Frrrrriday Rrrrround-up!

An end-of-weekly roundup collecting fffffive of the fffffantabulous things I find stumbling around the web during the week here, but which I post on one of the many other Internet outlets I stop by (or tweet at) during my travels. More about the genesis here.

I will never stop loving Ira Glass. [Facebook-ed]

Want to get your hands dirty and change the world? Join a crop mob. [delicious-ed, via @BeckyMcCray]

Revenge is a dish best served cold, with a Gatsby lecture. [Tumbld, via The Rumpus]

More on being lost, with panache!, from the big-hearted Penelope Trunk. [Google-Reader-ed]

xxx
c

P.S. It finally struck me that I could use one of the lovely images I've found in my travels rather than the same old cowboy photo. So there you go, and this week, just the four (other) link-links. But since I feel funny this first time out, not having five, here's a nice interview about my reading habits. Thanks, Brenda, for interviewing me, and thank you thank you thank you, dearest Jodi for hooking us all up via your wonderful Women's Business Socials. No more snotty ladies!

Image by Håkan Dahlström via Flickr, used under a Creative Commons license.

Poetry Thursday: Eno in the trees

Your shit
didn't break
all at once
or in order,
you could argue
that it never broke
at all,
that you were just you,
fixing yourself
the best way you knew how,
splinting your own leg
up there on the mountain,
miles and miles
from a trained professional.

So go.
Roll out
a doughy stretch
of time
before you,
as much as you can gather at once,
then play with it,
in it,
around it.

Frolic in the sea
take long drives through the country
do your deep knee bends
your yoga
your tai chi
and walk the hills,
with Hank Williams
with Joe Frank
with Brian Eno
with nothing at all,
and as many trees
as possible.

Eat real food.
Drink good water.
Follow the light
around the house,
like a cat,
from one patch
to another. 
Talk to fellow
travelers;
let them fall in step
with you
and peel off
where they must.
It will be you
and only you
in the end,
anyway.

Let go
of your notions
of time,
you have all the time
in the world,
and none of it
belongs to you
anyway.

You are a perfect mess
a beloved clutch of cells
and electricity,
a brain in need of a heart,
a heart in need of room.

Here it is:
all the room you need,
right here.

Do you see?

xxx
c

Image by guy schmidt via Flickr, used under a Creative Commons license.

The crazy lady cops to the crazy

Dan Owen loves it when I write about my workaholism.

So this is going to be a banner week for Dan, something I'm happy to give him, for all he gives back via his thoughtful comments, and who knows? Maybe, just maybe, if I can chip away at some scaly mass getting in the way of me and a foothold, maybe it will be a banner week for me, too. Because for as trenchant as my workaholism is, and for as much as many 12-steppers would insist that obviously, I'm getting something out of it or I wouldn't be doing it, I insist, INSIST, I tell you!, that there is a way out of this to a happier me. To someone who, it is true, enjoys work with perhaps more fervor than many, and still to the exclusion of many things, but not to the point of obsession.

There is always, usually, a way out of here. It's more likely that there may not be one way out of here, if you're talking tactics, but the central way is most certainly some shift in thought. For example, my way of feeling, my approach to the kind of work I was interested in doing too much of, changed in pretty much an instant, during my hospital-bed epiphany (which I spoke about at last year's Ignite). But while there have been other shifts in realization that took longer, my transition from being okay with applying my stupid workaholic engine to writing ads for The Man to not being okay with it, for example, the shift to new work itself, or a new way of being, or a new set of habits, has always taken a while. Rome wasn't re-engineered in a day.

Both Dan and Piper bring up one critical component of this re-engineering: checking the yardstick by which I'm measuring accomplishment. Fair enough. I'd say I'm aware of the disconnect between my idea of reasonable and that of someone who is, well, reasonable. This year, I had my annual goals list vetted by a compassionate but critically-thinking friend; last year, I had my then-coach do the honors (who herself has a touch of the workaholism, and who declared my original plan unrealistic). This year's list required less retooling for reality than last year's, and so far, I'm also much more on track than I was last year, both of which items I'm calling progress.

I believe the real progress lies in two things: first, my willingness to openly cop to this as something that's not working and that I want to change, then trying stuff that stands a reasonable chance of working. While I've been copping openly here on the blog for years now, there are years and years (and years, decades!) before then where I not only denied it, if you brought it up to me, I'd have told you that was insane. My father was a workaholic; I knew what workaholism looked like.¹

Second, I am objectively happier. Sure, there are many contributing factors, including the epiphany, but there are some key differences that point to my being able to back off this work b.s. now and then and have fun: for starters, a group of women friends, which I never had before, and not only choosing to be with them, but initiating many of the get-togethers. My old modus operandi was just to glom onto whatever friends my S.O. of the moment had, letting him initiate the scheduling. Now I cultivate relationships, and enjoy the tending of them, maybe not to the extent an extrovert would, but I'm not an extrovert! The flip side of this is that I also grab "me" time whenever the hell I feel like it, something I never felt entitled to do before. So, progress!

Ongoing visualization of a five-pound bag and the amount of shit that will fit remains a challenge, though. Piper's method for handling this is intriguing, but feels effortful to me. I've timed things, how long it takes to write a post, a newsletter, to clean the kitchen, to run to the post office, to no avail. The times are too variable. Slightly better has been to play with time allotments for things, as several commenters suggested. This has been marginally more helpful, but man, I have a capacity for denial even with this: I'll completely overlook the physical drain something that's emotionally exhausting will take, and end up with stupid-long lists.

What it boils down to is something that I really hate to look at, but is exactly what Dan seems to suggest is inevitable: what do I really want to do? Because that, I'll manage to get done. I take care of what I have to, eating and sleeping, keeping body and soul together, and what I "have to", this blog, mostly, and connecting with people I'm interested in about the topics I'm interested in. Like most smokers, I quit smoking when I wanted to, and not a moment sooner. I went on the Specific Carbohydrate Diet when the choice was between that or hard-core meds with deleterious long-term effects, not months before, when I was just uncomfortable.

These books I say I want to write? When I really want to, by this logic, I will write them. I'll quit writing so much here, and start writing more there. Maybe my refusal to let go of this idea of me writing a collection of essays on one theme is just another form of clutter. I've been cautiously, cautiously watching Hoarders lately, as they put up new episodes, and it's a little scary, seeing the outward manifestation of interior chaos and clinging. I recognize myself on that OCD spectrum, and fully cop to both my blessing/curse of seeing potential in goddamn everything and my reluctance to call chapters closed. Part of why I've been stripping away, stripping away, stripping away mercilessly (albeit slowly) at my physical and digital clutter issue is that I recognize this inability to make decisions about stuff-stuff is adversely affecting my ability to make decisions about life-stuff: there's a side of me that's still seven, and that wants to live in four different cities (at once!), with five different men, or none, as a ballerina/shrink/college professor/Mike Royko/hobo. Okay, that's an exaggeration: I never wanted to be a ballerina.

