Morning Pages No. 62
Tuesday 25th August - 10:26pm
Yeah, I know these are just becoming later and later, and I know Iām going to have to do this whole thing again in around ten to twelve hours, but I honestly just needed to take a whole day today. I feel like thatās genuinely something I needed to do. And a lot has happened today! I donāt know if I want to talk about all of it, but I suppose I do feel full and happy enough to talk about...some. I spoke to Malith? I called him when I was on my walk with Lonzo after realising that I was feeling a bit lonely. And Malith was #1 on my list of 50 people whoāve helped shape me into the person that I am today. Out of all the people I couldāve thought of first, I thought of him. And that was in my head all day today, so around 4pm I decided to finally call him. And I expressed that the reason I hadnāt been able to call him before that was because I was getting too in my own head about allocating time to call Malith. I mean we usually speak on the phone for hours at a time, with three or so hour phone calls being a totally normal and regular occurrence when we were younger, and by younger I mean like two or so years ago? Itās perfectly natural for us to waste away hours on the phone, and for our phone calls to include multiple toilet trips. Phone in hand. I felt like if I was always multitasking, then Iād have no time for a phone call. But on my walk today, I realised that Iād rather speak to him for twenty minutes a day rather than not speak to him at all for months just because I never had four spare hours at a time. Which reminds me, I also told the boy that Iād actually read āFleabagā, so I have to do that right after finishing these pages. Yowza. I kind of fucked myself over here, didnāt I? The amount of crap I need to do is seemingly large almost always usually because I allow myself to have days like this, where I get absolutely nothing done. Well, actually itās not entirely my fault. I had uni this morning, and so that meant a 9am start AT THE LATEST. I actually woke up at around 7am, closer to 7:30am but not close enough that it was an alarm that had woken me up. The sun woke me up, because it comes out earlier now. And I love that. Summerās on its way in, but I still have a gross winter body and itās still weirdly raining a lot, so I want to rectify the gross winter body, but itās a little difficult in this abhorrent torrential August rain.Ā
Iāve just realised I havenāt had a single paragraph break for this whole page, so Iāve decided to put one right here. We learnt about āchunkingā in Writing & Editing for Digital Media this week, and the inverted pyramid model thatās used for writing content meant for digital platforms. I felt pretty confident in my ability to āchunkā effectively, that is to construct my content in defined and digestible chunks so that itās not just one wall of text, and our audience is more likely to both find the information they came for, and also better engage with our content in general. Iām really enjoying this class, and Iām also really enjoying ONLY TAKING ONE CLASS! After this class, Iāll only have one more left, and then the internship. Which is exciting. If Iāll ever be able to actually do an internship. COVID-19 has screwed up my hopes of finding full-time employment by February 2021, and calling my 24th year on this earth the first official year of my professional career. It seems as though thereāll still be some time before I properly enter my industry. But I am enjoying doing whatever I can with whatever is available to me right now. I mean maybe I could go on to get my PhD at unimelb. Maybe not at unimelb? But honestly where else would I go? I have no other connections to any other institutes, but one could also say that I have no connections at unimelb either. I just owe them a lot of money. And also $282, or I believe that is the amount. I donāt want to think about that bullshit right now though.
Evan just coughed in the other room. Iām not sure what heās doing, but I love him. I donāt know why, I just wanted to write that.Ā
Sarah posted in the 21 Days group that todayās challenge was to call up one person from our list of 50 people and just touch base with them. Funnily enough, when I read the challenge I was already on the phone to Malith. I called him after realising that if he was the first person on my list, that would mean that Iāve been thinking about him quite a bit, and took that as a sign that I should definitely call him. It felt pretty nice to have preemptively completed the challenge, without even knowing that I was PREEMPTIVELY completing the challenge?! āPreemptiveā is such a weird word. I misspelt it when I was typing it out in caps. The āpā being between the āmā and the ātā threw me off completely. It just felt wrong to type those letters in that order.Ā
Anyway, Sarah also spoke about her friend Joshua in the post, and I didnāt know how to express my condolences. I just sent her a message. I feel my mind straying from these pages. I donāt think I want to deal with anything too complicated right now, which is why Iām skirting the issue. Sometimes, I worry that if I donāt speak about my friends and whatās going on in their lives, Iāll just repeat the same basic stuff that I seem to concern myself with for the majority of my time, or over the bulk of my day. I donāt know. I need to read āFleabagā, and Iām worrying that Iām not making sense. I doubt that these pages will provide me with any insight today. I honestly just feel like Iām ticking boxes at this point, and Iām a little bit annoyed about that feeling, but Iām also accepting it as part of the pages. Oh what zen. I am a revolutionary mindful practitioner, a beautiful and empty-headed queen of calm. I donāt fucking know. Itās 10:56pm, it seems ludicrous to still refer to this as a morning pages entry. LOOK. I consider it to be a colossal win that Iām writing anything at all today.
