brrr!

it is chilly-willy-mcdilly here in the somewhat great state of texas! (the "somewhat" is because my adopted-home-state enthusiasm has been sorta kneecapped lately by dumb stuff our governor keeps saying and doing.)

this happens every couple years in these parts and we get a stretch of shivery temperatures down in the 20's or lower. probably to you folks from more northerly locales, that doesn't sound all that bad, but in our neck of the woods, we're so unprepared for it that we do things like shut down the schools because there's a 30% chance of snow at 3:00 a.m. it's kinda nuts, to be honest.

anyway, the good thing about this kind of weather is blankets, blankets, blankets and lots of bedtime snuggling for shared body heat!

so as you might guess ... i'm a lot keener than usual to get to bed early!

xoxo,
claire

love

i feel like i used to post a lot more lovey-dovey fluffy mush stuff here. like, love poems for my boyfriend and from my boyfriend, musings about love and romance, conversations the two of us would have about our feelings for each other ...

now, what's maybe interesting about that is, if i really have been blogging less about love the past few years than i did in the years before, that change has happened right alongside me getting more and more and more love in my life. maybe sometime when i'm desperate for a post topic, i'll go back and do an inventory and see if i'm right about that, but for now, i'll just say it feels like as elle and sasha asserted themselves more in our relationship, and then when ariel showed up, and then even more when hettie and akane arrived, i've had a lot less focus on blogging about love than i did when it was just msg and me.

...

oof. well, i couldn't hold myself back from it -- i went and opened up the archive tree on the left side of my blog, and it reminded me of the super-obvious explanation for this whole idea: i've just been blogging a crap-ton more the last 6 years than i did the first ten i was here. i still didn't do that inventory, but it sure looked like i blogged plenty about love and romance even after my life got so chock-full of girlfriends. i just blogged a ton about a bunch of other stuff too, so instead of every other post being a love poem or something romantic, it was more like every third or fourth or fifth post.

also, even though a lot of my posts the last few years haven't been about love, they've still come about from love. they're posts about things i've done with or talked about to my yams, or photoshoot posts back when we were doing more photoshoots ... things that happened exactly because i have so much love in my life.

way to blow a hole in your own thesis statement, claire! now how do i wrap this up?

well ...

probably ...

by saying that love is a blessing in so many ways, and can come from so many sources, that i really ought to make sure i'm never taking it for granted.

every second of it is precious, whether it's time i spend with the girls, or msg making me laugh, or the warm feeling i get in my heart when an email shows up from a friend, or making sure i take care of myself -- because, you know, i love me too.

and on top of that, there's this about love:

i try my best to share it with you as well, dear readers. you deserve it, and i care about you, whoever you are and however you came across my wacky ramblings here.

feel loved, please.

xoxo,
claire

so embarrassing ...

yeepers. as of last post, i'm at 18 blog entries for 2025. that's more than i blogged in any entire year before 2019. and folks, this has not been hard.

what was i doing all those years?

smh

lottery tickets

my boyfriend has a weird way of buying lottery tickets. actually, not a weird way of buying them ... it's what he does afterwards that's weird. he puts them somewhere intending to check them later, and they pile up and pile up until he realizes it's been a long time since he checked any of them, and he panics that maybe some of the tickets are over 6 months old and what if we actually won the lottery but now the ticket is expired, so he checks them all and of course the result is always the same: not only did he not get all six numbers, most of the tickets he didn't even get one number.

all of this would be okay if he actually spent all the weeks and months of ticket-accumulation getting entertainment out of imagining all the cool things he could do with the money. and he used to do that really well ... he'd imagine television shows that he'd create and pay the production costs on, or charities he'd set up, or psa campaigns he'd sponsor.

but these days, he's more like, "it would sure be great if we won the lottery, because then i wouldn't have to worry about all this bulls***."

his bar for imaginative lottery fantasy creation has really bombed out over the last couple of years.

and that gives me an idea for a series of blog posts!

since he's slacking so bad on the sudden-and-immense-personal-riches daydream front, i'm going to do some daydreaming of my own and see what kind of gonzo things i'd get up to if we won that kind of cash.

coming soon to a blog near you!

xoxo,
claire

a wonderful thing that exists

so the last couple days, we've been re-reading the most recent book msg wrote, and honestly, it's just terrific.

besides me and the other girls, probably only ... i dunno, 5 or 6 other people have read it?

he hasn't really even made an attempt to get it published.

does that sound kinda sad to you? because ... it's not.

i have a person in my life who made this incredible thing -- it's exciting and hilarious and touching and just stuffed full of really beautiful writing, and it's made me and the other girls and those 5 or 6 other people crazy-happy to read it.

to me, if you're valued -- i mean, really, truly valued -- that's success. it doesn't matter if it's a million people or just one really right one.

sometimes he has trouble keeping that in mind.

but luckily he has a super-awesome girlfriend to keep pointing it out to him!

xoxo,
claire

role model!

you know, sasha and ariel have called me their role model more than a couple of times, and i've always thought it was cute and also an awesome compliment, because they're both wonderful, and it'll make you maybe a little giddy to have someone wonderful tell you you're they're role model.

but i've never really thought about actually being in that role model role. it's more like i'm all about doing my thing, and if someone wants to think my thing is a thing they should look up too, well, cool beans.

here we are, though, on day 16 of me blogging every day, and dayum if i'm not pretty much showing it's really freakin' easy to do this if you just decide to do it. (and don't put too much worry into your quality control.)

so here's to me setting a faboo example in 2025 for anybody who's reading.

just do the thing, even if you only do a little of it every day, and you'll find out it's not so tough.

xoxo,
claire

is all art escapism?

so, i'm one of the most ambition-less gals you're likely to meet. my biggest goal in life is to make my friends and loved ones happy, and they all seem to think i'm awesome, so it's not that much work.

but msg is like, a real talent. an honestly great writer. so sometimes when he's got his nose deep in a manga or his eyes glued to a string of youtube videos, i kinda feel like i should push him to be more productive. not because i want him to make something of himself, but because i know it makes him feel good when he finishes a really good novel and lets us all read it, and also because the more he writes, the more i think he has a chance of eventually attracting some other notice from somewhere and bringing his fantastic talent into a lot more people's lives.

only ... what's the actual line between indulging in the consumption of escapist stuff (like youtube and manga and netflix shows) and creating art that others are going to use for escapism?

and does the lofty intention of creating something worthwhile actually make it any less escapist than creating a bunch of fun fluff?

i mean, would people really read, or watch tv, or listen to music, if their real-world lives didn't have something missing that they want to fill in, or something miserable that they want to tune out?

i don't really have an answer ... i'm just yammering here. but at what point does art or fiction become worthwhile in and of itself, not just for escapist purposes?