Spiraling Life

Been a bit since I posted anything life related; here's update and sundry.

Tidbits:

Married 7 months now, still twitterpated. I have a fantastic husband. He brought a dozen red roses to me at work recently - just because. Now if I can just keep him from leaving screwdrivers and spare parts in random places. (Came home to a clutch on the stove once...)

Working as the Design and Copy/Print manager for the Office Depot in AU and really enjoying the creative side of it - I'm seriously considering going back to school for a degree in Graphic Design because of how intrigued I am by the field.

Jack, the world's perfect ferret, died peacefully at an ancient 9 years old. We're missing him. All the other critters are well, even if every one is insane. 4 cats - Mara, Pixel, Luna, and Gizmo; 2 bettas - Kibble and Tidbit (i.e. Bits). There is a distinct possibility of needing to shave Pixel for the summer because of hair overgrowth and matting. I promise to share photos.

Trying to journey, travelling in a spiral.

As to why I vanished...

Projects in progress:

Lots.

• Working on my New Year's resolution of cataloging the hoard I call a book collection. It can be browsed here. I'm nowhere near finished.
• Spring cleaning and rearranging; the military brat in me wants to move, the bank account says no. Chris is putting up with lots of furniture shuffling right now as a compromise to my demanding id.
• Idle craft projects of cross-stitch, knitting, and painting.
• The ever-present video games: Mario Galaxy and FFTactics mainly, with some Go and indie goodies on the side.
• New Song of Ice & Fire book soon (George R.R. Martin), so doing a full reread. By the by, HBO doing a mini-series and it's promising.
• Exploring graphic design techniques; recently created a frame-less collage of a few of our engagement photos.
• Related to the organizing; sorting/filing the plethora of papers and notes scattered throughout the house. Fiction, verse, articles... it's another archive.

Hopefully I'll be posting more on here. Not sure as of yet in what vein.

Ja ne!

-Lissa Rhys-

So here we go, into transitions

I've written in journals for years but this is a new experience - it's not that I've been avoiding blogging, just perhaps a bit on the biased side towards ink and paper. Still, even if no one reads this but myself, the nature of blogging at least means that I will still have my musings around in future years - provided that I don't just want to forget that I was ever young and idealistic.

There is a bittersweetness to life right now. As a graduating college senior I am understanding, perhaps more thoroughly than I ever have before, the mixture of joy and sadness that comes with transitions. Looking back through my studies, I see that this idea is not a new one but rather one that has been explored across time and culture. In the Odyssey, the idea of victory containing grief is one of the major themes and, while I can't match Homer I at least hope to understand this concept more for insight into my own life.

It has been my experience that Western modern culture has a penchant for placing things into their own little niches, for creating binary oppositions, for categorizing and pigeonholing. The gray areas of life are merely confused, straddling the fence, or in need of a deeper look that will classify them once and for all. From Descartes onward there has been a split in ourselves - it's time to pull ourselves together. As one who lives in said Western culture, I think it is time to again explore our identities.

The joy and sadness I spoke of as a graduate - are these truly separate emotions? Joy at having worked hard and succeeding, sadness at leaving this phase of my life behind? On the surface maybe, but I find that the more I delve within myself, the more difficult it is to pry them apart. Instead, I find the need to recognize this emotion as something else, an entity in and of itself. It is more than bittersweetness; it is a feeling of loss through victory. If there is a word for it in English, I don't know it. So to perform a bit of neologism - it is malvictos.