the canaryfish

Just for you, Rachael.

When the DC earthquake hit…

I was like:

But Rachael was just like:

The inner drama queen in me has always wanted to throw a drink in someone’s face. In fact, today I gave a friend some advice about dealing with a conniving guy. I told her, “Nothing says ‘you are behaving inappropriately’ like a drink in the face”.

Has anyone actually ever done that in real life? Why, I wonder? Is it because you want to slap the person but you’ve got your purse in one hand and your drink in the other? And God forbid your purse flies open and your phone/credit card/lipgloss falls out. So you throw the drink?

Because frankly, vodka in the eye hurts, but a swift kick between the legs probably hurts more.

….Which is why I am not going to back-date posts, even though not having posted every day makes me ineligible to win a fun prize from National Blog Posting Month (ok, fine, NaBloPoMo).

I have a fairly busy life and can’t make time to post every day. That’s okay.

Things I have done this weekend instead of write a blog post:

• Watch a soccer game with Alex
• Go to brunch, twice
• Clean my entire apartment
• Have drinks and dinner with my parents and a couple of our family friends
• Read a few chapters of a book for Book Club
• Drive Alex around places
• Run errands
• Recuperate (kind of) from my post-travel sickness
• Get an extra hour of sleep, hellooooo daylight savings time!!
• …and more

Today I’m taking a few minutes to do this in the midst of doing laundry and yelling at my fantasy football team members (come ON, Drew Brees; I do NOT want a repeat of last week!).

I have had a great weekend.

I was flipping through the most recent Sephora catalog and saw a model who had her nails painted light pink with a “swoosh” of coppery glitter starting in the bottom left corner and branching out to the top stripe like a french manicure. Gorgeous, but something my ol’ shaky hands and I can’t replicate.

My current shellac manicure is growing out and I’ll have to take it off soon anyway, so I figured why not try something similar with glitter tips.

The result:

(Pink is CND Shellac in ‘Rose Bud’, my usual shellac color. Copper sparkle is Sephora by OPI in ‘Don’t Be Eggnogious’ – don’t worry, it doesn’t have that gluey looking background in real life.)

I think it looks pretty good, at least if you don’t look at it that closely!

Last night I dreamt about work, all night long. And because I wasn’t feeling well, it was
1) A long night, since I went to bed early.
and
2) An interrupted night, since I woke up coughing every 20 minutes or so.

I spent all of last week at a photo and video shoot in California, and spent most of my weekend when I wasn’t on set sorting through wardrobe that wasn’t worn and needed to be returned to its vendor. And I spent a lot of yesterday on the phone with a supplier for a different project.

Needless to say, procurement was on my mind.

I dreamt about shipping. I dreamt about fax machines with small hands coming out of them and handing me faxes which needed to be dealt with in a certain order. I dreamt about the FedEx store on the corner of O’Farrell and Taylor Streets in San Francisco. I dreamt about sorting a pile of Sharpie pens by color and then bundling them into USPS Priority Mail Flat Rate Shipping Boxes.

Was it the cough syrup? Or do I just need to get out more?

Dear November,
Hi there. You may be wondering why I’m not so happy to see you. You probably know that I usually greet each new month with a smile on my face, ready for a new beginning. But that wasn’t the case this morning.

You see, I’m sick. I spent my last day of October flying home from California (well, the night before my last day, really) and although I was out of state for a whole week and perfectly healthy, something about that last flight just did me in.

So I tried to get a good night’s sleep last night, hoping to wake up refreshed and ready to greet the new month. But that didn’t happen. I felt worse this morning than I did yesterday, and have been progressing steadily downhill since then. In fact, I’m now home from work writing this.

And I wouldn’t even be here at all, except that today is the first day of NaBloPoMo (that’s National Blog Posting Month, or something) and I’m trying to write every day in November so that I can maybe win a prize, and also get back in the blog-writing mentality.

Yes, I know “NaBloPoMo” is really stupid-sounding. I think so too, even when I’m healthy and not feeling as cynical as I am today. But that’s you, November, so you’d better embrace it.

Here’s hoping the month only gets better from here! Cough, sniffle. L’chaim!

-Lindsey

Sorry, my bad. I’ve been gone for a while.

A long while…

I didn’t mean to take a huge blog break, but it just happened. When I started this blog I was all like, “Hooray! A blog! I have it!”, and told myself and a few other people that “I’ll have to write in it because I’m paying for the hosting and don’t want to waste money.”

Obviously that’s not always a motivator (which I should know, considering I threw about $600 of gym membership out the window in 2009 by hitting the snooze button repeatedly).

Unknowingly, my coworker Rachael, who I respect as both a blogger and a happy hour companion, made me feel much better a couple of weeks ago when she posted a blog post about her own lack of recent blogging motivation. Because she’s been blogging for YEARS, and so her stoppage is more noticeable to her hundreds of dedicated followers. (Whereas none of my friends or family seem to remember that I even had started a blog to begin with.)

I like to write!

I really do. I wish I spent more time during the day writing real things instead of emails… but such is life with a full-time job.

Anyway, last week was Rosh Hashanah. (That’s the Jewish New Year, for those of you who aren’t so culturally inclined.) And so, although I hate making “real” New Year resolutions, I made a Rosh Hashanah resolution.

I’m going to come back and write again. (Insert cheers here!) I’ve found plenty of blog post prompts, challenges, and ideas online — so next time my brain is empty, I’m going to pick someone else’s brain and start to write!

