WitchyGypsy.com

Posted by Layla Winterborne on Tuesday, 26 January, 2010 @ 11:25 pm

The days which once ebbed and flowed together in a delightful blur have become jerky and mangled in their flow.  Once beautiful in it’s own surreal fashion, I am approaching a month of minimal sleep which instead of turning me into a productive and poetic insomniac, as it often times is wont to do, I have become a mind numbed zombie whose only desire is to laze about, not quite taking in the images displayed in the soft glow of the television in front of me.

I am not an avid tv watcher.

Reading and social networking seem to require more effort and strength than I currently possess and my writing has fallen by the wayside.  Cory blames the majority of this sudden turn inward on work and the loathing which I feel towards it…and I am apt to agree.

Though I try to not let work interfere with my personal life, it is beginning to take its toll.  14 hour days at a place that I hate…arriving home exhausted and not being greeted by sleep because you dread tomorrow…

My creativity has been sapped.

I have found, though, that in my stupor I spend more time talking to the animals who share this house with me.  However, I do not talk to them as though they were babies.  I just can’t do it.  Hell, I don’t even talk to babies like they’re  babies.  I often times find myself addressing children as if they were adults.  Baby talk is grating to the ear and it makes me uncomfortable talking to “Wittle Wobby Wob” and looking for his “binky”.  *shudder*

As a child, I was obsessed with proving that I was a smart as the adults.  Even now there are days in which I feel that this is something that still must be proven.  Every year, as the clock of life moves another year forward, I find myself promising that this year will different…that 21 will be the year in which I will be viewed as “an adult”…22 will be the year…23…

Yet, why do I still feel like such a child?  Because in my own way I am foolish? 

Anyway…

I DO talk with the animals, though.  A LOT.

The ruler of the house, Zeus, is the one with whom I have the majority of my conversations.  He is always more than willing to sit and listen politely as I discuss books and my love for raspberries and give him advice on his life.  He is a terrible begger of food and instead of yelling at him (because he is terribly adorable), I attempt to have rational conversations with him about his addiction.

I’m constantly trying to help with his problem, and, you know, of course he doesn’t respond.  He’s a dog.  The most I’m apt to get out of him is a look of eager hope asking “Hunk of cheese?  Ham?  Even that boiled egg would do!”

I’ve been approached by several people, commenting that my talking to the dog about his problems is actually quite crazy in itself and I understand this.  While I do ask open ended questions, I realize that he will never understand me on any type of meaningful level and…even if he did…he could never respond…

I was told that talking to the dog was folly…that these conversations aren’t REAL…

…and I’m no atheist but…

The damn dog is RIGHT THERE…begging for cold cuts right at mine and your feet.  If you and I are real then so is he.  We are all on the same basic level of REAL.

A dog in the hand equals two invisible beings in the bush.

The dog does not speak ENGLISH but at least he IS.

Posted by Layla Winterborne on Wednesday, 20 January, 2010 @ 5:00 am

I have been spreading myself thin lately.  The more I think about it, the more I believe that it’s time to start the hunt for a new job.  I can only imagine that running my head, repeatedly, into a brick wall would be the closest physical equivalent to my frustrations at work.

It has been brought to my attention, several times throughout the past few weeks, that there never seems to be a middle ground with me.  I’m hardly ever “just content” and along those same lines it’s rare that I “just like” something.  It always seems to be a love or hate issue which I never realized before, but now that it has been presented to the forefront of my mind, these statements are dead-ringers.  Obsessively love and vehemently hate seem to be the only options you will get from me…and since I have recently been obsessing over my current loves and hates to the point of annoyance, I figure now would be the time to compile them into lists and hopefully get some of my giddiness/animosity out of my system.

My Love List

(Hopefully this list will suffice in cancelling out the Hate List which will follow…because apparently, being negative on the internet will get you blacklisted or whatever.)

First and foremost is my good buddy Stephen.  I would stab a stranger on the street for just 5 minutes with this man.

Lady-Fucking-Gaga.  Call me a conformist but her songs are catchy as fuck…plus, I want her to be my girlfriend.  (You should totally watch this video of this male a capella group singing “Poker Face”   http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bW5czKqT05A)

Glee.  I’m auditioning for Season 2 in about a month.  If that’s not love I don’t know what the fuck is.

Repo: The Genetic Opera.  An opera based around a future world in which organs are repossessed by Anthony Stewart Head.  Also starring the lovely….

Sarah Brightman…who, along with Stephen King, is one of the most influential people in my life.

White Chocolate Raspberry Mocha.  Self explanatory.

Dachshunds.  Mainly this one who runs my house.