It's crazy-making, the ability to see potential in things. It leads to lives full of crap and devoid of a central thing, okay, maybe two, that really matter(s).² I know more about this than I wish I did right now, I've been on both ends of this problem. Maybe I'm delusional, thinking that my continued pursuit of a solution to the problem is anything more than a workaholic cat chasing its own tail. Maybe I should cut my losses, find the lowest-common-denominator workaround to the problem, workaholics anonymous, which does exist, and sign myself up.³

One final thought (for now) on this mishegoss: while I'm happy to have read 52 books in less than 52 weeks, and while I almost certainly would have been a bit disappointed had I made it to the end of 52 weeks without having read 52 books, I really am happiest that I've managed to build reading back into my life. Really and truly. I am happy to be reading books again, because I enjoy it. I am happy to be reading them still, though I've more than fulfilled my "obligation" to myself, and I expect to continue enjoying reading far, far beyond these 52 books and however many weeks.

I'm proudest, however, that I've been able to stop reading books I didn't want to finish, after 10 pages, 50 pages, even 100 pages. That I didn't for a moment think "OMG I HAVE 100pp INVESTED I CANNOT STOP NOW AIIIYYYIIII!!!1!!" I am reading what I like, because I like it, that is healthy, I think, but it was my crazy-ass, OCD-oriented mindset that got me back to this nice place of being.

That, I think, is not crazy at all. Or maybe it's just crazy in the "good" way.

xxx
c

¹I didn't, of course, any more than I knew what Crohn's looked like. My workaholism presented much differently than my father's did, just as my Crohn's presented differently. He was all Joe C-Suite and shallow conversations and diarrhea! I was all starving-artiste and meaningful dialogues and constipation! COMPLETELY DIFFERENT. (Not.)

²Here's how crazy-making it is: when I watch Hoarders, I want to train as a professional organizer who specializes in compulsive hoarding disorders!

³By the way, if anyone has experience with this organization, I'd be very interested to hear about it. And yeah, I get the ano

Image by moffoys via Flickr, used under a Creative Commons license. From this "Crazy Frog" Filckr set, which will almost certainly make you laugh, which is good for you whether you're a workaholic or total layabout.

Sticking a fork in it, Mister Rogers-style

While I've spent most of what I'm coming to call my "Sabbatical from Sabbatical" holed up alone, I have made occasional runs back into L.A. for various types of interpersonal reinforcements.

A Biznik meetup. Some Nei Kung lessons, to get a particularly complex bonus-extra move down pat, successfully, fingers crossed.

And, of course, for shrinkage. I've taken many hiatuses from shrinkage over the years, but I've found that the monthly tune-up version of ongoing shrinkage really works for me. Maybe if I can get my farkakte compass working 100%, I'll be able to forgo those; maybe finances will force my hand at some point, regardless. But for now, I compile a little GTD-style "@shrink" agenda, slot it full of stuff, then haul my ass in to get the crazy straightened, kind of like a Brazilian blowout for my psyche.

We're running up against a really trenchant issue now, or maybe it's a tangled web of stuff that presents as a trenchant issue: my workaholism. Nothing I haven't discussed here before, but I'm starting to look at it a little differently, a little more tactically. One huge step forward for me was declaring this very sabbatical (although not the Sabbatical from Sabbatical). Granted, I've been declaring it incrementally, two weeks in December became a quarter in early January, and I keep pushing the edges of it outward as much as I can.

Within those borders, though, I've been operating with mixed results. I'm happy with the amount of reading I'm doing now, both for fun and edification. I've gotten much better about spending time with friends (I think, maybe I should check with them.) I'm spending more time with food prep and on exercise, which keeps me from hurling myself at drive-thru windows most of the time (I confess, to you and the Specter of Wayne, to my enduring love of those goddamn Jack-in-the-Box, 2-for-99¢ tacos). I'm getting to bed earlier, so I'm getting more rest.

On the other hand, I seem to be having trouble finding the "off" switch for my days. Part of it is that I have not been good about earmarking an entire one per seven for rest, so I steal time during my weekdays, which pushes work into the weekends, which creates a vicious circle. The other part is that, and I cannot believe that I'm saying this at almost-50, I've never found the "off" switch for each individual day. From the time I called my time my own, I've just worked when work needed to get done. Justified or not (and believe me, most of it is NOT), when you work in advertising, you work, period.¹ Once I escaped, I felt like I couldn't stop working, because I didn't have a foothold in anything else yet. This drove my ex-husband, The Chief Atheist, batshit-crazy, probably rightly. During most of our recreational time I was less a companion than I was an angry, grudging millstone. But it got me out of writing ads for money into acting in them for money, and helped me pick up all these mad, 21st-century skillz along the way.

Besides, a lot of the time, I'd goof off here and there during the day, then work away all night. I'd get my 12-hour day in, just at weird times. I can't do that anymore; these days, I feel the air coming out of the balloon at around 6:30 or 7, and there's no second wind forthcoming.

So I'm looking for hacks. Soliciting hacks! Or ideas, solutions, tricks, whatever you want to call them, as long as they've worked for you. They can be front-end hacks, i.e., things that I could do in the earlier part of the day, to ensure that I get my plate cleared off and feel okay stopping at a reasonable hour.

But I'm especially interested in "Mister Rogers" hacks: putting on play clothes at the end of the day to signal it's time to stop working. That kind of thing. They can be treats, I love treats!, but they should not be fatty, as I'm trying to reduce a bit, and they should not be alcohol. I already know how to use that as a shut-off valve.

What does one do to mark the end of the day? WWMRD, What would Mister Rogers do?

Or is that all made-up, PBS, fairy-tale stuff?

xxx c

¹This has only gotten worse with time and the splintering media landscape, by the way. At least I could take time off when I was away on location, during production. These poor people now? Ugh.

Image by Hey Rocker via Flickr, used under a Creative Commons license.

What's wrong with me?

The proof that I sat my ass in a tub of awesome this August continues to mount: this morning, at coffee, one of my new friends, photographer by trade, semi-retired layabout by choice, and all-around fascinating fellow Virgo a few miles down the road (both literally and metaphorically), offered to tell me what was wrong with me, woo-woo-style. (What? Some of the witchiest people I know walk among us as straights.)

