(manic monday) Rocket City Bloggers’ Year Long Blogging Challenge: Weeks 3 – 6

Oh, dear. I really am behind. The point of a weekly challenge is to post weekly, so I suppose it defeats the point if I end up posting monthly instead… yet here I am, with four weeks rolled up into one post! This is kind of a manic Monday, isn’t it?

Week 3: Assuming the apocalypse is upon us, what do you stock up on?

Let us also assume this is a survivable apocalypse (zombie, holy) and not a nuclear one which would annihilate everything, including hope. In which case: I stock up on nothing because I would almost certainly not survive zombies. Is that a depressing thought? Totally. Do I curr? Naw.

In the spirit of participation, let us suspend all belief and say that the biblical apocalypse occurs, or that I do somehow manage to keep myself alive after a zombie-disease outbreak, and have reason to consider long-term supplies. This is what I would want:

• Weapons: a bow and many arrows, as they are recoverable.  An impressive collection of knives (for hunting and cleaning animals, as well as protection and other survival necessities)
• Books on the following subjects: generic wilderness survival and medicine, hunting & fishing (and how to clean animals for eating), plants, and first aid
• Rope
• Water containers and a large stock of purifiers (such as iodine tablets)
• First aid supplies, including antibiotics

Seeing as how I’ll be dead for all of this, my plans are moot. Next!

Week 4: What is your favorite joke/cartoon?

While I love many cartoons, choosing a favorite is easy: Adventure Time, because I am an adult, and seriously this show.  Fortunately my kids love it as well, so I have an excuse to watch it. Not that I would need an excuse if I didn’t have kids, because it is that awesome. Never growin’ up.

LSP forever

Because I have a rather dark sense of humor, all of my favorite jokes are the most inappropriate. I cannot possibly choose just one, but for the sake of the challenge, here is a (not so?) tame joke that never fails to make me laugh:

What is the hardest part of a vegetable to eat?

The wheelchair. 

I’m sorry.

Week 5: What are you passionate about? 

Reading. Writing. (Not arithmetic. So bad at math, tho.)  Photography. Art. Love. Learning. Those don’t require much explanation.

I am also passionate about mental heath awareness. Being bipolar and having many friends with different mental health issues, I know firsthand the difficulties of existing in a world unaccepting and ignorant. Even close family members can be hurtful without meaning to be: “Wow, you don’t seem bipolar.”  My disease is mild and under control, quite different than its frightening rap. Can I fault people for having no clue? Of course not. I can understand their side – give to them what they had not been able to give to me – and use my passion and knowledge to bring awareness to those around me. A flickering light.

 

Week 6: Are you a city mouse or a country mouse? 

I suppose you’d have to call me a suburban mouse. I love visiting both the city and the country, but my real home is right in the middle. That’s all I got to say about that. (What’s a good day without a Forrest Gump quote?)

Week seven coming your way – on time! On its own!

—

The Rocket City Bloggers are a diverse group of bloggers with at least one thing in common: writing from the Huntsville, AL area, otherwise known as Rocket City. This April began a Year Long Blogging Challenge, and I am attempting to participate. Clearly, though, this is proving to be more of a challenge for me than I initially believed.  Click the image below for more awesome people from the Rocket City.

one.

A blank page excites me.  I cannot count the number of notebooks I have purchased on the thrill of their emptiness alone.  They hide quietly in drawers and storage boxes, on bookshelves and desks waiting to taste the ink from my pen.  Sometimes it scares me, the openness a clean slate represents.  All of the things it could be, it could also not be.  I can fail as easily as I can succeed.  My fear bubbles as my thrill begins to peak, cheeks warm from both emotions colliding beneath the surface.  It is a quiet alchemy that creates the golden thread.

As a 23-year-old wife and mother, I still struggle with the question, “What do you want to be when you grow up?”  Helping mold two small people is difficult when one’s own mold has not begun to set.  I do know a few certain things about myself, however; first, satisfaction does not come easily to me unless I am left with no choice, such as a looming deadline (many an essay has been completed with literal minutes to spare).  I am a perfectionist and incredibly detail-oriented.  Second, I have a frightening density around my heart that flexes and burns like something alive – anxiety and depression have a strong hold on my life.  Third, creating is the only thing that has consistently helped with those two things.  The blank page stirs up my anxiety, but it also stirs up my creativity.  My first “career choice” as a child was a journalist.  All I know now is that when I grow up, I want to be alive, and really alive, too… not just breathing.  Creating makes me feel.

Writing has not been the cornerstone of my life, but it certainly has been a supporting beam.  I mostly dabbled in poetry (unsurprisingly) as a teenager, not letting the words take form until they fell out of my pen.  The stanzas were broken and confusing, no rhythm or rules.  Looking back, this is an excellent metaphor for my own life.  No traumatic events have caused my emotional turmoil.  I have always been emotional and self-centered, something I have fought for years.  One day at seventeen it simply all fell down onto my chest, and I have not felt light and free since.   My poems filled with liquid angst, then hardened, and disappeared entirely.

One thing I have certainly noticed is that writing in particular opens my heart, little by little.  A lot of effort for not a lot of progress, and if I am quiet for too long it slams shut again and I have to start from the beginning – one step forward, two steps back, for it’s always harder to pick back up.  I am waiting for the day when density will crack… the sticky fingers clawing up my shoulders and neck will dissolve into the spring air, and the breeze will blow through my chest.

For now I will step over the threshold of fear and allow someone new, a perfect stranger, into this alchemist’s world.  Like every inexperienced ‘net writer, and maybe some veteran writers, too, I fear rejection.  Criticism I can take, if it is dealt softly (and if it isn’t, then I can take that, too, just not as easily).  Only a handful of people have really seen what I have to say, so I feel I cannot truly know if it is acceptable or not.  I don’t know why it should matter, for it is an extension of me and therefore others’ opinions should mean nothing; however, of course, they do mean something. A lot of something.  Until I become more confident in my writing I need that criticism, praise, and information.

May brings this blog to life, to contain a myriad of words, art, and other beauties. An infinitesimal thread of gold binds them together, and to me.