I'm back and ready to party. Or blog. Or both. I'm open...

Greetings and salutations, y'all!  I'm back from my blog vacation. My blacation?  Irregardless, I took an extra week because I didn't really feel like blogging over Labor Day weekend.  I figured you'd understand.

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I'd like to tell you that I took a lot of long baths and read poetry and listened to a lot of Vanessa Carlton songs but I didn't do any of that stuff.  There's a time and place for candlelit baths and cocooning to non-abrasive music but this was not it.  I mean, I listened to a lot of The Black Angels and burned a lot of incense but that's a totally different thing, right?

Anyway, I had to DO something.  Be proactive.  Create something.  Or maybe destroy something.

That sounds ominous.  I meant I just threw away some socks with holes in them that I'd been saving for a long time.  It still felt good.

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Mostly I got dirty, filthy, gross - went outside, played in the dirt, got sweaty, got sweatier.  I chopped down bushes, sanded things and didn't shave my armpits.  [MS sidebar: I get laser treatments done in my armpits so this isn't quite as defiant an act as one might think unless you look reeeaallly close.]

Somehow when you've been on the internet too damn long it's like you forget you're a human animal and that you actual possess a corporeal state.  I tried to remind myself of that. 

We're all made of stardust, right?  That's what a nice mustachioed man on the internet told me one time. But also dirt and toe jam and muscles and too much pasta.

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I took several weekend trips because traveling is my happy place.  I made a lot of new friends (and got rid of some old ones), went to new restaurants and generally tried new things like people do that don't watch Twitter streams all day. 

Like, you know those things that you read about and think "Hey, that would be so cool to do!" and then you never do them?  Well I actually did some!  So weird, I know.

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I went to museums and did my hair different and drove all the way to the middle of nowhere to see something that might have been cool.  Turns out it wasn't but at least I did it.  Same thing with my hair.

I signed up for yoga classes and an adult tap class.  Not a pornographic tap class (although how fucking weird would that be but also I kinda want to watch it on Skinemax...) but a class for middle-aged women with a song in their heart and toes full of twinkle.

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I did a lot of productive nesting.  I hung art and styled vignettes and made a big mess in the process that I still haven't cleaned up and I'm okay with.

You know in horror movies when the heroes go to an abandoned warehouse basement in search of an alien mom thing and find it filled with bones and twigs and ripped up newspaper all glued together with alien bile and love slime and they're like "OH SHIT IS THIS ITS NEST?" and then somebody immediately dies to feed her babies?  Well that's what I did.  Not the murder part... the making an alien nest part.  But with candles and vintage trays.

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And I was directed towards a great new astrologist (don't start with me...) who explained why August was terrible particularly as it relates to recent events so I was like "Thank you, Jeebus, I'm not entirely insane!" 

She explained why I was DO-ing all these things as a form of ritual.  And Virgos love some ritual.  

Not ritual sacrifice, if you were worried...

Although maybe it's time to sacrifice some armpit hair...?

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Nah.  I'm good.

And now it just happens to be my birthday month so I'm pretty much a riding the Beyonce birthday wave of flawlessness for the next three weeks.

To sum up: I'm back, full of renewed energy and lots of new age-y goodness (debatable) and ready to blog again in an enjoyable way.  

Well, enjoyable to me.  How much joy it brings others is also debatable but the internet hasn't kicked me off yet so I'll take that as a good sign.

Hope you're all enjoying the slow slide into Fall and the universe it treating you right.  

Or if that asshole isn't, treat yo self right.

Image pairings courtesy of Adapto (where you can find the source of individual images) but I photosphopped them together as one unit just for ease of blogging/formatting.