A modest titter of horror rippled around the table when he made the suggestion, and I'm pretty sure there was a second wave when I jumped at it. (Although that could have been Judge Colleen kicking in. It's been known to happen.) Why don't you tell her what's right with her?

His reply, My superpower only works one way, was delicious. But mine was the reason I was really interested: What's wrong? makes a great to-do list.

I'm kidding, but I'm not. Because while I'm all for knowing your strengths, I read the book, and I've had various other witchy people give me various other witchy kinds of readings for the same reason, my bottom line with all this self-improvement stuff is illumination of dark corners and assistive devices for finding blind spots. I get what I'm good at, for the most part, enough to know where to spend my time getting better at it. And I'm getting better at seeing what trips me up. So I see the illumination of problems or flaws or "faults" just as advanced instruction on the finer points of the machinery.

I can fly; now I want my instrument license.

xxx
c

Image by JoF via Flickr, used under a Creative Commons license.

Poetry Thursday: More I Cannot Wish You

I am imagining
you a song:

it is the song of your dreams
if your dream
is to hear
Frank Loesser's
"More I Cannot Wish You"
sung by 
the perfect Irish baritone,
breaking here and there in places
because he's seen and heard it all,
or a virginal chorus
of earnest high school voices,
painfully on pitch
because they have seen none of it yet
but are impatient to.

Either way
I wish you the boon
of that gentle song,
all but forgotten
for want of dazzle
in the midst of a show
that crackled with it,
but the tune that carries
sweet truth the furthest:
that love is what matters most
even when
it is the hardest thing
to believe in.

So yea, though we swoon to drunken Sarah Brown
and her dream of bells,
and nod along with Adelaide's lament of fidelity
and cross our fingers for Sky Masterson and his sevens, 
and tap our feet as Nicely-Nicely
finds his personal Jesus,
we'd do well enough
to wish each other love
in all its shapes and guises,
and mostly,
to it showing up
today.

xxx
c

Image by jmscottIMD via Flickr, used under a Creative Commons license.

Urge to yammer

I've been housesitting for friends who live in a very quiet, very bucolic part of the state. It's been restful in many ways, most of which are probably obvious: no traffic, no city noises, cleaner air, singing birds, some of whom sound weirdly like my iPhone's alert noise, which tells you all you need to know about how often I get out of the city and into quiet.

What's been a bit surprising, and not a little alarming, has been discovering how much noise I'll generate to mitigate against all that glorious silence. After dark, for example, I tend to like having Netflix or Hulu on to keep me company, not a habit I'm particularly okay with, but my current policy on this kind of stuff is to slow down and observe rather than act out of the alarm and try skipping over to good habits. Because when I skip steps, nothing sticks.

But the other other (and far more disturbing) thing I've noticed is how often I catch myself talking out loud to nobody. I'll observe something silently, that it's getting dark, for example, and that I should shutter up the house for the evening, and then I'll say, "It's getting dark, I should shutter up the house for the evening." I mean, I will voice EXACTLY what I've just thought.¹

I'll ask my shrink and report back to you on that. In the meantime, here's what the wide gulf between all that quiet and all that chatter has also pointed out to me: how much quieter I've gotten around other people. Not in a being-shy or expressing-my-inner-introvert's way: in a listening way. In a being-okay-with-quiet way and a give-other-people-room way. I was raised to be really, really "on", in my family, the wittiest monkeys tended to get the prime resources. "Off" didn't happen unless I was off by myself (and believe me, I worked hard to get that "off" time.) The worst feeling I could have was to be around people and not feel comfortable enough either to talk (usually because I was either intimidated by their superior knowledge or their quicker monkey wit) or to let there be quiet (more complex, but obviously some deeper thing about safety).

These days, while there is still often the urge to natter on, to rush in and fill that abhorrent vacuum with yammering, just as often I'm cool with hanging. With letting other people natter on or, if they're interesting, of drawing them out with questions. And yeah, yeah, I know the whole thing about the most sparkling conversationalist being the one who shuts up and lets other people talk about themselves. In my early days of learning the networking thing, I tried to consciously apply that technique. Now, it's different; now, it's more of a genuine curiosity. Who are these people? What stuff do they know that I don't?

Or, if it's about me (and yeah, it still is, because I'm still a selfish, self-involved, terrified little hairball much of the time), then it feels good to be quiet and to note the feelings and impulses that float up: Wow, I'm getting really anxious and my breath is getting shallow; or Dang, I really want to tell this guy what an effing incorrect blowhard he is. More often than not, I've been happy to shut up and listen. Or, when I don't, to learn something from my not being able to.

If I have a point, and this is a baby idea, so I'm not sure that I do, it's that clutter takes many, many forms. And word-clutter (surprise!) is one of them. In the past, just as I've rushed in to buy more crap to fill empty spaces, I've filled empty air with words. Finally, I get the power of "empty" space, of quiet. Years after having it illustrated during countless power scenes in acting class (for a crash course, watch The Godfather, part I or II.) Decades after I first  tried (and failed, and failed, and failed) in silent meditation. Because the space is not empty: it's filled with silence.

Beautiful, powerful, completely whole, utterly terrifying silence.

xxx
c

¹If I'm in a playful mood, I'll add, "I know it is; I'm you." So yeah, I'm probably a little nuts. On the other hand, if you know you're a little nuts, perhaps you're less nuts than if you don't know. Or maybe there's just a little more hope for you. Or maybe you should just ease off the caffeine a bit.

Image by Bùi Linh Ngân via Flickr, used under a Creative Commons license.

Poetry Thursday: On looking out over the valley

Have you seen the light
to the side of the house?
And have you seen
how it pulls each edge
of each leaf
of the agaves
into brilliant focus,
and casts shadows
in the folds of the
organ-pipe cactus
while it draws your eye
to the two shy flowers
blooming to one side?

And have you seen the light
on the bougainvillea
at the edge of the road
and on the lavender
to one side
and the soft, green sage
to the other
and on the million silvery spikes
of rosemary
just beyond?

Have you seen the light
on your hand
on your feet
on the gravel
on the asphalt
on the twisted wires
that seem to thread
from tree to tree
and through the haze,
on the softly sloping mountains
at the other edge
of the valley?

Yes, there are dishes
to be washed
and beds
to be made
and errands to be run
and to-do lists
to be done.
But they will be here
and this
will not.

Sit, if you can,
for a moment
and take in
what you can,
for now,
because you cannot
ever see enough of it
and because all of it
will change
in the blink of an eye.

Worrying the thread of longing

It's too bad that you can't be in two places at one time. Or three. Or twelve.

Each of them feels so right when I'm not there: Chicago looked good when I lived in New York; Los Angeles looked good when I lived in Chicago. Now that I'm here in Southern California, the segmenting just gets smaller, the beach looks dreamy when I live inland, but the further-inland entices, too.