Zombies.  Because they’re lovable and cuddly and I can’t imagine that there is a mother in the world who wouldn’t love that face!

Little Miss Perfect.  I.  LOVE.  THIS.  SHOW.  Even though I would never let Michael Galanes touch my child.

Bridezillas.  Have you ever seen the episode where the crazy bitch stabs her fiance with a pair of scissors?

Wife Swap.  I recognized Balloon Boy’s parents before the press even disclosed that they had appeared on the show.

My Hate List

https://nicoleisbetter.com

Okay ya’ll, I get that everyone is up this girls vagina because they think that she is just the funniest thing EVER but I don’t get it.  Deliciously Vulgar?  Not really.  Plus the whole “I’m going to say OMG and LIKE all the time because coming across as dumb is, like, totally in right now!” just makes you look like a vapid dipshit.

http://www.twittershouldhireme.com/

Nicole’s roommate.  Everyone wants to commend her for taking a fresh new approach to finding a job.  I just find this to be lazy.  You were unemployed and living with mom so instead of going out and looking for a job like the rest of us, you made a website…good for you.  (Also, the fact that these two sit around and ask their Twitter followers to give them free shit, just because, really irks me.  If I did that, everyone would just think that I was an asshole.)

Stephanie Meyer.  Seriously…have you read “Twilight”?                           (Speaking of “Twilight”, go watch this video…it’s HA-larious…http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E2Hwv1EbCkk)

Avatar.  Visually, it was quite lovely, but it was also long, boring, and predictable.  During the entire movie all I could think of was “This is fucking Fern Gully in SPACE!”.  Also, don’t tell me that you didn’t see him totally taming the giant flying creature and Sigourney Weaver kicking the bucket.

Also…here’s a picture of my cat for you to print out and put in your cubicle at work:

(Penelope did not make my Hate List this time around…even though she is bitch and tries to suffocate me at night by sleeping on my head.)

Posted by Layla Winterborne on Wednesday, 13 January, 2010 @ 2:59 am

Me: I want to be friends with the old ladies who meet up at that knitting shop on Tuesdays.

Cory: So go be friends with them.

Me: I should go in there and ask them how much it would cost to be friends with them.

Cory: Oh I’m sure they’d love that.  They’re old ladies, not hookers.

Me: *exasperated* Well I don’t want them to think that I’m just USING them for their knitting expertise and oldness!

Cory: Their OLDNESS??

Me: Yea!  Seriously, no one likes being used.  Oh!  Maybe we could be friends and they would make me cookies because they’d love me and my hipness.

Cory: *rolls eyes*

Me:  AND THEN!  AND THEN!  If I start going often enough maybe we can become totes besties and they’ll invite me over for dinner and make me pot roast and tell me about their sexual escapades with Ronald Reagan!

Cory: WHAT?!?

Me: Seriously…or JFK because we all know that he got so much tail…

Cory: Oh lord.

Me: Seriously, they could regail me with stories about how their husbands were out fighting in ‘Nam and they stayed home and continuously impaled themselves on giant Reagan cock.

Cory: *sighs*

Me: Well, it would probably be more like MASTURBATING to giant Reagan penis but we all know that women don’t masturbate so they would just tell me the stories like it actually happened.

Cory: Now you’re just going too far.  You just made up ridiculous lives for women that you don’t even know.

Me: If I were alive back then, I would have totally masturbated to young Ronald Reagan and his giant dick.

Posted by Layla Winterborne on Tuesday, 12 January, 2010 @ 5:02 am

I have always enjoyed the beauty of early mornings…though until now I have scarcely been able to enjoy them.  At 4:30 the city seems quiet even though I can hear the trill of the train whistle across town.  Very few windows are lit and I feel as if there is a shroud of secrecy in which only I and a handful of others are privvy to.

It is so cold outside that if it weren’t for the few whispy tendrils of smoke that continue to curl and weave their way along with the soft morning breeze, I wouldn’t be able to tell where the smoke from my exhaled cigarette end and the mist of condensed breath begin.  For the first time in months I can hear the soft echos of my footfalls in the courtyard as Zeus prances happily from fallen branch, to sign post, and back again, marking his territory as dogs are wont to do.

These past few weeks have brought me little sleep though I can’t say that they have been riddled with restlessness.  I enjoy the softs sounds which the late night silence brings.  The purr of cats resting lightly at my feet, the almost inaudible snores of Zeus in his bed, the rustle of blankets as my lover tosses and dreams in the next room over.  It’s a peace that I haven’t felt in dare I say…years.

