I'd like more conversation here among my LJ friendies. I know you are all wonderful people and I feel that I don't know most of you as well as I'd like.

So let's talk. Invite your friends, comment, spread love, have informative and respectful debates, agree to disagree, agree to agree, and just get to know each other.

I will start.

Hi LJ! I'm Marian. I live in Philly with nurgal and our son Connor. I'm currently reading "In Defense of Food" which tinanj let me borrow, which is really changing the way I view food and is encouraging me to change my eating habits for the better. I'm an artist, or I'm trying to be and I just discovered a fabulous new view of city life and I'm looking forward to expressing that in my artwork. I'm currently temping in Center City Philadelphia and I quite like it. I get to meet lots of different people and work with different kinds of companies, and hopefully I'll find one soon that I can make a permanent home with. nurgal and I are engaged, and I'm not sure if I'm allowed to tell everyone the date yet, but I will say it's about a year and a half away. :D

For the most part my life is an open book, I'll answer just about any question you ask.

So come on over say hi and spread love. :D

*puts out chips and dip and fresh fruit smoothies*

I just made a small flist cut. I'm really trying to narrow down my friends list to the people that I have the most connection with. I went from nearly 100 people down to 49 in the last 6 months. It gets harder and harder to make cuts as the list gets shorter because the people that are still here I have some sort of connection with, however small.

If I cut you it is with no hard feelings. If you were cut and wish to remain on my friends list, please feel free to comment or email me (email is in info).

I simply can't keep up with an flist as large as the one I have. I've been on LJ so rarely recently that I'm missing much of what all of you are saying. I'd much rather spend the time I do spend on LJ cultivating closer relationships with the people that I connect with than spread all my time and energy out among a larger list with less connections. If that makes any sense.

I know it's my journal, my life, my choice, but I always feel bad when I remove someone from my list. If I've removed you it is with no hard feelings and I wish you the best in all you do.

I'll probably be making a few more cuts within the coming months until I'm down to a very small, intimate group of people. The whole process may take a year or more, but my goal is to get down my friends list so that everyone on there I feel intimately connected with on some level. Whether it's the blossoming of a new friendship, or the comfort of an old one, as long as there is some connection on both ends. If that means that there are 40, 10, or 3 people on my list, then so be it.

Did I mention that I quit my job?


It was totally worth it. My most recent check was $30.


Go me.

Thank you flutterbychild for scanning this in!






This is one of the pictures we had taken the other day.

This is Wade Posting:

Marian is having issues with her Computer right now. Her powercord is no longer working, so her access to the net will be non-existant or very limited for a little while. If you need to get in touch with her, just hit up my journal and let me know. Or you could send her a way to contact you from here and I will relay it back to her.

I have thinned out my friends list. If you can't see the last post then I have cut you. I wish you no hard feelings, but I felt that we didn't have the connection I was looking for.

Feel free to email me or leave a comment if you are wondering anything specific or think I made the wrong choice. I'm open to discussion. :)

Well, LJ Idol is having a run off vote. There are 4 people tied for last place and the bottom 2 get booted. I am one of those 4 people. :( I don't want to be done with it yet!!!

My favorite LJ-er. Well that's difficult. I have a rather large friends list, and I enjoy reading everyone and I enjoy adding new people to it. Each person brings something special to the table.

However, a few choice favorites are as follows. thimble_island, welcome_to_1984, and mitsukai_toori are all people I consider good friends from real life. These three are people who were there before I started LJ and who I feel as though I can trust them completely and implicently. I love them all very much.

jenelycam, goddess_of_art, as well as all the other artists on my list I find to be inspiring and creative. They are the ones who have helped me get out of my artistic funk, and I want to thank them for that.

dissolvedgurl, jenny_junipurr, princessbobbie and tru2myart are the moms who I read and hope to emulate. The people I can relate to as a mother.

And then there are the people that make me laugh and who I just enjoy reading. greyweirdo and popfiend are in particular at the top of that list.

Those are just a few of the people on my list who have made an impact on me. And, interestingly enough, I've met most of them within the last year.

*hugs to all*

Will Ferrell is so freaking funny in this No Pay Rent! video.

One night nurgal, my best friend Emily, and I went out to the bar that Emily's boyfriend Joe was DJing at. We were sitting around having a good time talking, getting drunk, etc. This guy that I vaguely recognize comes up and starts talking to us.