But wait, even my tiny living space does not rule out restless longing. When I am at my desk, I wonder if it might not be better to write at the coffee shop, at the co-working space, at the dining-room table, just 1o feet away. And who says longing needs to be anchored in the real world, have you never watched a movie and wanted to crawl inside? I give you Tuscany and its very special sun, the holy Gilbert Triangle, and (irony alert) the Kansas of Dorothy Gale. (To be clear, while these places leave me cold, I am not immune, rather perversely, I know, Phoenix looks good to me when I'm watching the Mid-Century version of it in Hitchcock's Psycho.)

I've moved enough times to get that the problems you think you leave behind will jump into your luggage and follow you to your next destination like so many Manhattan bedbugs. What is the question, really, that's behind "Where do I want to live?" Is it really how do I want to live? Is that the Big Question that's at the root of all the questions, especially as I roll up on 5-0, or is it a subtle variation, how do I want to spend my time?

As I continue my casting-off of stuff, I'm finding the smallest bit of room and courage to look at some radically different ways of living out the back 40. So far, it's been equal measures asking for help and being open to serendipity, so hey, feel free to drop fantastic tools/books/what-have-you that have been helpful. Some context would be nice.

xxx c

P.S. For the record, I've had great success with The Artist's Way, Move Your Stuff, Change Your Life and Simple Abundance; I'm having ongoing good results, especially this year, with Your Best Year Yet. This time around, something finally clicked between me and Wishcraft, whose contents my friend Havi has long loved. I'll report back here once I've finished it and assimilated the results. (Which brings up an obvious to-do for the blog: create write-ups of each of these as I have for Move Your Stuff, and maybe a comparison grid of some kind.)

Screen cap of opening panorama from Psycho nabbed from the internets.

The point of pointlessness

Thanks to that goddamn Yehuda Berg, I think I've figured out Reason #5 why I enjoy washing dishes.¹

The first reason, of course, or maybe not "of course," but "of course" to me at this point, having long ruminated on the topic, is the immediate satisfaction of accomplishment. Like a lot of people playing a long and fuzzy game, milestones are more like 100-milestones, and closure, period, is even rarer. Whereas with dishes, unless you're toiling at Satan's Eternal Sink at the Seventh Circle Café, eventually you're done, and the outside of "eventually" is usually less than an hour. (Thanksgiving/etc. take longer, but then, there are usually helpers, unless your friends and family are total shits.)

The second reason is brain-off time. (Walking is brain-off time, too, but you have to put on shoes and leave the house, which is not always convenient.) My brain often hurts from being pushed beyond capacity and reason. (I know, I know.) Dishes are guilt-free brain vacation, because I am still

The third reason is really a corollary of the second reason: you can do it while watching TV! Because, as Ole Golly cautioned her young charge, Harriet, TV should be "enjoyed" only in conjunction with another, equally dull thing, because together they make up one sort of entertaining thing. (Exceptions, notable for their true scarcity, as well as extreme non-boringness, include The Wire, Mad Men, and a handful of other offerings where looking away means really missing something.) Seriously. If you take nothing else away from this long-ass post, TV is far more enjoyable and watching it will leave you feeling far less woozy and hungover when consumed with a healthy portion of manual labor.

The fourth reason is clean dishes. Duh!

Which brings us to the fifth reason, a decidedly woowoo one, so beware, prompted by reading today's pithy missive from that goddamn Yehuda Berg: washing dishes makes other, more "important" stuff happen elsewhere.

Now. TGYB's own point about pointlessness is that concerted effort in one area or on one project does not always bear immediate and direct fruit: you pour yourself into a relationship that just will not work, only to find yourself in a subsequent one that does; you bust hump on a project that flops, only to have another magically fall in your lap.

There are almost endless, nuanced variations on this.

Sometimes trying a thing teaches you you're not very good at that thing, but allows you to inadvertently discover that you kick ass at something else. I'm thinking Jan Brady in that episode where she ends up discovering a knack for art, or my dad, who by his own admission was one of the world's worst copywriters, but who, in the course of trying to sell his crappy ads, discovered he was an amazing salesman.

Other times, the wheel moves around to someone else before cashing-in time: you work and work and work to make the world's greatest adhesive to no avail, but someone else discovers it kicks ass at sorta-kinda helping tiny yellow squares of paper temporarily stick to everything. Or you're Nicola Tesla, and you're just ahead of your time and kind of a sucky business person. Or you're a woman or other disenfranchised and oppressed soul, and your shit is just outright stolen, because it can be. (And speaking of advertising, hoo boy, notorious for that kind of thievery.)

Finally, or at least, finally for our purposes, there is the seriously woowoo notion that applying effort in one area has a hoodoo-voodoo effect in another. This is where skeptics start howling at stuff like feng shui and the Law of Attraction and their ilk. Which I get, believe me, especially because the mainstream is not the exclusive province of charlatans, hucksters, and idiots. Personally, I have huge problems with the Law of Attraction because the way it seems to get put out there is as a kind of cosmic shopping device: I want these things, ergo I will wish them into being. Which is messed up for a lot of reasons, not the least of which is entitlement. Bah. Don't get me started.

But when you look at it another way, the hoodoo-voodoo thing does make some sense in certain applications because it's establishing new and consistent behaviors, as well as facilitating change and creating new surroundings. For example, my kitchen falls in the Prosperity bagua, according to feng shui. Me cleaning the hell out of it, something I've been doing slowly and assiduously over the past six months, is not going to make me rich.²

However, me attending to something I've largely neglected for the past five years brings with it a whole host of salubrious effects that might conceivably affect my ability to make money, from feeling good about caring for myself to understanding that I can push a c*cksucking boulder up a motherf*cking hill, if I do it incrementally. Will two checks for $10,000 each show up in my mailbox ten days from now, the way they did the last time I finished de-gunking the tracks in my jalousie windows with cotton swabs? Doubtful. Will I come out of this exercise feeling freer and better able to make a move? Yes, because I've unloaded a bunch of crap, and have a concrete understanding of how much of the remaining crap I really need to get by. That facilitates a physical move, which is something I've been considering, whether to a place where I might lower expenses (and save money) or find new opportunities (to make money).

Besides, greasy kitchen is a bummer. Just is. And I am all about bummer-removal right now.

That goddamn Yehuda Berg made his point in just a handful of well-selected words, which is why he's that goddamn Yehuda Berg and I'm just the communicatrix. We are on the same page, though, the Yehuda and I. Energy is never lost, for good or for ill. (You'd better believe that when you put energy in the wrong place, it will come back and bite you in the ass down the road.)

