Corner of Bourbon & Division

Even Mother Theresa limited herself to Calcutta, for the most part.

The human mind can't encompass more than about 100 close friends and family. Beyond that, it's physically incapable of caring just that much. This is a good thing, a survival mechanism. Can you imagine feeling the same devastating sorrow as losing a parent or a sibling or a child or your best childhood friend every time someone out there dies?

I would go insane. More insane than I am now. It would make life unbearable. We'd constantly be in emotional agony. Who wants to live like that?

I believe in the interconnectedness of beings. I don't believe one person inherently has more value than another. I also believe that some people have more value to me than others. I love my parents, but the teller at the bank will only get a civilized nod and a "Good morning" at best. The guy I pass on the street will never be acknowledged 99% of the time. My friends are more important to me than my coworkers.

Would I like to save the world? Sure. But I can't. I also can't care about the world in its entirety. I can care about my small corner of the world. I can strive to try and make my friends and family happy and safe, and to make my corner of the world a pleasant place for them to live.

My friends and family have friends and family of their own. My circle and their circle are not the same, and so I trust them to take care of those they love whom I don't know. In turn, those people must take care of their own. Eventually, there must be a trickle-down effect.

This isn't a perfect system. There's no such thing as a perfect system. It's just the best and only thing I know how to do. I am not a revolutionary, nor am I an activist. I lose myself in crowds, and I don't have the voice or the oratory skills for speeches. I am not brilliant. I will never write anything that will irrevocably change the way people think.

The best I can hope for is that someone someday will look at me and say: "You know, I think she's onto something. Maybe I'll try that too."

The topic has come up lately about taking the path of least resistance. This is what I've called it in my head, anyway. Someone mentioned spending the whole day just following people where they went (walking one friend to work led to meeting another friend, which led to meeting a third friend, etc.), and how it allowed her to reconnect with six or seven people she hadn't seen in a long time in a way that she felt was meaningful.

I wonder what it is about hardship that makes us feel virtuous. Somehow, it seems, the harder life is, the better we feel about it, as though somehow suffering makes it not only worthwhile, but right. I have observed people have (perhaps unconconscious) hardship contests, as though being worse off than one's neighbour makes one worthy of the admiration of others, and automatically makes one a better person.

I wonder, though, if the opposite might not be true.

I don't mean to say that being slothful or just "letting life happen" is the right way. That's not what I mean by the "path of least resistance." I don't mean that we should sit back and abdicate responsibility, and in that I suppose the example I used in my first sentence is misleading.

I simply wonder if doing the right thing is really as hard as we make it out to be. I wonder if, were we to make the choice to always do right (by our own definition of what that is, I guess), we would find that it's always onerous, and that hardship and deprivation is always the result. That, by doing the right thing, we are necessarily making ourselves suffer, and that the only consolation we can derive from the suffering is that we're doing it because it's right. It would be interesting to see if, after a certain time (weeks or months or years, I'm not sure) of doing the right thing simply because it's the right thing to do, we might not find that it was a lot easier than we originally anticipated, and that in the end it has made our lives simpler and easier and more straightforward. That in time, we will find that we are, in fact, happy with how things have turned out.

In the same way that it's easier to tell the truth than to lie, because one doesn't have to keep track of the truth the same way one has to keep track of all the lies that follow the original lie, I wonder if it isn't easier to live a good life on the whole, and that most of the perceived hardship of living a simple, healthy life isn't just that: a perception and not reality.

If I find out the answer to that, I'll let you know. :)

Once again, my birthday has rolled around. Happens at least once a year. ;)

Every year around this time I like to take a step back and evaluate what's going on in my life, what I've been doing, and whether it's working out for me. Last year, I decided I wanted to change careers, and here I am, one year later, in a new job and well on my way on my new career path.

This year is no exception. I have been implementing a few changes slowly over the past few weeks, and I plan on implementing more. Some are small, and others are quite personal and I probably won't discuss those in LJ (at least not publicly), and others are more mundane and barely worth mentioning, but they're important for me.

Like most of my friends, I don't do "resolutions." I find that it's counterproductive to make the kinds of resolutions that seem to be so popular at this time of year. However, since my birthday falls around the beginning of the calendar year, my habit of trying to make positive changes in my life does tend to coincide with "resolution time." I'm not especially fussed if people choose to interpret my actions as New Year's resolutions: after all, it's only what I think of them that matters, in the long run.

In the past week, I've had to make some difficult decisions. The new job and the priorities I've set for myself this year mean that I'm going to have to disappoint some people, which I hate to do. However, one of my "non-resolutions" is to learn how to define my limits and boundaries better. I am terrible at saying "no" to people, especially people I like and consider friends, but it helps no one in the end if I overextend myself and am unable to honour my committments. I'm hoping the disappointment will be short-lived, and that the people involved will understand why I'm having to make these decisions. I'm being deliberately cryptic here because I know some of the people read/have LJs, and I want to talk to everyone concerned in person before discussing it openly here.

( Conversations with Shithead )

Etc. It's a little bit exhausting, having these arguments in my head all the time.

This post doesn't sound very up-beat, but I've actually been doing really well of late. I had a lovely Christmas, a grand New Year, and I've been enjoying my clean apartment. I really do like my new job schedule, as bad as it is for my social life. Apart from the fact that I can't do anything in the evenings on weekdays anymore, I do like it. I like being able to get at least 8 hours of sleep a night, and I've always been a morning person, which means I get a lot done between, say, 8am and 2pm, when I leave for work.

I don't think I mentioned that, because my father is awesome, I now have access to a car during the week to go to work. He offered it to me during the week since he's not using it: in exchange I fill it up with gas and bring it back on Saturday morning, picking it up again either Sunday evening or Monday morning. Hurray!