He mentions that he remembers me from highschool. I asked him, "What's your name?"

"Mat."

"Mat?"

"Yes."

"I have no idea who you are."

"We graduated together."

"We did?" And I immediately thought back to VC.

Emily looks at me as she takes a drag on her cigarette and shakes her head. "No. He didn't graduate wtih us."

I think some more. "Where did you graduate from?"

"Titusville."

"No, we graduated from VC."

"Oh. Well we went to school together."

"Do you remember my name?"

"Marian Scales."

"Heh. I have no idea who you are."

"What was your name again?"

"Pat Lytle."

"Pat!?"

Everyone shouts "YES!"

"OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOH. I thought you were saying MAT."

"No. We all heard him say Pat."

I love friending frenzies. It's also been awhile since I had one.

*pulls out the booze, chips, and left over easter candy*

Come! Be merry!

You can read my entry here

My Transformation

I used to be a child. Spoiled. Naive. Immature. When I was 15 I acted more like a 10 year old. When I was 18 I acted more like a 15 year old. And at 21 I acted like a senior in highschool. I was annoying and I didn't get any of the jokes that people told. And often times I WAS the joke. I didn't take school seriously. It was simply the next step after highschool. I didn't take my future seriously. ANd I didn't take myself seriously. I was impulsive. I did things to do them and because they were fun and occasionally I did things because I had to, like going to class and doing my homework. I was depressed. I went in and out of depression. I had a fling with caffiene pills. I thought smoking made me look cool and that if I had sex with every guy I found myself attracted to that I'd be accepted and loved. I had aspirations of drug use, a bohemian lifestyle, hitchiking, art, and sex.

Then I started dating Wade. I suppose that could be construed as the beginning of my Transformation, but it didn't really start until I was pregnant. It was a slow process, and one I'm still going through. Over the next year I matured into a woman in her 20's. A woman who was about to graduate from college with a degree in Graphic Design. A woman who had no idea what she was going to do with her life, but that whatever it was she wasn't going to half ass it like she had the last 20 some years of her life. A woman who was going to be a mother. I lost the naivete and the obnoxiousness. I still didn't get sarcasm, but from dating Wade that had begun to abate. I was no longer a girl, I was a woman. A mother. I pined for the girl I was losing, but I looked forward with new hope to the woman I was becoming.

Open Topic


I am not perfect. I've never pretended to be perfect, nor have I ever wanted to be perfect. I've made mistakes, some worse than others, and I've learned from them and I'm learning to live with them.

I'm especially not good at relationships. Highschool, a time of learning about love, sex, and relationships for most people, only taught me about sex. I didn't have many relationships, at least not any real ones. During College I still seemed to avoid the dating radar, though not entirely by choice.

So now, in my current relationship, which is the first REAL relationship I've ever had, I've made more mistakes than I'd like to admit to. Recently, I've made a HUGE mistake that I regret with my entire being. One, that by rights anyone else would have left me or at the very least been furious with me. Instead, I am being forgiven and I am being given the opportunity to rebuild the trust that I betrayed.

There are a lot of things about me that I need to actively work on changing and ther are a lot of things in this relationship that I need to actively work on changing. Especially before we even begin to consider taking steps towards marriage.

Smoking has been a source of contention since Connor was born. I quit for the entire pregnancy and for most of the time in which I was breastfeeding. After weening Connor I began to pick up the habit again, especially in social settings, which is where I've always been more prone to smoke. nurgal has asked me repeatedly to please stop, especially when I'm around him because it gives him horrible headaches. Being my stubborn self I refused. But recently, after nibbling at a months old pack I've realized how much I don't like smoking. That it was never a source of pleasure or amusement for me. It was simply a social device that I used in an effort to be cool, and to be quite honest bumming smokes can be a great way to meet people. It may actually be how I inadvertantly met the Pittsburgh LARP crew.

So, in taking the initiative at changing myself, my behavior, and my relationship with nurgal I am quitting smoking. Completely.

You can read my entry here.

I Can't Believe I did that!

I can't believe I fell off a bridge. I'm not talking a little bridge that just sort of goes over a dip in the road. No, I mean a 30 ft. bridge.

For some reason around here a fun thing to do is to go jump off the Rockland Bridge in Oil City and into the rock strewn water below. The water is about 12 ft deep, but you have to jump out a couple of feet or you could die on the rocks directly below the bridge. Why this is the cool thing to do, I don't know.

