Apples; cream cheese and olives and carrots on a stick

My roommate comes up with some pretty amazing metaphors. I think it's some combination of her own artistic sensibility, experience in life, and the fact that she's from Japan and, well, they have a different culture over there and all that. Over the course of living with her these past couple months, I feel really lucky to have benefitted from sage advice and encouragement from her, time and again. One idea I keep coming back to, over and over again, is the metaphor that our capacity to handle stuff - whatever stuff might be: schoolwork, a job, adversity, relationships, multitasking, finding a life direction, job hunting - is like an apple. You build your capacity with age. With challenges. It grows.

I may be a small-ish apple now [and 4 years behind her], but she feels confident that I will grow. And for all that I keep bumping up against the limits of my capacity, wanting ever so much for this little apple to be able to handle where I'm at in life right now, I need to accept that, well, you're just not there yet. It's coming. But let go of wanting to be a bigger apple than you currently are.

My apologies for neglecting this space so much this semester. It seems I just cannot sit down and sew a straight line on my sewing machine [literally, I have the pins in place, I just have to load the damn bobbin thread and STITCH]. I cannot even upload the photos of the finished handknits off my camera that I posted about last time. I can barely sleep through the night sometimes. But I know that one day these things will return.

So yeah. Here's to becoming a nice, big, fat juicy apple. And I'm already grateful be much, much further along than I was even 6 months ago. I saw a doctor yesterday who said, "You know, you seem to have it under control." To which I had to laugh because it reminded me of something my therapist had said - don't compare your insides to somebody else's outsides - and because it made me think of how large a chasm exists between how I may feel and what I [often unintentionally] project. I'm just, you know, tired and wanting space for reflection that I just don't have the luxury of indulging right now. So, um, I don't know. Maybe I'll see you all in 2010 or something. Or maybe the apple will swell just slightly and I'll get my act together and post something craft-related to round out the year. We'll see.

Sorry for the brain dump and the negativity. That's just what happens when I'm tired. So, to end on a positive note, here's an image from the amazing Thanksgiving weekend I had with some college friends in DC. It was the next best thing to being back in CA for the weekend.


The battalion readies itself for battle ...