Twenty-nine down...

Day 29 – Your aspirations, in great detail

Within the next year:

• New job as senior designer, preferably with above the line advertising agency
  
• Move to London
  
• Lose enough weight to be able to wear my favourite PVC again
  
• Enjoy the good things as they happen, rather than stressing and second guessing

Within the next five years:

• Job of creative director/design manager, running my own studio (possibly my own design agency, possibly that role within an existing agency)
  
• Be professionally published writer (short stories, and maybe something longer)
  
• Have all groundwork in place for further study (MA? PhD?) and find way to tie subject (vision/perception/communication/language/reality) into career development
  
• Earn enough to be able to treat my parents to nice things, and to not have to worry about where to get the money to visit my brother each year
  
• Get back to Australia (And to a couple more countries off my wish list)

Random stuff:

• Learn to play the violin
  
• Learn another foreign language (thinking of a Chinese dialect, possibly Mandarin)
  
• Take up a properly energetic sport (soon as I've lost enough weight it won't bugger up my knees - kickboxing maybe)
  
• Anything and everything off my wants list

(And to be Queen of the Universe. Although that's not entirely an aspiration. I ~am~ Queen of the Universe, the universe just hasn't realised that yet...)

Topic list is here

We'll fly on the white wings of the wind

Day 30 - One last moment, in great detail
I can't pick one so here's a whole load of them:

Wrexham. 18. Shy as hell. Previous time I'd been home Mum was throwing out an old black hat and on a whim I claimed it. Wore it when I nipped down to the shops and found I was walking differently - you stand up straighter in a hat. On the way back, two (drunk) girls stopped me in the street to tell me I looked beautiful. (They were going on about cheekbones, which I didn't think I had.) When I got home, I ended up staring at the mirror for a long time, without once thinking I was hideously ugly. (For the first time ever.) Thank you random strangers.

Uni. 19. Making a really dumb joke and having someone laughing uncontrollably at it, and realising for the first time ever that the people around me were friends because they liked me (and thought my bad jokes were funny) not just because they felt sorry for me, or felt obliged to be. Huge moment.

Australia. 21. Middle of the desert. Washed my hair in a wood-powered shower (with the smell of woodsmoke drifting in over the door) and dried it in front or a campfire built out of whole trees. Later that evening I and two other girls liberated a box of wine and snuck off to talk about how our lives had brought us there, under a sky carpeted with unfamiliar stars.

Wales. Twenty-something. Up all night at one of the Ladybird parties of legend. Three of us still alive, still drinking, at dawn, standing by a fishpond in the amazing never-ending garden, talking the world apart and watching the sun emerge.

On a train. Sometime. I'd been getting very heavily back into photography, and had reached the stage I was at at Uni, where I saw more of the world through a camera lens (and in stop motion, because every photo opportunity meant click - move - click - move - click like a fractured marionette.) Was on a train from somewhere to somewhere, that had made an unexplained stop in the middle of nowhere. It was late summer, so the wheat was high and gold in the surrounding fields. And the wind had come out to play, and the entire field was dancing, twisting and bending in great rolling waves, over and over and endless. I had the urge to rush and get my camera, only to realise that even if it would take a decent picture through the window pane, it could never capture that moment. All I'd have to show for it would be a rather uninteresting looking field, and a year later I'd have wondered why I even took it and the moment would have died forever. I started leaving the camera at home a lot more after that.

Dragon*Con. A few years ago. A game involving plastic laminated droid tags that you had to keep out of sight of any stormtroopers. And there were a LOT of stormtroopers. (One of whom was Elvis.) So many stormtroopers that I ended up blind to them, and so had my droid confiscated pretty quickly. The confiscating trooper was a bit on the petite side, so I just had to ask 'Aren't you a little short for a stormtrooper?' Quick as a flash, he whipped the helmet off, revealing ~that~ haircut, and replied 'Luke Skywalker. Here to rescue you, Ma'am.' Moment of genius. Memories from Dragon*Con tend to be very hazy for obvious reasons, but I remember that one clearly. (Some of our friends managed to keep hold of their droids that day - they countered with 'These are not the droids you're looking for' cards, which the stormtroopers obeyed without question. Of course.)

Now. Sitting here having read through all my old Livejournal posts. At first it was slightly depressing, seeing that I seem to have been going round in the same few circles forever: need to sort my CV and get a new job; need to do more drawing of my own; need to get serious about writing; need to paint the wardrobe/cupboard/luggage. But then I look at where I actually was then, and where I am now, and I think: I'm getting there. Not just that, I'm accelerating. Flying.

(These things are always self-referential in the end.)

Topic list is here

I finished! I'm quite impressed by that, as usually with these things I get distracted halfway through and forget all about them. Although I've run a day over, which is (stopbeingabloodyperfectionist) disappointing. (Of course, I can get round it... I just need to cross the International Date Line without noticing.) Now need to line more stuff up to keep up the writing every day thing.