So I try to stay alert, and to choose wisely. Mostly, though, I try not to worry as much about the point. The point will sort itself out later. Or is likely only visible from some further-out point.

Commit fully. Move forward. Take breaks. Trust.

xxx c

¹It's a term of endearment for the wily wizard who sneaks up on me EVERY TIME and zaps me with truths. Cf: #45 & 46; and this. ²Unless it is, in which case, whee! Drinks are on me! ³Although hey, if that happens, woohoo, and see #2, above.

Image by dno1967 via Flickr, used under a Creative Commons license.

If you like story-type stuff, you should check out my friend Christine's great new podcast, Storyworthy. I'm on this week's episode, "Hospitals," telling the story of the doctor who lovingly offered to build me a new rectum.

Poetry Thursday: Cranky is as cranky does

I am annoyed
by this fake movie
with Jennifer Aniston
and this real guy
falling asleep in my lap,
in my airspace

And I am annoyed
by my pants not fitting
and by all the things I ate
to make them that way

And I am annoyed
by the books I brought to read
because the good ones are done with
and the bad ones
I want nothing to do with

And I am annoyed
by the time
that crawls so slowly
when all I want
is to crawl into bed
(and miles to crawl
before I sleep)

I am annoyed
by how little I wrote
and how easy it was
not to write it

I am annoyed
he hasn't called
and that she
will not stop
by the heat
and the humidity
by having too much
and not enough
and the hopeless
piles of civilization
I cannot stop seeing
all around me,
that I cannot stop
adding to
even when I know better

Dear God:
I am annoyed
and dismayed
at what I know will be
the long, shameful walk
back
to the me
who is not
annoyed.

xxx
c

Image by Kossy@FINEDAYS via Flickr, used under a Creative Commons license.

Asking the right question

A while back, when my shrink and I were trying to dismantle my Lack of Entitlement Issues, she had me ask myself a question repeatedly: What do I feel like doing?

Like the complaint-free bracelet or any other kind of check-in built around raising awareness, it worked like gangbusters once I focused on it for a while. Which is to say, it probably would not have moved me forward had I not made it Project Front-and-Center, but once I did, it moved me from a place of not even realizing I had stuff I wanted to ask for to what I suppose will be a long, flat plateau of asking for it outright. Still, it's a kind of progress.

One of the tricks of forward motion, though, is learning to ask the right question. This is where the older among us usually have it all over the younger, because we've been in enough situations where we've done things right and wrong that we have a working vocabulary of questions for various conundrums.

For some reason, though, I'd never found a good question for grappling with immediate satisfaction vs. delayed gratification. I mean, I'd powered through quitting smoking and transitioning onto the Specific Carbohydrate Diet, but there were really compelling things urging me on in the moment: inability to breathe, for the former, and blood pouring out of my ass, for the latter. Once the super-compelling reason disappeared, it was much, much harder to just say "no" to tasty grains and sugar. (Fortunately for me with regard to tobacco, the stuff tastes and smells vile once you've been off it for a while.)

More and more ideas have been coming to me via my gut lately, possibly because there is a lot more gut lately, thanks to straying from SCD, and I've been better about giving them the attention to float up to me (possibly as a result of the awareness-raising from the Lack of Entitlement exercise.) And a few days ago, this came up: instead of asking myself if I really wanted this (bad thing, usually carbs), or if something else wouldn't be better for me (duh!), or what such-and-such-inspiring-hero would do, or if this would give me more or less room/health/whatever, I should ask how I wanted to feel: right now, in five minutes, the next day, etc.

It's worked and it's not worked, and so it's really too soon to say if it's a significantly "better" question. Honestly, I find that I'm more willing to reason out the answer to any question if I'm better rested, so the truly significant gift I can probably give myself is less about the perfect set of questions and more about eight hours.

Still, I wonder: if framing has so much to do with what we do, what are the framing devices that work the best? And which of these were truly surprising to you? The "feeling" angle seems so obvious in hindsight that I figure there are probably other, even better questions out there.

So how about it? Are there questions, ways of framing a situation, a decision, that finally turned the key in the lock for you and made the tumblers fall into place? Or is it more about powering through for you?

xxx
c

Image by katietower via Flickr, used under a Creative Commons license.

Poetry Thursday: Game on

The first change is
up to you.

The rest
come rushing
up to you,
one after another,
pell-mell,
willy-nilly,
greedy, greedy bastards
ready ready ready
for the light
you have let in
through that small, small
crack in the door.

The news is
that changing one thing
changes everything.

Whether that bit
of news is
good
or bad
depends on how
open 
your arms
and your brain
and your heart
really are.

xxx
c

Reframing your ducks

I have a signed Keith Haring poster from the New York Book Fair that's been with me for 25 years now.

It's moved with me from Brooklyn to Manhattan to Chicago, where I finally had it framed and hung it proudly on the wall of my first bona-fide "grownup" apartment (i.e., all mine, with furniture I purchased myself); it's moved with me since to three other places and one additional city, Los Angeles.

Somewhere along the way, I fell out of love with it, but I hung onto it because it was valuable, literally, perhaps, but more personally, because I could remember the moment of signing, me, nervous and sweaty on one side of the table, Keith Haring, weary and sweaty on the other. (New York summers are the opposite of dry and temperate.)

He asked me who to make it out to, and in a fit of stupid reaching to be different, I said, "C-A-W", my initials. Because more than anything in that moment, I wanted Keith Haring to think I was interesting and unusual. I'm sure that's exactly what he thought, right after "Christ on a bike, they come out in the heat."

Anyway, there it all is, in one framed, signed poster: me in my lost, twentysomething yearning, and New York City, and the closest I ever got to Keith Haring (other than the dance floor of Area a couple of times, where everyone served as background for everyone else's ongoing New York music video.) It's not serving to do anything but remind me of what a sad little tool I was, both for my pathetic stabs at cool and for selecting an orangey-red frame that matches nothing I've ever had nor will have in my home. Yet even though I am committed to letting go of what's not working for me, I can't give this the heave-ho. The idea of selling it hurts my heart; the idea of giving it to Goodwill is unthinkable. It needs its Next Right Home, but it's not fit to go out into the world yet. Its Next Right Home's owner would (rightfully) look at it and politely decline. It is '80s in the worst of ways, bright, loathed, neglected.

It occurred to me that maybe, just maybe, the thing was not empirically awful. That it could be saved by, perhaps even made lovable by, reframing. I scouted readymade frames, Aaron Brothers coupon in hand (does anyone shop at Aaron Brothers or Bed, Bath & Beyond without one anymore?) but came up short. Which is how, a few fiscally painful exchanges later, I wound up with my same old poster looking completely awesome on my bedroom wall in its new, plain, wildly overpriced, custom black frame.

