It's been almost a year since I left social services for nannying. I can't remember how long it's been since I left opera for social services.

Being blissfully happy and mindlessly thankful about the new mellow quality of my life, I chose to consciously reduce drama and relax into cushiony simplicity.

When I was a child, I spent many summers with my grandparents in thirsty, tiny Evergreen, Alabama, where the sunshine was sticky and the heat laden with dust. There was a lot to do there, really: play with my Uncle Jim's old toy cowboys and, well, Native Americans, exploring the old attic and the old kitchen, rich with anique roller pins and grimy bottles waiting for discovery, playing the 100-year-old piano with the three notes missong. But it usually took a week to lauch myself out of the boredom resultant of a slower pace and to embark on these endeavors.

Even after those gears began their creaking, I was still stirr-crazy, bored, and even guilty. Guilty because I was surrounded by love and beauty and found myself miserably restless anyway. Evenings would while away in the warmth we pretended was cool of every purplish evening on the verranda. My rocking chair clackytied about 10 times as often as Granddaddy's while the wisteria hung around us like frangrant spanish moss, and the tip of his cigar smouldered like a firefly.

These days, I would rather go to bed at 9:00 to avoid the restless irritation of having nothing worthwhile to do until a later bedtime.

I've tried cards, conversation, livejournal, writing quid-pro-quo's with strangers, friends, and family, all of the Julia Cameron books, "Writing down the Bones," collecting, crafting, and writing greeting cards for loved ones (often 10-15 regulars a week), sketching, and skulpting.

I am currently working fourty hours a week raising a 15-month-old, and 4-10 hours a week teaching a combination of improvisation, method acting, psychodrama, and basic performance craft to child prodigy championship figure skaters.

I am also a devoted and loving wife who cares actively and deeply for her husband, and his family.

Still my intellect punishes my mood for its ennui.

Does anyone know a good writer's workbook or writer's group?

I'd really appreciate your suggestions.

My little brother's been giving me writing "assignments" once a week to keep me on the page. This one's rough, but seems at least vaguely appropos, given last night's rapid, random ramblings:

--Day One
so sleepy. finally so warm. held. rocked by external breezes i can neither hear nor feel on my skin. like an impossible sense memory of flying inside my mother on her flitations between flowers and rest in the brief instances before she laid me to hatch in my embryonic coccoon, which was her egg. once again tiny and fragile; alone. so sleepy........

Day Four
waking up to what are best described as sensations of light. as though the only thing standing between me and the sun is a vast, heavy raincloud. i no longer feel driven by the routines of searching, eating, drinking, expelling, and resting which were once the definition of my existence. i feel my breath as a sign of my life, fogging me, warming me, and then chilling me inside this tight, flimsy shield.

Day Six
could no one have told me it would be this way? or perhaps i am deformed, pathological, wrong, a proverbial freak of nature. but i can only observe the goings and comings of changes in vision and temperature. i am afraid. i am helpless in my immobility as much as in my fatigue. perhaps i am a disgrace to my speicies, and perhaps the worst of the shame is the pleasure i take in this lazy isolation.

Day Seven
lazy. i must be lazy, but i do not feel lazy. all i do is lie still, watching abstract and colorful dramas unfold beneath my eyelids. yet every particle of me seems constantly driven; a work ethic i would be proud of save my knowlege that this great, fearsome, mysterious process is an irresistable force and not a choice of my own making.

Day Nine
explosions of flower colors. poppy orange, daffodil yellow, hyacinth blue, painfully blinding daisy white. i cannot differentiate between reality and hallucination. still, it is not until i become aware that i believe they are one and the same that i know i am changed forever.

Day Eleven
pain, pain, pain. the aching soreness i could handle, but the cramps and pinches and constant burning are driving me mad. mother earth, god, goddess, deliver me. i cannot endure but i must. there is no option. even death is not an option (though i have considered it well) because i can make no movement to cease this torture of my own creation: i am trapped in a cage i designed and crafted for myself to be a protective, healing blanket.

Day Thirteen
constant motion in front of my eyes. shifting neon paisleys. a disorienting kaleidescope of colors and textures. this juxtaposition of ennui and fluidity brings to mind the forest legend of humans and motion-sickness. i know that i would vomit, except that i have consumed nothing.

Day Fourteen
ouch ouch ouch. tingling pain that is both hurt and delight. i wish i could sever, cut off the legion of knobby, hard flesh-gatherings which create constant salivatory rushes inside my cheeks and my heart. as my throat swallows and my soul absorbs, i am overwhelmed by startling warmth and untouchable aches. the excrutiation of the breakages would be well-worth the resultant bruised tenderness of relief.