Several years ago, before Emily was even pregnant, and before I met Wade, we decided to get new swimsuits from Walmart and go out to the bridge. I had never been there before, but Emily, who was working for Youth Alternatives at the time would go with the other volunteers and the kids and jump off the bridge. We arrived and there was a family and some other people hanging out and jumping off the bridge. Beer cans were strewn along the shore with candy wrappers, empty chip bags, and other debris.

Emily jumped in a few times. I stood on the road looking over the bridge and watching everyone else jump in. I climbed over the guard rail and stood clinging for dear life to the top rail. Emily was next to me encouraging me to jump.

She counted "1, 2, 3"

I froze. "Em, I can't do it!"

"Relax. You'll be fine. Look at all these little kids that are half your age jumping. You can hold my hand, here watch." She turned to a guy nearby. "Will you hold my hand and jump with me?" He climbed over the rail and took her hand. She counted and they jumped, she screamed the whole way down. When her head came above the water again she looked up at me. "Come on Mae! I'll come up and hold your hand, we'll do it together!"

She came up, climbed over the rail again and grabbed my hand. "I'll count. If you don't jump with me, I could die."

"Okay! I'll do it this time. I promise!"

"One... two..."

I froze again, "Em, I can't do it!"

"Marian!"

We climbed over the edge. She jumped a couple more times. Continuously encouraging me to jump, that it would be fine. At one point a group of guys that Emily knew came up and we talked to them. We flirted. We said we'd meet them at Kings later.

A 12 year old boy climbed onto one of the cement supports. He was scared too. His family was down there encouraging him to jump. After 10 minutes he jumped. He was fine. He was grinning.

Emily looked at me. "If a 12 year old boy can do it from there, then you should be able to too."

I was determined to do it. I wasn't going to be shown up by a small child. I had been up there for over an hour.

The guys helped me climb down onto the cement support. It was about 5 feet lower and I had space to get a small running start. There were rocks right below . I had to jump out a couple feet to miss them. Emily was in the water waiting for me.

She counted several times. I still couldn't do it. I came close, but I always stopped at the last moment.

Emily said, "Look, if you don't jump then we're not going to Kings."

I really wanted to go to Kings.

I stepped back, I ran, I put my leg out to jump, I changed my mind, I stumbled, I twisted, I slid down the side of the cement support, and landed right on top of the rocks.

My butt hurt a lot.

Emily swam, slowly, over to me. "Are you ok?"

"Yeah, my butt hurts."

She laughed. "Ok, now we can go."

With that we went back to her house and changed for Kings.

The Hard Truths That I Have Learned, During My Time On Livejournal, About Myself and How I Interact With People

Most of the lessons I've learned since I started livejournal I learned on my own, outside of LJ. This is the one lesson LJ has taught me.

For many years I made my journal public. All of my pain and angst was displayed for the world to see. I didn't care that people could read my most intimate secrets. If I didn't want anyone to know, I didn't post about it.

Then Fish happened. I wrote about it on livejournal, not thinking that anyone would really read it and find out. Then, I don't quite remember how I found out, but I was informed that Fish knew I what I was accusing him of before we had our "talk." He had said he had no idea.

I should have learned my lesson then.


But no, I continued to keep my journal public. Then, a couple years later, I wrote about someone I knew, who didn't even have a livejournal, and I didn't even mention her by name. She knew I was referring to her and she called my phone leaving a message, and the whole thing ended rather badly. After that I made my entries friends only.

Many months later I temporarily returned my entries to public viewing, and the same person sent me an email commenting on my entry. I felt as though my privacy had been invaded, and I immediately returned my entries to friends only.

What I learned from all of this was that, even though my life is an open book, it is not an open book to everyone. There are some people out there that I would rather not share my life with, but they are very few.

My entry is here

I believe in friendship.

I believe in doing everything to keep a friend. I am one of those people, and a friend of mine says people like me are very rare, who will do everything in my power to keep a friendship alive. I will put every ounce of my being into a friendship if there is at least a tiny thread to hold on to. I believe in this.

I also believe in knowing when to let go of a friendship. It is not an easy thing to do, and I do it rarely. I have exhausted myself emotionally, mentally, and physically from putting effort into a dying friendship before I left it in their hands. After you have put everything that you are into something and it has not been reciprocated then it's time to leave it in the other person's hands. Then it's time to stand back and wait for them to come to you. And if you are lucky, they will.

This is what I believe in.