Getting rid of new stuff, stuff that you haven't had for a while, or that hasn't been in your family for a while, getting charged with multiple hits of emotional energy, isn't too hard. Even the expensive new stuff is relatively easy to let go of, once you get over that first hump.

Getting rid of old stuff is much, much harder. For starters, you're invested in it seven ways to Sunday; it becomes so much a part of you, it's hard to see how it could serve you differently, or serve someone else better completely.

I recently unearthed a mamaluke of an old habit, not remembering, that is going to be an unholy bitch to wrangle. My shrink and I spent the better part of this month's session unpacking it, and I just know I'm going to be a long time at turning this one around. The reframing began with me being introduced to the idea that when you come from a fucked-up home, you tend to do a lot of dissociating, and that leads to a lot of not-remembering. For a long time, it either didn't matter (I could look things up, or ask) or the problem wasn't that bad. But with perimenopause, things have declined precipitously, I forget names almost instantly after they're made known, and random nouns are getting harder to grab as my rickety head-RAM spins fruitlessly. Plus, I want to live a good life, and that means addressing my demons, even the stinky, hoary ones I paved over or figured out a way to work around a long time ago.

At some point, I will let go of most everything. And at some point further down the road, I will let go of the rest of it, as we all will when the clock counts down to zero.

For now, I let go of what I can as I can, and reframe the rest, so it can continue to serve. And it warrants remembering that one can enlist a little help with the reframing, as well as help with the outright tossing. None of us got here on our own; sometimes, we can all use a little help getting to the next place...

xxx
c

Family, friends, health, work: Pick three

There's an old saying the creatives in my old ad agency liked to lob at the suits when they started fire-breathing stuff like budgets and time and quality:

Fast. Cheap. Good. Pick any two.

Actually, we were rarely this articulate or polite under pressure, usually, we used a lot more words, rapid-fire and sotto voce, most of them of the NSFW variety.¹

It's a cheap truism, obviously crafted by someone who was paid a lot of money or given much time to come up with it, but it makes it no less truthful. That whole having-it-all thing? Bullshit bullshit bullshit. A bill of goods you've been sold by a similarly well-paid, overworked team of mad men, most of whom have the fat lifestyle or lousy home lives to back it up.

Which brings us to the updated project-triangle illustration for the modern age of self-actualization, the Four Burners Theory as (apparently) laid out by David Sedaris, and expounded upon by my young friend Chris Guillebeau. In the interests of symmetry, a model worth aspiring to, I lay it out thusly:

Family. Friends. Health. Work. Pick any three.

The metaphor of burners is a great one, provided the four you envision sit on a cooktop of the ancient variety (like me!) where there is limited gas to go around (unlike me!), and it is impossible to go great guns on all four at once. If you've been privileged enough to grow up cooking on Wolf ranges, think crappy, old plumbing, where a neighbor's flush means your scalding-hot blast of shower. (Or, in the case of Gloomy Manor, any water running anywhere in the house means the trickle of shower water you're under reducing itself to spittle.)

The idea is not that you can't have all four, even at once: it's that you can't have an exceptional level of all four at once. You cannot put in the time required to raise children properly and nurture outstanding friendships of depth and be an elite athlete and win the Nobel prize in chemistry. Because to be outstanding at any one thing requires an outstanding level of focus on that thing. Ipso facto, right?

Since you are a smartypants, your brain is racing to find exceptions to this rule. Lance Armstrong, maybe. (Although, you know, that's an awful lot of primary relationships, not to mention single-parent offspring, to qualify for categories #1 and 2.) As Ben Casnocha notes, Tim O'Reilly seems to be living the dream, but I'd wager O'Reilly himself would say that he's not all-in with any one of the four categories.

My own bias has always been towards a singular focus on work; it's how I was raised, and I suspect that to a degree, it's also how I'm wired. My Crohn's epiphany brought an end to that, though. In one fell swoop (and several subsequent months of recovery), I realized that while elite athletic performance was as meaningless to me as it had ever been, a baseline level of health and happiness was not. The former requires a certain amount of time and attention in the form of rest and, because of my annoyingly high-maintenance diet, food preparation. The latter? Well, sleep pulls double-duty, I refuse to be miserable at my own hand, and an average of eight hours daily is required to keep the Mean Reds and blues at bay.

The happiness part of the equation is far, far trickier, because family, friends and work each factor into that level of buoyancy I strive to maintain. I'm guessing they do for most of us; we feel better when we're being useful, and that requires both meaningful work and a level of reasonable engagement with other human beings. Historically, I've let the first two slide. Most of the serious relationships I've had ended largely because I just can't handle the demands of a primary relationship.² Hell, I can't always handle the demands of friendship. So I have a few close friends who, for whatever reason, put up with my bullshit, and many more casual friendships which are less time-intensive and which I can thus maintain without a lot of stress and drama.

This means I forfeit most of the benefits of family, and for now, I've made my uneasy peace with it. I really, really, really want to hit these next ten years hard, work-wise. If it means I end up pushing a shopping cart or a ward of the state in my old age, well, there's no one to blame but me and my choices. I also accept that there's no guarantee my work will be of a quality that justifies these choices. Frankly, that's even scarier to me than ending up alone, which is probably an indication that I have a long way to go before I can join the ranks of the mentally healthy, but there you go: it's the truth, and that's as good a place as any to start from.

If I have a point here (other than my seeming one, which is to depress the hell out of you), it is this: you are the sum of your choices, and there is no gobbling up your cake and still having it whole on the counter, pristine in its lovely glass cake stand, there for you to enjoy tomorrow. And a non-choice is a choice, too, so there's no weaseling out of it. Your life will get eaten up from under you, even if you don't do the eating. (Pro tip: deep-six the TV.) I have been extraordinarily lucky in that the IDIOTIC amount of time I spent doing something I hated, writing ads, turned out to be of some utility later on. Really though, the sooner you can get yourself out of something you're done with, or release something you have no use for, the better off you are. Trust me on this.³

In other words, let us not miss out on the most obvious and helpful part of the whole equation: pick. Choose. Decide. Spend time in thoughtful deliberation, weighing the pros and cons of your choices and actions and possible outcomes and then BE a verb.

Do not be like me and let life live you for too many years. A few, fine. No harm done. Everyone needs a break, and there is some value in playing at Candide a bit, here and there, for the adventure of it.

But do not lose sight of the almighty power you have built into you. Yes, be, but also, do.

Pick one to hit out of the park or pick a life that lets you gracefully enjoy a bit from the sampler plate of all four.

