Monday, September 20, 2010

Long Overdue Post!!

Hi Friends,

Thanks for being patient with me. This has been an exciting week!!

1. I finally bought the text book for the piano class I started taking. Even though I don't have a piano at home, I carry the book around the house, looking at the notes and trying to sing along. I'm enthralled.
2. My beautiful, dear friend Kim has challenged her readership to 21 days of doing something uncomfortable. I decided that I would be waking up at 6am every day. (y-i-k-e-s.) I find it nearly impossible to get myself out of bed in the morning, so the thought of doing it at 6am was quite literally terrifying. (The first day, I sat on my couch at 6:10am and my first thought was, "How did I just DO that?!") Although I gave myself a break this last weekend, I've been doing pretty well. In fact, my body pretty much comes to full alertness by 5:55, even before my alarm goes off. I should be thrilled, but it's really just strange to me - I can't believe 26 years of a bad habit can be broken in a week!! So what do I do with all that free time in the morning? Well...

3. There's a book called The Artist's Way. It basically guides you through finding the Artist within. One of the exercises is to write 3 pages of stream-of-consciousness-thought when you first wake up in the morning, before you do anything else with your day. So, for about the first 30 minutes of my day, I roll out of bed, head down to the couch with my notebook, and write whatever happens to be on my mind. Sometimes, I'm pretty deep at 6am.... but most of the time I'm just exclaiming about the fact that I'm up at 6 in the morning :)
The Artist's Way also has you go through different exercises every week, and to have weekly check-ins with people going through the book as well. My people are Elaine and Mary, and we are checking in via our blogs! How fun!!

For this week, I want to share a couple things. First, is that I totally yanked Elaine's idea for her artist date and went down to Art Essentials downtown. BUT, I bought a couple canvases and some oil brushes for a mere $20. And now the next time I feel like painting, it will not be on a National Geographic poster ;) The other thing (this is such a fun exercise), is that the book asks you to pick 5 imaginary lives. What would you do? Who would you be?? Here were mine:

Broadway singer/actress (not only for the career, but also for the fact that I would be in New York!)
Model (I hear you get to keep the clothes sometimes :D)
Movie Critic (Go to all the premieres? check. Get paid to watch movies and write? check. Get to wax philosophical about story lines and directing styles? double check.)
Novelist (I thought my first office job was crazy and I had stories to tell.... then I moved on to my second office job, and honestly you wouldn't even believe me if I told you....)
Casting Director (I underlined this one and put exclamation points after it. I think that means I was pretty excited at this idea.)

And I have to share my favorite affirmation. What a fiercely confident statement that what we do is worth it: All my work comes to good.


So much more to share about the Artist's Way - and I already have a killer idea for my artist date next week. Can't wait!!

xo,
Meg

3 comments:

  1. YAY!! It's shocking that most of your "lives" have to do with either writing or acting ;-). And I love your good work statement. I forgot to put this on my blog post... but I realized something kind of cool this time around. When I did that exercise it suggests in the middle of the chapter, writing the sentence 10 times... I had far far less negative blurts than I did the first few times I've tried to do it (you know, within the past three years).

    I'm excited to hear what your artist's date is this week!

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  2. I like your blog. I don't like that you quit facebook. I'm hoping to come up for a visit soon, you guys going to be in town for halloween weekend?
    Lindsey H

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  3. I feel like you've abandoned your blog. But welcome back to facebook. Just came across this http://www.nanowrimo.org/. thought you might be interested.

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