I texted Julie and organised to visit her again next Wednesday so we can spend a bit more time looking at all the stuff Iāve done on Squarespace so far. Itās not bad, what Iāve done so far. Like itās really not bad. Iām proud of where the siteās at, with perhaps a small exception to the colour scheme and the fonts. I have to sort that out. Iām not entirely sure how to add our own font packs to Squarespaceās site builder. I hope they allow for that? Because the font pack that they do have is INCREDIBLY limited. Iāve stopped using italics in these pages because Iāve realised that when I copy/paste the text from this morning pages doc into tumblr, tumblr gets rid of all my italicised text and just turns them into normal letters again. Lonzo just had a dream where he was running and his legs were moving, but heās lying behind me under the blanket and so his little scratchy paws were moving up and down on my butt and it felt like the largest, weirdest, most inefficient spider bite I was ever receiving.
There are now TWO spiders on the window sill above the kitchen sink now, and the newer one is smaller but still BIG for a house spider, and itās suspended in the centre of a web thatās been prominently constructed right above the kitchen sink and in the centre of the bottom section of the window. So basically this spider is like eye-level with me when I go to do the dishes. But the problem is, is that this smaller spider looks eerily like a crab, its legs are at weird angles, and I legitimately think itās dead? AH. I hate this so much. Iām trying not to think about it, but goddamn itās on my mind and now Iāve described it in great detail. That horrid spider will be in these morning pages for the rest of eternity, and someday future Rue is going to read this description and hate past Rue for it...present Rue? Rue that is Rue right now, sitting here typing against her will but also for her own good.
Iām weirdly enjoying it that whenever I answer the phone at work and an older man is the one whoās calling, they say ālike a French streetā when I tell them my name. Haha! Sometimes Iāve responded with āor like searing regretā or something along those lines. And if they appreciate wit, they tend to laugh. This one time, I told a middle-aged couple about my idea for a useless superhero (āSuperfluousā), and the dad (because he was a dad and she was a mum and they were in the shop buying a phone for their daughter, if I remember correctly) CACKLED. I have a love-hate relationship with brackets. I think theyāre lazy and I would never use them in anything I write and put my name to, but Iāve always used them avidly in journal entries and personal stuff like these pages. I figure nobodyās going to judge me for having horrid grammar and some shoddy structure in something that they shouldnāt be reading anyway.Ā
I do enjoy writing though. Always have. No surprises there. But sometimes it is hard. It feels like a part of me that I feel I need to disconnect from myself in order to survive, and yet at the same time, it is my life. I donāt want to do anything else but this, I say that a lot. But then sometimes I am SO fearful that Iāve forgotten or Iām on the way to forgetting how to do this. Itās been literal years since I last wrote long-form fiction, and I feel like all the stuff Iāve written recently isnāt even that good. But was my stuff as a teenager any good too? Mr. D.B. Kuruppu said that it was. And I owe it to him to try harder. But I owe it to myself too. I have good ideas, or at least teenage Rue had good ideas, and those ideas deserve to be fleshed out and done justice.Ā
Nickyās just crawled into my lap. He almost crawled all over my keyboard but I stopped him. He almost did it again. Now heās licking his back leg but actually I can hear and feel his scratchy tongue trying to lick up my yellow āKINDNESS ONLYā hoodie. I love this hoodie. I never thought Iād ever spend so much money on a HOODIE, but I am glad that I did. Wearing this makes me feel happy, and I know that it makes other people feel happy too, which is everything that matters. Positivity. The colour āyellowā is one of the most beautiful colours in the world, but the best thing about it by far is the fact that it reminds me of my mum. Thatās a beautiful sentence. I miss my family. I want to see Sandy at LEAST. Maybe I should call her tomorrow and see if sheād be keen to take the dogs out. I also have to do a bit more work on the website tomorrow, but for now I suppose I should just read āFleabagā and maybe a bit of āDominicanaā if I can stomach it. And by āstomach itā, I mean if I can physically deal with lying on my stomach after my very modest dinner of hummus and crackers.