Yesterday I had a fairly bad day. And it’s easy to let bad days carry over into the next day, so when I woke up this morning (after a few interrupted and kind of restless hours of sleep) I decided I was going to do my best to “Make it a great day!” (as my dad always tells me to do)… despite the extremely negative black hole abyss that it started from. But you know, sometimes it helps to list things out so they’re in front of your face.

So, without any further ado.

It’s a Good Day Because:

• It’s the start of a month. I like those, it’s like the first day of school — a fresh beginning, every 30 or 31 (or 28… or 29) days!!
• I worked out this morning. A nice short HIIT workout, which has made me feel metabolically fantastic all day
• I’m wearing a cobalt blue shirt, which is my current favorite color to wear
• The underwear I’m wearing has a funny saying on the tush (and no, I will not tell what it is!)
• I have happy hour plans with some of my girlfriends this evening
• My parents are coming to town tomorrow evening and we’re going to the Nats game
• Tomorrow is Friday
• My morning meeting tomorrow was cancelled, so I’ll have more time to actually accomplish/wrap up my work before the long weekend
• I just made a list, and I like making lists

I think most days, I could greatly benefit from making a quick similar list. Lots of little things add up, and then you can’t help but smile when you look at them all.

Are you having a good day? Why? A huge compiled list would be quite happy indeed!

Women get lots of compliments.

There are “You look beautiful” and “This food you made is delicious”, both of which I love. There are the ones that make me wonder about the complimenter’s true feelings. As in, “Oh my gosh, your purse is such an interesting color!!”

There are catcalls on the street, which may or may not be meant as compliments, but which I almost always dislike (and which are the source of campaigns both DC-oriented and nationwide to end “street harassment”).

But earlier this month, while singing at the top of my lungs in the car, I got the best compliment ever.

Let me preface this by saying that I’m good at plenty of stuff.

Musical talent runs in my family (my uncle is even a professional trumpet player!). My cousin is a great a capella singer, and I do love to sing, but that particular talent has never really presented itself on my side of the family — for as long as I can remember, my dad has told my mom that she sings in the key of M. (For you non-musically inclined folks, that’s not a real key.) In my first and only school musical, The Wizard of Oz, my 5th grade self tried unsuccessfully to sing “If I Only Had a Heart” without my voice cracking. Yeah, like a boy in the midst of puberty.

"...Just because I'm presumin' that I could be kinda human if I only had a heart...."

So anyway. Early August.

My then-boyfriend, JB, and I were driving to my parents’ house, and I really just cannot drive without singing. A 3-hour drive passes a lot more quickly when your iPod is on, you know? So I was blasting Taylor Swift, and bouncing along to Britney (gently bouncing; I was driving after all). Of course, in my own ears, I sounded amazing. I hit all the notes, got the vocal intonation right, even breathed in the appropriate places. And because I’m a self-confident independent woman, I didn’t care what I sounded like to JB, or to anyone else in a 500 foot radius that might be hear me.

And then it happens. JB leans over, looks me in the eye, and gives me the greatest compliment of my life: “You actually sing really on-key.”

I think as soon as the words came out of his mouth and the huge grin spread across my face, his ears came to their senses, and he regretted his statement. Because as of that second, I had no second thoughts. Now I could ALWAYS sing. ALWAYS. Long rap verse? Sure, I know all the words! ¿Lyrics en Español? Hell yes, I was a Spanish minor! High notes? No problem, I’ve got ‘em!! And unless the poor guy wanted to jump out of a moving car on the Beltway…. he had to listen.

But you know, it made me happy, and that’s the point of a compliment, right?

We give people compliments to make them feel confident, because we care about them. It’s so rare, especially living in a city, that people say or do something for no reason other than making someone else feel good!

So while we might end up having to stare at our friend’s strangely-colored purse across the table every night for a year, or we get stuck in the car with someone who’s having one of her frequent “off-key days” when it comes to singing… I think it’s worth it!

My coworker Mike decided that today would be Man in the Mirror Day, a day to break free from obligatory resolutions and charity — instead, a day to look at yourself in the mirror and think about what you can really do to make the world (or, YOUR world) a better place.

Sometimes it's hard to stop looking into a mirror...... (photo credit - flickr.com/mikedefiant)

There is no shortage of evidence that my generation is a hard-working crowd, full of ideas to create new businesses, jumpstart our economy, and make tons of money freelancing on the side.

I have come to the realization that I am not really one of those people.

I already have busy days just between work, socializing, and sleeping! I need more time to exercise, cook, and come up with interesting tweets. Plus, really, the desire to write a business plan and venture out on my own is just not something that I’m feeling right now.
(Recently I wanted to open a bagel shop, but the cost of commercial rent in Arlington County and the ungodly hours that bagel-makers [and their manager] must work brought me to my senses.)

So while many of my peers are thinking big (and it seems to be working for them, so that’s great), I don’t mind thinking smaller. Plenty of great things are done close to home, so I want to focus on what I can do!

Here’s the mirror: So, what CAN I do, in my own world?

I will discover something I’m really passionate about. It’s okay if there’s no business idea behind it! It doesn’t need to turn into anything more than something I care for. There are lots of things I like, or want to know more about — becoming more involved with one of those and taking it to the next level is going to make a difference in my world.

Entrepreneurship isn’t my thing, but that doesn’t mean I can’t pursue a passion in a different way. If enough people support a cause or lifestyle, caring strongly about something will result in a big change. But there’s no way I can figure out the “how” without the “what” — so finding that real passion that will be my first stop.

I will. I think we all can! Let me know how you plan to change your world.