Pick, though. Pick today, and then pick again tomorrow...

xxx
c

UPDATE: Here's a link to the Sedaris essay referencing the four burners The lady who told him about it (she'd heard of it in a management seminar) said the stove could be electric or gas. I think for the analogy to really work, energy-wise, it needs to be gas and old, per my description, above. But hey, what the flock do I know?

¹If we could talk at all, that is. Sometimes, we were so apoplectic at the unreasonable demands, all we could do was fume and point to the graphical representation we'd clipped from wherever, probably an ad, while we kept working.

²There were other reasons, but I fully accept that I suck at giving my beloveds the attention they deserve. And until I figure this shit out, I'm off the market.

³Or, hey, just read the archives.

Poetry Thursday: Heat wave

Try to focus
on how free
your toes feel
in your brand new flip-flops
or how cold they don't feel,
like they did last March
or anything else
but the creeping, creeping
heat
that floats upward
from the ground
only to pool
in your head
with no way out,
slow-cooking your brain
and what's left
of the information inside it.

Do you miss
butternut squash soup
and roast vegetables
and crisp apples
and piles of warm
blankets on top
of you, holding the cold
at bay, weighing you down
ever so gently?

You do.
So do we all.

They will be back
before we know it,
before you can say
"Pass the ice, please,"
before before before.

What was it like
before,
when it was cool?

I forget...

xxx
c

Chasing vs. going after

I didn't submit a talk show idea to Oprah. (You can thank me in the comments.)

I didn't submit a panel idea to South by Southwest. I didn't submit myself as a speaker for the international women's conference a friend urged me to.

I haven't entered a contest or sweepstakes in I-don't-know-how long, haven't asked to be included in a gathering I knew would be fun but that I hadn't been invited to, and the last guy I liked who asked for my number had to pry it out of me.

I'm not sure exactly when it happened, but at some point over the last year or so I went from being someone who chased after things to someone who went after her own thing. And yes, there is a difference.

Take Yaddo, for example. It's an artists' community in New York State that houses writers and poets and, well, artists in retreat, providing them with a beautiful, distraction-free setting in which to focus on a piece of work. One applies, and one is either accepted or not. I have decided to apply, because I really, really like the idea of me in a beautiful, distraction-free setting, finishing one of the three books I started writing this year¹. Or take Jennifer, although you can't, because her delightful husband already has her, heart and soul, who introduced me to the idea of Yaddo, and that it was a perfectly reasonable thing for me to apply to. (She wrote most of her book in residence there.) I met Jennifer because I wrote a review of her excellent memoir, and got to know her because, after a bit of correspondence, I asked if she might want to start up a little writers' group here in L.A., and she said "Yes."

See, it's not like I don't go after things. I'm going after Yaddo; I went after Jennifer (in, you know, the friendliest and most well-meaning of ways). And if Yaddo turns me down, I may go after a slot again, later on, if I really want it. What I'm realizing is that in the past, there were too many times when I chased stuff because I thought that catching it would get me something or somewhere. That it would mean I had made it, maybe, where "it" is the cool kids' club or a USDA-prime stamp on my ass or some other shortcut to the other side of some mythical, self-imagined velvet rope.

Much like Gertrude Stein's genius summing-up of the perils of grabbing at the evanescent, however, on the few occasions when I managed to chase down my trophy and nab it, I came up empty. The thing I had desired wasn't there, and the desire I had going in just vanished without a trace.

If pressed to define the difference I see between chasing a thing and going after a thing, I'd say this: a chase ends up being about the chase, and less about the fox at the end of it; going after something is putting one foot in front of the other and moving towards what you want. Deliberately, thoughtfully making choices, and perhaps delaying gratification elsewhere, so that you can get to the Next Right Place you need to be. Although I guess you could just as easily go after a refrigerator or a dream house or even a fox, if you had decided that what you really wanted was a teeny, tiny stole. But you would want that refrigerator or that house or that tiny stole because you really wanted it, you'd really thought it through, and figured out how it would make your life that much better, and it was worth losing that much life to go after it, and not just because you wanted to fill an empty place in your soul with a high-end icebox or rub your neighbor's nose in your teeny, tiny fox stole.

Is submitting a talk show idea to Oprah always chasing? No. Absolutely not. I'm sure there were lots of people who were motivated as much by the idea of making a submission video as they were winning the golden ticket. When I entered a similar kind of contest a few years back, a huge part of the "why" for me was that I came up with an idea for a video I thought would be hilarious and great fun to assemble, not because I particularly lusted after the idea of being chosen from on high (no pun intended) by the great gods of the cut-rate airline to travel in their metal tubes and document what I found along the way. I mean, it would have been fine, but the winning, I was ambivalent about; the making of the video I had to go after.

But I spent a lot of years as an actor, watching a lot of actors chase after stuff that wasn't there. As I said in a recent interview, you need to be about the acting, and the day-to-day work of being about the acting; if you're going after gold statuettes and the love of a million random strangers in the dark, you're going to come up with nothing even if you get your wish.

So yes, chasing vs. going after is a little like the old destination vs. journey standoff. And it's also about living for other people vs. living for yourself, living the life you really, truly want, every possible minute that you can. It's probably also a bit about all that good sovereignty stuff that Hiro Boga talks about.

The easiest way for me to think about it, though, is wanting what you want enough to do something about it, but really wanting what you want.

As the song says, more I cannot wish you...

xxx
c

¹Yes, three. And you heard it here third, I already let the cat out of the bag with Havi's Kitchen Table people and Pace & Kyeli's World-Changing Writing Workshop. There will be more on these three massive mothers as I move forward, including how you can participate in one of them, but in the meantime, if you want to get on a notification list, sign up here, and leave a note in the comments field to that effect.

Image by jot.punkt via Flickr, used under a Creative Commons license.

Poetry Thursday: utilitarian

Poetry is not
the sole dominion
of hearts and flowers,
angst und drang,
misty, water-colored memories
or raging against the machine.

Poetry is an equal-opportunity
conveyor belt,
portable language
that works hard
in short bursts,
serving up energy
in small doses
like vitamins
or bouillon cubes:
there when you need it, 
handy, on the third shelf, in the back,
a quick hit
of inspiration
or instruction
or other non-necessary
vital nutrient.

Why not
a poem about math,
about naps,
about alternating current
or meditation?

Why not
a line
or two
or three hundred
about someone
you may never see again
or the way the light
hit the side of that brick wall
and carried you back
to your girlhood days
and the freedom
you forgot you had?