Day Fifteen
alone. all alone. as if i never understood what the word meant before. i am isolated in mandatory, inarguable systems which i never imagined. utterly alone while buffetted by an unseeable wind, hanging only to a brittle twig; fragile by my own design. what have i done?

Day Eighteen
will i still be loved if i evolve past my loved ones? the caterpillars i knew before will surely either not recognize me, or recognize me with shun because i became something they did not; some wanton temptation they resisted on purpose. i am empty and hollow, as though my skin, hairs, and feelers are the walls of a room far to drafty and haunted to ever be inhabited. this aloneness will never end, and the realization of such is every bit as suffocating as the tight integument of fillaments i have woven in an effort to contain myself.

Day 24
more pleasant sensations today, including one that is akin to excitement. this mysterious process is becoming an itch i cannot stop scratching, a tickle that is difficult to endure. but "More" has crept into my emptiness, and wrapped his arms around "Despair," who was existing in desolate quietness there. somehow i am beginning to believe it possible that i will emerge as a miraculous hybrid of wounded, risky, fearful, depressed, and meant-to-be in the body of a creature more full of delight and laughter than any i ever met before.

Day 27
straining sensations today in body parts i've neer noticed before. i have a compullsion to flex muscles weak from dissuse. but the more i am aware of the stretchiness and tension in those tissues, i wonder if, perhaps, i have not neglected thier exercise, after all, and instead, they are vulnerable only due to their infancy. it seems possible that they never existed before.

Day 29
a drive and enthusiasm seems to have saturated a chasm that was vacuous in its seeming pointlessness. i struggle against the gauzy strands of the cloth-like swaddle in which i am eveloped. i yearn to be out of myself and into the larger world. i am frightened, yes, and yet i find joy in my fright. what will be? what will be? what will be? whatever it is i have become during this retreat, for better and for worse, i know deeply and with grave, giddy certainty that i have become what i truly am.--

I'm singing tonight in a benefit Caberet put on by the Metropolitan Community Church to raise funds for the Music Program at the Harvey Milk Elementary School. It will be a great show for a great cause. 8:00 PM, John Sims Center, 11th and Mission, $15 suggested donation, sliding scale, no one will be turned away for lack of funds. Check it out:

Shoot me an email if you want a seat saved.

www.jonsimsctr.org/MCF.htm

So my last day in social services will be Friday.

I need several celebrations:

1) a catharsis scene
2) a spiritual ritual
3) a lot of journaling
and
4) a serious celebration.

The celebration could be in or out of town. Any ideas anyone?

Don't forget to check out LJ for the details of what this wild ride is like. Oh, and if you do find me there, be sure and let me know. A couple of friends from tribe have looked for me on LJ, but I don't regularly check the "manage friends" feature, so give me a heads up and I'll clear you for the locked entries.

Hello, All.

While blogging is brand new to me, I've known for quite some time that, while writing is clarifying and cathartic for me, writing with an audience inspires discipline at the page and often seduces the appearance of the muse.

Thus, several months ago, I joined Live Journal, without thinking of it as a "blog."

Now I know it is, and I know that the inclussion of people watching ("I see cyber-people" tee-hee) as well as the embarrassingly cutsie mood faces, locations, and music selections, truly do motivate me to actually sit down and get it (whatever "it" happens to be) on the, er, screen.

I used to write erotica, short-stories, novellas, and poems constantly, and many were very intreaguing, effective, and even formative for the audience. Social services has found me entrenched in a world in which values are backward: That which helps me is to be kept at bay, for fear its revelation will drive me away from my percieved mission.

I am quitting social services, perhaps temporarily, but maybe for good, after almost a decade, to do soul-affirming work that pays better and gives me the emotional and intellectual space to persue a second Master's degree, probably PhD track.

Thus, I am looking forward to the reserve of time and energy I will have to write again, and am wading in the Live Journal waters to initiate myself back to the practice.

If any of you have the time or energy to follow my updates, even from time-to-time, on Live Journal, it would help me so much. Currently, I have very few "friends" there, but am striving to write regularly nonetheless.

I need people I admire to check-in on my endeavor from time to time, with or without occassional commentary.

I.E., just knowing you are there will help me to write more, and to write better.

If you want a sample/s of my best stories thusfar, I am happy to send them privately.

Otherwise, I am "sfzerlina" at Live Journal. If you are already a member and are willing to glance over my ramblings from time to time, please "friend" me so that I know you're watching. If you're not a member, it's free and painless. I would consider anyone who signs on very much in my debt .

Thanks ever so much,
Sarah-Helen