blog of sam and misty

Why I write

More and more often, I try to throw a switch inside my mind that shifts my attention from consuming to creating, from following instructions to making my own rules, but usually something pretty disturbing happens. I tap at the keyboard for a few minutes before I lose interest, then go back to happily grazing on websites like Youtube or Metafilter. I occupy myself with nutrition free mental junk food that offers me nothing of value, but leaves me starving for more. I turn on my television, watching shows that make me want to buy sets of DVD’s that remind me to get the soundtrack featuring a recording artist who wears merchandise from a sports team meant to remind me to watch their game on my television.

It’s all because I made a wrong choice a long time ago. Instead of being willing to take risks and push myself to reach further, I chose to make myself comfortable, to be safe and sensible. I thought I was well behaved and smart, but really I just didn’t understand that for every risk that I took along with a chance for something bad to happen, there was a chance for me to learn something new and challenge myself. I let my life shrink around me until it became so small, there was no room around me to breath.

I want to do something better for myself than that. I want to act, to leave something behind me after I leave, hopefully something of value. It’s not easy to make that choice to expend the effort from one moment to the next. to risk trying things for fear that I won’t be good at them, but each time I do it, it gets a little easier. I find myself getting absorbed and wanting to elaborate more on what I’m trying to say. To be more specific, more persuasive in my message. I want to write words that will make people sit up, act, think differently and just maybe take a few actions of their own so that they can share this feeling of being at the wheel with me instead of just following directions.

Photo of the day – looking for noms

I’m not sure what this guy would eat, but he looked hungry as Sam and I were coming out of the Hot Shop at Morean Arts Center in St. Petersburg, FL.

Silly humans…

It has been an interesting few weeks here in Banterland. Misty and Sam went off on a trip which turned out to be a bit longer than they planned, and left the Dot and me to our own devices. They got a catsitter to come and look after us for a couple of days, but other than that, we were free from Sam’s games on the xbox and Misty’s rewatching of episodes of Burn notice. We had the whole apartment to ourselves and endless time to spend in it. I spent it catching up on some reading that I’ve been wanting to get through for quite a while now and some poetry writing that I’m very happy with. The revised versions may pop up in the blog in a while, so stay tuned.

Dot kept me on my toes though. I know the sound of her little footsteps approaching the folding sofa very very well and I can go from resting to on guard in the fraction of a second between the moment that I first hear that sound and when she pounced, I was ready to dart out the other side and start the chase. Sometimes we’re playing. Sometimes we start out that way and we wind up really going after each other. But whatever happens during that time, we always wind up back at our status quo. A fragile state of armistice between us that usually falls apart after a while, but forces us to understand each other and ourselves well enough to function as siblings.

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