Why not
tell the world
in a way it might be ready
to hear
about hockey
or horticulture,
scissors or roping steers,
ice sculpting, sunscreen,
chemo, parcheesi
mountain rappelling,
database management,
composting, credit,
and how
to cut back on coffee?

Don't we all 
need waking up
in one way
or another?

Couldn't we all
use a lift 
from here to there
now and then?

Wouldn't it
be great
if you could grab a cab
or a train
or a bus
at any corner,
rain or shine,
to take you from where
you're stuck
right now,
to some place
you never knew existed
but is just
where you want
to be?

Is it all bottled up
for want of permission?

Fine.

Here's what you do:
take the thing you know
and cook it down,
long and slow, steady-like,
or all at once, in a flash,
then serve it up
to the rest of us.

It doesn't have to be perfect:
it just has to be.

We're hungry,
goddammit.

xxx
c

Image by kenhodge13 via Flickr, used under a Creative Commons license.

Break

Every so often, one is required to take a vacation, whether one wants to or not, when one is about to have a nervous breakdown, for example, and metaphorical white-coated men show up with kind firmness and a complimentary wrap-sleeved jacket. Or when one is still a teenager, without agency or car keys (which is the same thing in modern-day North America).

Or, slightly more happily, when one's sister decides to get hitched in a remote slice of paradise tucked into a box canyon in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado. I mean, I suppose I could have declined; I am well past my teens and have agency galore. Car keys, even. But I would rather eat ground glass than miss the wedding of the person responsible for, among other things, saving my life some eight years ago.

Still. Generally, I do not vacation well. Since I've discerned there was a difference, I've found my favorite "vacations" are just wry twists on my regular routine, which is to say, taking select pieces of my regular routine to another place so that I can see and do them slightly differently. The carousing, the foreign schedule, and, on weeks like this, the meeting of a whole bunch of new people for the first time, even fantastic ones, can make bona-fide, Normal People Vacations somewhat problematic for the introvert freak contingent.

This trip was slightly different. Okay, wildly different. I left, I stayed, I enjoyed the hell out of myself, even though I barely busted out the laptop to write until today. The food and surroundings and accommodations were outstanding, which never hurts. And the occasion was a wildly happy one: my sister has met a genuinely superb guy with an incredibly nice family and the greatest, most welcoming set of friends I've met in a long time. Not a dud in the bunch, and every last one of them kind, funny and generous. I have hit the family-and-friend jackpot, and didn't even know I was entered to win.

But also, I took some necessary precautions along the way. Housekeeping-wise, I prepped before I left, lining up several posts (although not this one, or one that should have gone up yesterday) for my various outlets of nerdery. I've got the rest of my life down to a streamlined minimum, so there's not nearly as much last-minute wrangling to do before I leave home. And most importantly, once I got here, I did what I needed to do to keep my circuits from frying: lots of sneaking off by myself to read, to walk, to Nei Kung, to unplug. (Also, if you are an introvert/feminist/lightweight, refuse all offers of tequila shots, and keep your arms down when the bouquet gets thrown, if you can't avoid the affair entirely.)

It wasn't as much alone time as I get at home, living my freakish little life with its great swaths of solitude, but it was enough. I'm good, I had a great break, and I would not have done one thing differently. And now I have 50 new best friends, plus a brand new spare fambly. Plenty of time to nap when I'm dead, or something like that.

If you have a need for solitude, balancing it with the other, seemingly-lesser (but really, only less obvious) need for fellowship can get tricky. With a little time, care and the inevitable leap of faith, though, it generally all works out in the end.

And at times? Smashingly so...

xxx

c

My narrow, narrow bands of interest and utility

For most of my life, I thought I envied people who were on a mission: the ones who were seized by the desire to paint or to build stuff or to cure malaria.

It was only very recently, maybe as recently as last week, or the week before (time has been playing tricks on me this month), that I realized what what I was really wishing for was to have some kind of defining passion that easily translated into a verbal business card at a cocktail party. I hated being in advertising for most of the years I was in advertising; I didn't even particularly enjoy telling people it's what I did. But man, did I not begin to appreciate how easy it was to tell it.

All of the things I'm passionate about, talking to people about of stuff, telling stories, figuring stuff out, are squishy and weird. The closest I've ever come to a defining thread that connects them all is "creating order out of chaos"; a former colleague once said I excelled at "coming up with creative ideas," which, once I got over the metal-on-metal grind of a well-intended but gratingly redundant descriptor, I decided was not half-bad as summaries went. Ideas, I has them. Maybe I could be the Lucy Van Pelt of idea vendors: a nickel a shot; a buck, perhaps, given inflation. But no, because I'm even less tolerant than Lucy.

As I close in on six months (!) of self-imposed sabbatical, I'm both predictably alarmed and oddly nonchalant about my inability to define what it is I do in a way that is pithy and truthful. What I have been answering of late in reply is either "Nothing!" or "I'm on self-imposed sabbatical!" I will also occasionally just lie and say, "Marketing consultant," if I don't feel like engaging at all. It's a lie, but a relatively harmless one, as lies go.

To my creative intimates, the fellow strugglers in writing workshop, or elsewhere behind the scenes, I share the only thing I know for sure: that I want to write, and that I am doggedly pursuing it, placing structures where they need to be to support it, addressing what obstacles I can see that might be getting in the way of it. (I'm also actually writing, and not just what you see here. But I'm not quite ready to talk about what.)

One thing I'm considering is slashing my expenses to the bone and taking another Stupid Day Job. There are all kinds of issues with that, too, of course. I may be romanticizing it, for starters. Also, absent the singular focus a definable driving passion provides, I may outright hate it: when I had my last Stupid Day Job, I was pursuing acting rather ferociously. What happens when you just want to live your life, figure out some shit and write a little? Does a Stupid Day Job even work under those circumstances? Can anyone even get a Stupid Day Job in this economy?

And who do I think I am, anyway, wanting to live a life and figure stuff out and maybe write, freakin' Thoreau?

Ah, well. I have no reason to believe this, but somehow I suspect I will look back on this time when I am old, if I am fortunate enough to grow old, and in the same way I now smile at youthful me for wasting time cataloguing minor imperfections of flesh and character, I will shake my ancient head at my foolish former self for not appreciating the goodness, the greatness of even these sometimes baffling days.

Every day is a gift, even the ones that don't come wrapped in pretty paper with a bow on it. Even the ones you want to send back to the store. My bands of interest and utility are slender enough not to have crossed in any obvious places, but that they haven't is no reason to wish for this day to be over any sooner, or any other.

Hello, ridiculous day of this tedious month of my difficult year.

Hello, and welcome. Let us see what we can do to each other, shall we?

xxx
c

Image by fpat via Flickr, used under a Creative Commons license.