This morning I found myself standing outside in no more than a pair of snowboots and the shawl which I received as a Christmas present from my grandmother.  Judging by the way my breath condenses, I know that I should be wearing more but I feel enveloped in a cloud of warmth.  This past evening, though the majority was spent reading, I came to the realization that in order for me to be truly happy, I must accept and be happy with every aspect of myself.  Some may scoff as if they have known this all along but for the first time I feel as if I may be approaching that barrier.  Though the sadness of depression still lingers at the backdoor of my mind, I realize that there is so much beauty in my life which I have overlooked.  So many hours full of laughter which leaves your belly aching and the lines in your face a little deeper…and yet your spirit yearns for more.  I have had adventures of which others only dream and yet all of it, I have taken for granted.  I allowed the negativity of certain individuals to slowly seep in and take over until it was all that I knew.

I can only imagine that this mornings sunrise mirrored what I am feeling inside.  A rich tapestry of colours penned by some magical, beautiful hand, rising over a dark city only to bring with it a new life.  A breath which had been missing for so long.

I feel now as I wish I had felt then and I feel more alive in this instant than, I dare say, I ever have. 

This mornings cup of coffee is the sweetest I’ve ever tasted.

Posted by Layla Winterborne on Monday, 11 January, 2010 @ 9:32 am

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And I ALWAYS do as I’m told…So…uh…you should probably just skip over this entire post…

Posted by Layla Winterborne on Sunday, 10 January, 2010 @ 12:40 pm

Posted by Layla Winterborne on Sunday, 10 January, 2010 @ 2:33 am

(Off Topic: We had an absolutely beautiful sunrise today)

I don’t blog about work.  I just…don’t.

Blogging about my day at work is about as interesting as the ham sandwich and coke that I had for lunch yesterday…or the cup of coffee that I had at 8 this morning…or the the less than mediocre movie I watched in the middle of the night in a fit of insomnia.  I don’t have anything beautiful to say about the job which pays my bills…I make phone calls, I coordinate events, I plan birthday parties.  By the end of the day, my eyes are watering from the harsh light of the glowbox to which I have been mercilessly chained.  There is something about being forced to sit in front of a computer all day that makes my eyes water more than the hours that I spend crawling the web at night.

This is not to say that I dislike my job.  I enjoy it actually, IMMENSELY,  even though there is an awkward sentiment in being hung in limbo between hourly employee and corporate slave.  I enjoy talking shit with my co-workers and learning about their love lives and their children…and even the high school employee’s…there is something special even in their stories of high school love and exams and parental issues…

And yet, all this time, I still haven’t been able to really open up about my day to day…

Until now, that is.  Oh wow wow wow…until now.

These past few weeks at work have been filled with inebriated parents, broken glasses, and fist fights between nine year olds.  Two Monday’s ago, I left my office long enough for a smoke and in that time watched as a teenage boy jumped from his moving go-kart, landed face first on the track, and subsequently was run over by the kart behind him.  Broken arm, broken nose, and parents threatening US with a law suit.  Upon being asked why he did it, he smiled and said “To see what it felt like”.

Same Monday, rewind 3 hours and in walks a family of five.  Four children with their mother who smells as if she’s been doing nothing but drinking Martini’s and shooting vodka for the past week.  She stumbles in, flask full of wine, shirt buttoned way too low for a woman her age.  Her children shift back and forth from foot to foot, obviously uncomfortable.  You can tell from their faces that this isn’t the first time that she has been completely hammered in public.  I watch from my upstairs office as she waves her arms around frantically trying to convey some sort of message to the employee behind the counter.  He shakes his head slowly, eyes growing wider by the minute.  He raises his hands in an “I don’t know” gesture then points to me as he spots me watching from above.  From what I could gleen from the situation, Mother was upset due to the fact that we don’t serve alcohol in our “Family Friendly” environment.  At one point she had slapped her older son across the face for trying to sneak her flask from her purse while she fumbled to answer a text message on her phone, and the youngest daughter was desperately trying to call a cab so they could get home safely.  Apparently, their father was “Away on Business”.

From here on out, it just gets better as I break up a fight between two rival “gangs” full of 9 and 10 year olds.  I walked away with nothing more than a scratched face, a broken pair of glasses, and a complete new WHAT THE FUCK attitude.  This is the third time in this city that I have been witness to a children’s gang fight.  At least this time no one was stabbed. 

Six of the seven events which I had planned today cancelled last minute…which is good and bad, in a sense.  Good for me because I was able to come home early and enjoy some of this beautiful Saturday…bad because I left with less money in my pocket.  Houstonians will party until they pass out in 120 degree heat, but refuse to leave their house whenever the temperature drops below 50.  Folks here start strapping chains to their tires whenever there’s even a threat of temps hitting 40.  These past several days, you would think that the rapture had suddenly burst forth, leaving the rest of us non-believers behind.

