The Wide, Wide, World of Reality

People often ask me what it's like inside my head.

The honest answer is that it's the Beetlejuice soundtrack in there, and it's easy to get lost.

I'm an outdoors person, and an athlete. I try to run, or get my daily dose of sunshine in (even when it's cloudy, those rays get through!) regardless of the workload. It helps keep me connected with the real world, to humanity in general, keeps depression at bay, and also keeps my ass at a manageable size.

The boyfriend is an outdoors-y guy as well as a creative, (I've said before- think a Thoreau/Daryl Dixon mashup with a photography degree), and his view of the world always amazes me. I can make up shit in my head all day long and sell it to you, convince you to care about things that never happened to people that don't exist. But he can look at something mundane and see the amazing, capture the magical qualities of a corn stubble field in the snow that I never knew existed.

I've lived around cornfields my whole life, and yes, I've always known there was something a little eerie about the stalks - green or dry - rubbing against each other in the wind. They have their own special sounds, they can slice your skin like paper, and if you wander more than four rows in you WILL get lost. Sometimes for a good long while.

But I've never thought about the stubble, the mowed off, unproductive sentinels that simply wait six months to get plowed under. They're distinctly unmusical. A remnant. Until my boyfriend went out yesterday and took some shots that make them look like a tiny invading alien army wading through the snow to come kill us.

I think as writers we sometimes spend too much time in our heads, neglecting the world around us, and the amazing qualities even the most mundane objects can hold if we change our perspective. So think about it today as you go about your routine - oh, yes, the routine, that will make you blind to everything except the task in front of you.

Make your desk chair a little higher, or a little lower. Take a pen and put yourself on eye level with it and really look at it for second. Find something you see every single day, and look at it a different way.

You'll see something new.