Tag: writing

Impulse Control

~ Brooke F. ~ Leave a comment

I was thinking, what would my past week have looked like had I no impulse control. It’s a scary yet interesting question. 

I think I would have thrown a head of lettuce in my sister’s face. 

I would have told that girl her dolphin earrings were cute and that lady that her highlights were spot on. 

I would have said hello to that person I thought I recognized and asked that girl who was crying at the library if she was okay. 

I would have randomly turned left as I drove out of our driveway and would have skipped work. 

I would have gone to the coffee shop and just drawn with charcoal all day. 

I would have told the barista that I wanted the sweetest drink she could concoct and I would drink it in one gulp. 

I would have woken up at 3 am to take a walk outside at night.  

I would have punched a wall once and a fake friend twice. 

I would have bought myself a new dress and shoes and would have danced in front of the mirror just to watch the folds of fabric shimmer and wave. 

I would have dyed my hair how I always wanted and maybe even cut it short. 

Until now, I haven’t realized fear has stopped me from doing so many things. Some good and some bad. 

A Very, very, very Bad Day

~ Brooke F. ~ Leave a comment

Okay, gents and ladies. It’s about time I write about an adventure…

So come and listen to my tale, sad but fantastic, of one of the worst days I’ve had in a long, long time. 

I’m am of course taking about the NyQuil and boiled egg train wreck. And I don’t mean train wreck in the sense that is was a mess of a day (though it was) but in the sense it involved a literal train wreck. 

Are you intrigued yet? Well I sure hope so because I’ve pulled nearly every trick to gain your interest. 

But truth is, it really was just a bad day. One of those days where it felt as if nothing could go right and everything that could go wrong, did. 

So let us turn back the clock… back to where it all began….

This tragic chain of events was put into motion on a Sunday night. 

I had a cold. 

Nothing too bad except for the fact that every time I tried to lie down my nose decided to run like Usain Bolt. So it was kind of hard to sleep. So (like a Norma person) I took some pills that just so happened to be cold medicine.  But what I didn’t realize is this wasn’t just any cold medicine; this was NyQuil night time, coma inducing, death emulating cold medicine whereas I didn’t even think I was taking a night time cold medicine (it was in a regular day time box). So I, without being in full possession of this knowledge, took not one but TWO of these pills. When I realized my mistake, I was… stressed?

You see, NyQuil is some pretty strong stuff and it seemed to effect me pretty bad in the past. So much so that if I ever needed to take it, I would only take on capsule and even then I was a zombie the next day.  

But I had work this Monday, so the next morning I needed to be up and going at a pretty decent hour. 

So I googled how long it took NyQuil to leave one’s system. I wasn’t super happy with the results where I found that it could take anywhere from 8 hours to THREE DAYS. 

yikes. 

But there was nothing to be done at this point, so I just went to bed and slept in my tired defeat. 

And so began my soon to be bad day, when I woke the next morning feeling about as conscious and awake as A sloth during hibernation (I don’t think they actually hibernate but that’s not the point). 

But simply getting out of bed wasn’t the end of my problems. Turns out my siblings don’t know how to replace the toilet paper roll so I had that fun moment. 

Then I had the boiled egg issue. Usually The night before work I would pre-boil an egg for myself so I wouldn’t have to worry about breakfast on a Monday morning. But I had forgotten to mark the egg so my mother thought it was just a plain ol regular one and put it in a container with all our raw ones. 

So I began cracking our eggs into a bowl in a desperate search for my chosen boiled one. I never found it. So instead I had six scrambled eggs for breakfast. Yummy.

And then it came time for work. Or so I thought. The road the way I normally went was blocked off so I had to go the slighter longer way. No big deal… until I realized they had construction going on down that road. And to top things off, when I slammed on my breaks a little to quickly to stop for said construction, my coffee decided to have a will of its own and commit coffee suicide, pitching itself forward so it could spill all over my radio, blue tooth speaker, and music player. But hey, at least my entire car smells like a caramel frappecino. I’m sure THATS going to age well with hours of sunlight!

But I didn’t have time to clean up that mess just yet. I was still driving at the time. So I drove on, trying to wipe my jeans dry as best as I knew how. When I leaned over I noticed that only half of my coffee had been spilt so there was still a little silver lining there. 

Noooopee. 

I cross over a railroad track to my work and unfortunately this train just decided to take a quick nap right in the middle of the place I needed to cross over to get to work. And (also unfortunately) I wasn’t expecting this stop so I slammed on my breaks and said goodbye to that last half of my coffee. You will be missed. 

Thankfully they got the train up and running fairly quickly though so I was only about twenty minutes late for work. But it wasn’t too bad for there on out. I had to kind of deep clean my car though. 

But hey! I lived!

Graduation Thoughts

~ Brooke F. ~ Leave a comment

“We ARE rich,” said Anne staunchly. “Why, we have sixteen years to our credit, and we’re happy as queens, and we’ve all got imaginations, more or less. Look at that sea, girls—all silver and shadow and vision of things not seen.” 

Let me tell you something. This quote is everything. Never have I felt something that so perfectly mirrors what I feel about looking back on high school. 

High school has been hard but it’s like any time period of your life. You take it: for the good and the bad. 

If I had any regrets in my high school experience, it would probably be the very thing that this quote seems to express. 

I wish I had spent less Monday’s wishing it were Friday. I wish it didn’t take me this long to figure out that I’m happy as a queen. 

