Write about: standards.
I realized this evening, while my mind was wondering as I did the dishes, that I managed to forget all about the anniversary of my diagnosis of type 1 diabetes. Better known in my house as Diabetes Donut Day.
It's been nine years (well, and five days, to be exact) and this is the first year it slipped past without my noticing. I suppose that's a good thing. But I also want my annual donut.
So I'll be getting one tomorrow to make up for it.
Went out to take pictures this morning, but it was very foggy first thing and I had errands I wanted to do as well. So not many pictures were taken, and I'm not especially happy about any of the ones I did take. I'll share this one though, taken on the southernmost beach in Penticton:
I showed them to Kat and she liked most of them, then suggested that my standards have gone up recently. I'll allow that that's a possibility.
Mine:
Julie was well aware, thank you very much, that she had lowered her standards when it came to men. She did not, thank you very much, need her friends to remind her of this at every possible opportunity.
She had been single for far too long. That's where being picky had gotten her. Not with the perfect man, not even with an okay man. Alone. She was tired of it. Sick to death of it, if she was being honest.
So she had removed a few items from her Must Have list. Well, that's how it had started. Two weekends and no romance later several more were crossed out. The day after that another handful were erased entirely.
What remained... well, it wasn't pretty. But Julie was trying to stay positive. She reminded herself daily that by increasing the number of fish in her proverbial sea she was more likely to land a catch. And who knew? Maybe that eventual catch would happen to check off all the boxes on her original list.
Oh, what a happy little coincidence that would be!
At any rate, she had a date. It was a Friday night and she was going out! With a man! And he had a job (that was one of the few Must Haves that were left) and - what a bonus - he was picking her up in his very own vehicle (original item, recently removed)!
Unfortunately, Julie had some difficulties maintaining her upbeat attitude when her date arrived (right on time, mind you) in his work vehicle. Which would not have been so bad, really, if he wasn't a garbage man.
Sanitary engineer, she reminded herself sternly as she stepped out her front door.
3 comments:
I'd forgotten that Diabetes Doughnut Day (I've Anglicised it for you to make it sound posher) was so close to the start of the year actually; I had it in mind that it was March. Oh well, do we all have to have a doughnut on the same day to show solidarity for you?
I think your standards have gone up as well based on the pictures that you're choosing to share with us, but that's a good thing, as it's forcing you to take better pictures in order to keep yourself happy about it! I like this one, though the sunlight on the water is unfortunately a little burned; might be worth playing around with the colour balance tools in your favourite image manager and seeing if you can recover some of the detail.
Well, Julie strikes me as very pragmatic, and at least she's dating an engineer. It might not be something a Jewish mother would entirely approve of, but it's a career :) I quite like how you introduce her and explain how she's got to where she is now, it definitely brings her to life in my mind.
Standards
The miniature golf course had a large sign out the front that loudly proclaimed, "We have standards!" Joe, who'd had to give up his donut in order to pay to get in, looked around and wondered what on earth the sign could have meant.
His golf club was oddly shaped, to the extent that he'd handed it back to the chain-smoking, dreadlocked trustafarian with pink lipstick, blue eyeliner and a beard thinking it was a boomerang. It had been pressed back into his hand and eye contact had been made, and now he felt slightly unclean. The balls were chipped and cracked to the point where they were nearly cubical; when he dropped one on the first tee it didn't even roll to the side. The first hole had once been a windmill, but that was before the catastrophic fire. Little charred corpses were laid around outside it, and the ambulance that had arrived was also burned out; had the used hypodermic been one-quarter size it would have fitted the scene perfectly.
Joe swung his club at the ball and missed. He looked around, and kicked the ball, and though it clunked like a clown's bicycle, it did at least head towards the windmill and might even have gotten there if the ground hadn't given way beneath it. The sinkhole consumed his ball with a groan, and the willmill tilted in a way that would have made Don Quixote proud.
Joe looked at the second hole; once billed as Daytona Beach, and now clearly a quicksand-laced quagmire, and decided that discretion was the better part of valour. He went back to the desk and dropped the club on the counter.
"That's bent," said the trustafarian in a Tinkerbell voice that made Joe's skin crawl.
"It says you have standards outside," said Joe. "Where are your bloody standards."
The trustafarian pointed, and, following his finger with his eyes, Joe found himself looking at four rusty flagpoles. "Standards," said the trustafarian. "Now, about the damage to that club."
I've been working on that poetry-novel, so just a quick acrostic for today's prompt. Marc, I'll put a link here to my post on my blog when this poem is done so you can see it if you want. And I'm calling the whole project Lamentations.
================
Silly
Time-keeping
Always
Nagging
Driving me crazy
Asking 'are you doing it
Right?' Every
Day I do it right, and
Still you ask me.
Greg - yes, everyone must eat a donut. Or doughnut, if you must. It's the law.
Or something.
I don't really have a favorite image manager, as I don't do much editing. Yet. The plan is to invest in Lightroom soon though.
Hah. I appreciate the twist on the prompt, and think the descriptions of the course are brilliant :D
Morganna - Lamentations? I like it, and look forward to reading the poem :)
That, I think, is one of my favorite acrostics that you've shared with us. Those final four lines really polish it off beautifully.
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