year to buy clear plastic balls or beach balls and there isn’t a foam skull to be found anywhere.

Half-assed jacket and skull ball in bag. Good enough? Yep, good enough!

I was not up for the level of construction/crafting required to use a mould  (and time was limited) so I ended up buying two ‘frost domes’ for flowers and trimming them to make a sort of ball shaped thing, and the ‘skull’ inside is a skull mask around a balloon. This is where being a half-assed costumer comes in handy – I didn’t have to make it perfect, I just had to get close enough for me. And I did. See?

So I will be stomping around the event this afternoon in my good enough costume, having a grand time with my kids. (They are dressing up as Sans and Temmie from Undertale, in case you were wondering. We also half-assed their costumes.)

Aside: I decided to dress as this character ages ago but I was afraid I would forget what I had decided, so I put it in my calendar for sometime in February ‘Be The Bowler for SciFi’. Then, I promptly forgot about it. When the reminder popped up I was totally baffled because I had forgotten the reference. I was trying to figure out if I had agreed to be part of a bowling fundraiser or something (a bad idea, I am terrible at bowling), I just about knocked myself out with the facepalm once I figured it out.

So I am off to SFOTR and my other Saturday adventures shortly but I am curious about two things.

1) Do you like to dress up for stuff? Are you a full-on cosplayer or do you half-ass it like me?

2) How do you decide when something is good enough? Do you start with an intention for what is good enough or do you just stop when you get tired of your plan?

*Yes, this is what I am like in real life, too – One minute I am pondering the nature of existence, the next I am wondering how Black Widow can kick so high in leather pants. I think she must spend a lot of time breaking the leather in – perhaps she has people to kick specifically for the purpose of breaking in her leathers.
**That is in NO way a judgment on people who dress in teensy costumes, your body is your body and you can cover it as much or as little as you want to. And I will kick the ass of anyone who tries to harass you because of how you dress. For me, personally, it’s about my sense of what is public versus what is private in my own life, everyone has to make those divisions for themselves.

This post is part of the 2016 A to Z Challenge and I am looking forward to posting something new every day in April. I hadn’t meant to be away this long. <3

Well, how is this for irony?* After a spectacularly annoying morning, I decided that acceptance would be a great word to start my A-Z challenge and now, here I am at 12:29am on what is technically the 2nd of April,** forced to accept that I don’t always have control over how my day is going to unfold and forced to accept that I can’t always get everything done that I hope to accomplish in a day.

My mind gets it but my heart doesn’t. My heart wants a little more lee-way, it wants a little more kindness from the world, it wants points for trying. And it would like those points to come in the form of a little extra time when it is needed.

I know that the real world doesn’t work that way and that it is not possible for me to literally eke out extra time here and there.*** That doesn’t stop me from wishing for it though.

But, given that my wishes in that area have not yet come true, instead I am left with acceptance.

In my head, acceptance has this twisted connection with giving up, with not trying hard enough, but yet, I know better. I know from experience that once I say ‘Okay, I accept that this is a rough spot.’ Then I feel a whole lot better and I start to see solutions where none were before.

For example, once I accepted that I didn’t have as much control over this day as I was hoping to, then I could relax a bit and ‘roll with the punches’ – as my Dad has been advising me to do my whole life (not one of my strengths, that). I could spend less energy in struggling against what was happening (no crises, just annoyances) and spend more energy in figuring out solutions and ways to feel better.

And once I accepted that I wasn’t going to get everything that I set out to do done today, then I could focus more on making good choices about what really needed to get accomplished and what I could put off to another day. That felt a lot less stressful and, again, it let me put my focus where it was most useful.

I still don’t like it though, I don’t like having to tell myself to dial it back. I don’t like having to navigate the way that acceptance sometimes feels like ‘giving up’ – it’s totally not, I get that, but it’s where my mind goes first. I guess I have to ACCEPT that it is going to feel like that before it feels better.

I just keep hoping that over time I will learn to do the acceptance thing a bit more automatically. Sure, it comes easier than it used to and I tend to reach the point where I recognize that it is time for accept things as they are much more quickly than I once did, but it still doesn’t come naturally.

Maybe I have to accept that it might never feel natural but that it will always serve me well?

So far, acceptance has a 100% success rate in helping me feel better. My brain gets it, but that heart? She’s as stubborn as all hell.

I just have to accept that about her.

*Let’s not quibble about whether this is true irony or me using some sort of mistaken interpretation of it. I’m sure that once you read on, you will see the weirdness of me picking this word today.

**Since I haven’t been to bed yet, I am deciding that it still counts as April 1st. It’s all one damn long day, really.

***I also know that, depending on how I proceed, it is possible for me to FEEL like I have some extra time and that perception is a HUGE part of my relationship with time but that’s a whole separate post.