But better now then never.  But I guess that’s just how life works. Especially when you have eighteen years to your credit. You finally realize how rich you are. And knowing this makes facing the uncertain future all the easier. 

Books to Read in front of a Roaring Fire while it Snows Outside:

~ Brooke F. ~ Leave a comment

The nutcracker

Anastasia 

Sir gwain and the green knight 

The adventure of Christmas pudding by Agatha Christie 

A Christmas carol (duh)

The snow queen fairytale 

Genesis 

The polar express

The little match girl

Murder in the orient express

The gift of the magi

The adventure of the blue carbuncle by sir Conan Doyle

How the grinch stole Christmas (I don’t care how old you are)

The lion the witch and the wardrobe  (I don’t think there’s a list where this would ever not fit)

It’s that Time of Year…

~ Brooke F. ~ Leave a comment

I came to a realization the other day. The phrase, “it’s that time of year” is suitable to proceed any sentence and make sense. 100% of the time you follow up what someone says with, “it’s that time of year”, they’ll nod in agreement and know exactly what you mean. Because apparently it’s ALWAYS that time of year. For example:

Person a: my banana went bad on the counter in just two days.
Person b: it’s that time of year.

Or

Person a: my Christmas tree shed all over my floor.
Person b: it’s that time of year.

It works all the time.

Why I Like Rain

~ Brooke F. ~ Leave a comment

It’s so calming

I will always treasure The memory of sitting on the porch, the cold air nipping at my nose and a warm drink in hand. Complete peace before the chaos of the day. 

And finally I can drown in something that isn’t my stupid thoughts of how things can go wrong and how I’m going to mess stuff up.  

And the smell. Good glory,  the smell is amazing. Fresh air, newly cleansed, crisp and so utterly perfect it almost stings to inhale. The smell of starting over. The smell the growth. The smell of everything becoming more alive amidst the storm. 

And The sound is music to my ears, more comforting than a thousand lullabies. The gentle, rhythmic thrum of rain on grass or on the roof, almost as if you are hearing the heartbeat of the sky. 

And it somehow comforts me as I watch the grey come and go. The heavy clouds come and leave. And no matter how chaotic and dark the storm, the sky still manages to pull itself together and becomes a vibrant shade of blue. It may take it an afternoon or even a few days but it will return to its original hue. 

Nostalgia Is Wrong

~ Brooke F. ~ Leave a comment

The good old days are not a phase in life in which things magically are perfect. It’s something you’re actively doing and creating as you live each day.  Last week could have been the good old days if you lived them to the fullest. This last weekend even. Your life can be comprised of thousands upon thousands of “good ol’ days” but not if you continue to spend your life reminiscing of a time you thought things were perfect. The Good ol Days are now. The sooner you learn that nostalgia is a dirty rotten liar who insists things were better than they actually were, the better off you’ll be.

Recycling Emotionally

~ Brooke F. ~ Leave a comment

Learn to recycle emotionally. 

Turn the energy that you use towards disliking yourself to building yourself up. 

The energy you use to envy others, use it to be thankful  

The energy you use to hate your enemies could turn into love towards those closest to you. 

Regret of the past can turn into the hope of the future. 

All emotions take energy. Make sure you’re putting yours into the right ones. 

Where to leave your perfectionism

~ Brooke F. ~ Leave a comment

When I was younger, I wasn’t worried. Not In the least.

I would wake in the morning with a light feeling in my chest and a carefree air about me. I would set out armed with a stick and go play in the woods and in the mud in search for adventure. 

I would crawl through culvert pipes and pretend they were entrances to magical worlds, rabbit holes to far off places. 

I would climb up to the highest part of a tree, and where the branches would meet at the center was a throne that I imagined was made for me. I would sit there and overlook my kingdom and pretend I could talk to the birds as the flitted past, giving me news of the worlds beyond. 

Then I would return home and write of my adventures in a notebook and draw maps of the new kingdoms I had conquered and discovered. Page after page I would fill with drawings and notes, describing the magic that I had found that particular day. 

But that’s not the way things are anymore. Now I’m worried, scared even, bogged down by fear and perfectionism. The stories don’t come as easy as they used to and the feeling of lightness and the glow of curiosity no longer radiates in my chest. 

Many times I have rested my pen on a blank page only to be met with a emptiness of mind and spirit. And on the rare occasions that I would actually write something, I would return to it, and rip its pages away because it was not perfect. 

I still relished the feeling of pages beneath my finger tips and the smell of new notebooks but I could never bring myself to fill them with the same colorful stories that I used to create so many years ago. 

But there came A Day I was tired of it. Tired of being perfectionistic. For my fear of creating something substandard drove me to create nothing at all. 

So I took with me a journal, perfect and empty, on a walk. More times than I’d like to admit, I had wanted to fill this book with a great many number of ideas and drawings but I could never bring myself to mark up it’s crisp, empty pages. 

So I walked to a pond’s edge and looked out upon its reflective surface, unblemished and smooth like a mirror. At its shore, I tied a string around the book and left a long tail that I could hold onto. And then I cast it as far as I could into the water. 

I reeled it in, the journal now a soggy pulp of pages. So I took it home and dried it. 

It was not longer perfect. The pages were wrinkled and the cover was beginning to peel. But that was alright. 

So I set it on my desk and opened it and began to write.