As I look at my clock now, I realize that I have spent the last three hours attempting to write this entry, and it wasn’t for lack of wanting…it was more being interrupted by a mid-sized manic breakdown which threw a wrench in the works.  I allowed someone whom I’ve never met, whom I never even knew existed until now, break a part of me…ah it feels so foolish.

Leeroy Jenkins

For my fellow nerds out there…this video STILL makes me laugh.

Posted by Layla Winterborne on Friday, 8 January, 2010 @ 1:01 am

Sometimes I can hear everyone on the planet talking all at once and it gets so loud that I swear my eardrums will burst beneath the pressure until I suddenly find myself talking to only one person…but it’s not really me doing the talking. Sometimes it’s my mother or that one screaming kid from Chuck E. Cheese or a student, but mostly it’s a conglomeration of unrecognized faces that hold their own actions and gestures and movements. Sometimes they do no more than talk over coffee…other times they fuck, using my voice to moan, to scream, “Oh god! Harder, deeper, faster! Oh baby, oh baby!!” Things I would never say but can’t stop because they’re on the brink of orgasm and all I can do is cry out some guy’s name that I don’t even recognize.

Singing with someone else’s voice.

There are times when I don’t want to talk politics and war and art but it’s verbal diarrhea and I’m not in control. The words keep tumbling over a foreign tongue until I wake, shivering, because at some point I became tangled in my sheets and eventually just kicked them off the bed.

Looking at the twisted mess on the floor, I have to remind myself that I am me…touching my arms, my hair, my face, even touching…checking for the penis I had been using to fuck some stranger five minutes prior but all I can feel is the slit of my cunt and now I can smell my own smell mingled with salt and sweat and booze. We are not a single, white sheet with me here and you there and in that corner a hammer, an orgasm, a fig tree, two guys fucking on a park bench….No…I’m me and you’re you but together we form an us and I can’t do anything but cry out in the throes of passion and scream in anger and sigh in disgust because I can only feel what you feel and all I feel is used. I am theirs and they and I make we and I can’t scream because there is no “I” in scream.

I feel used and the sorry bastards didn’t even get me off.

Posted by Layla Winterborne on Tuesday, 5 January, 2010 @ 8:31 pm

The nights are getting colder here…the moon a bright orb in the clear sky and for a moment, just one moment, I wish that I could pull the breaker which powers the neon glow which seems ever-present in this city.  Just for 5 minutes would I love to see the stars.

One of the trending topics amongst Houston’s Twitter users is the fact that starting tomorrow, we are going to be experiencing temperatures that are lower than most points in Antarctica.  While I’m sure that this isn’t as foreboding as it sounds, social media and news media are buzzing with the thought, posting tips on how to stay warm and emergency hotlines just in case your pipes freeze within the walls.  I’m also sure that if I stand outside and listen hard enough, I can hear the conservatives shouting out “SEE???  WE TOLD YOU GLOBAL WARMING WAS A LIE!”  As it was when Obama was announced President, it is the end of the world once more here in Texas.  I’m half expecting the heralders to appear once more, shouting fire and brimstone from the corners of busy intersections.  It is only in times such as these that wealthy Christian business men in designer suits can band together with the vagabonds of the city and preach, in unison, of the impending doom which is upon the sinners of the world.  The lamb hath been slain and the seven angels shall arrive on winged horses to deliver the righteous and to punish the damned.

When it comes right down to it, however, the cold weather, for me, basically means that I will be working from home for the next few days, at least until we reach a temperature in which the steam from my breath won’t instantly freeze to the faceplate of my helmet.  I can only imagine the hilarity and possible dismemberment of appendages that would ensue from being briefly blinded by my frozen breath. 

I can only imagine though, that if an accident such as this were to happen, it would be beautiful in the sense that the last thing I would see before potentially blacking out would be the individual ice patterns which laced their way across my vision.  Each uniquely and exquisitely formed, visions of lace in ice and I can only imagine that I would be reminded of some mythical Christmas morning which I only ever experienced in dreams.  The smell of gingerbread lingering in the morning air from the cookies which we made the night before.  Crisp logs crackling and popping in the fireplace, the smoke rising and curling, lovingly caressing and whispering with wispy fingers the other puffs which escaped from neighboring fireplaces.  A vision of mother and father, daughter and son, sitting around a lavishly decorated tree, opening and reveling in the gifts in which Santa slyly left beneath the tree…

In a scene such as this, the morbidity of death and accidents dissipates and dissolves into something which could be…quite beautiful.

Posted by Layla Winterborne on Sunday, 3 January, 2010 @ 7:05 pm

During conversation
Hi! Hello! How are you?
I love you
never escapes my lips