Okay, digression over. I'm enjoying having my mornings to myself. I spend them quietly, get a start on my day at my own pace, without being jostled around public transit and being overwhelmed with people and random stuff like that. This week I got some writing done for Capricornucopia, got my medicare card and my driver's license renewed, registered at the YMCA, and saw my parents for coffee. I also puttered around the apartment, did some cleaning, cuddled the cats, read, and generally had a good time all on my own. This kind of pace suits me much better, and by the time I get into work I'm usually feeling pretty energized and serene, which is nice.

So, 2007 and year 29 of my life look like they're getting off to a very good start.

I really, really wanted to go do my dance class tonight. Last week I was felled by the Massive Wall of Tired™, and tonight I have a migraine.

I can't afford to exhaust myself this week. After 40 hours of work, 4 hours of volunteering, and 6 or so hours of dancing, I'm also looking at 16 or so hours of class on Saturday and Sunday. So, I'm going to go to bed early tonight. That means that, once again, I won't be learning the intermediate dance.

*sigh*

In better news, I am accumulating a backlog for Beyond the Pale in anticipation of being super damned busy over the weekend. I've already got all my installments written up until Sunday, and if I can write one or two more tomorrow, that'll be even better. I'm going to be really busy next weekend as well, so if I can keep my buffer of one or two installments intact, then I'll be good to go.

If I've learned anything from NaNoWriMo and Jan's August Writing Challenge and my own latest attempt to catch up with the serial, it's that writing damned well is a muscle. In September of 2004, when I started writing Beyond the Pale, 1,500 words was a struggle. Not in terms of finding the words to say what I wanted, but just the sheer amount of time and effort it took to get the words out. After about four months, I fell behind and didn't bother catching up.

Then I decided to do the writing challenge in August. I had thirty-one days, and I was thirty-one weeks behind. I had already been doing a little bit more writing, so I figured it might work. It almost did. It was still a struggle to write, but not as much, and I wrote other things at the same time. I wrote fourteen installments. That was fifteen fewer installments than I had planned, but fourteen more installments than I had started out with.

When November rolled around, suddenly writing wasn't like beating my head against a brick wall anymore. I could sit down and churn out my 1, 667 words a day with very little difficulty. It took me about an hour and a half to write that much. I surprised myself by writing more than that on many days. The writing wasn't always good, but I forced myself to keep going anyway.

Now, it takes me a little over an hour to write an installment of Beyond the Pale. I treat it exactly like NaNoWriMo: I don't edit, I don't delete unless absolutely necessary. I write it and post it. It's raw, unfinished art, and that's the way I want it for now.

I am very grateful to be living my life the way I am right now. I have many friends who love to write, who are fantastic at it, but who can't because other stuff in their lives has to take priority these days. I am grateful that, while my cats may be pissed off that Mummy isn't giving them her undivided attention all the time, I don't have to watch them 24/7. I am glad that my job right now doesn't take up all my energy so that I can catch up on my writing. I am very, very grateful for what I have right now, even though it's all going to change soon enough.

I stopped writing when I was about twenty-one, and heading for my first breakdown. Before that, I wrote all the time. I wrote hundreds of pages, spent all my time writing, to the point where my mother and I used to have epic battles about whether I was going to leave the damned computer and come have dinner, now!

One day, I'm going to find that Writing Place that Ceri described again. I know that place. I used to spend a great deal of time there, but not anymore. I feel as though I've been cut off from there for a very long time.

My writing is decent. I know it is. Oftentimes it's more than decent. I just miss being in that blissed-out state in which the story practically writes itself, rather than having to think about every word and every plot twist.

t! wrote today about climbing out of the pit. About how, when you have limited amounts of time to devote to your projects and routine maintenance of your life, you end up falling behind at some point, and the catch-up game is all about clawing your way out of the giant hole in the ground.

Actually, go read it here and then come back. Really, if you haven't been reading the_exclamation up until now, well, now's a good time to start. Go! Shoo! Come back when you've read it.

Right now I'm climbing out of one pit. I've still got a number of others that need climbing, but I figure one pit at a time. When February is over, I'll only be twelve installments behind. I'm tempted to keep going, but we'll see how much energy I have left by then.

In other words, I am cautiously optimistic right now.

:::sparked by a comment I made to luvenditti:::

Ever have a problem shutting up?

I don't mean when you're talking at length and intelligently on a topic that may or may not interest your listeners. That happens to most people at any given time. All the other person can do at that point is roll their eyes (inwardly, anyway) and wait for you to finish if they don't give a rat's ass about your topic.

I'm talking about the kind of non-stop babbling that makes your listeners wonder what the fuck you've been smoking. The kind of situation in which you can hear yourself talking and cringe at what's coming out of your mouth, and yet instead of sensibly shutting your mouth and salvaging what's left of the situation, you keep talking, and there's nothing you can do about it.

There's nothing quite as awful as sitting there and listening to your mouth continue to talk, and all you can think is: "Oh God, oh God, shut up. Please shut up. Stop talking. Can you hear yourself? Stop. Stop now. Stop while you still have some shreds of dignity left. You can still salvage this if you stop talking. Shut up. Please please please shut up. Oh God, I can't believe you just said that. For the love of all that's good and holy, shut UP!"

This happens to me all the freaking time. I also happen to have a freakishly good memory, and that means I can remember all the hideously embarassing things that have come out of my mouth in the past twenty-three years or so that have passed since I learned to form complete sentences and interact with others.

I think part of it has to do with the fact that I didn't talk much until I was in my late teens and early twenties, and thus never really learned how to censor what comes out of my mouth. It was either be silent or else talk the other person's ear off. No middle ground.

It can't be only that, though. I know a few people who have the same problem, and they certainly weren't wallflowers when they were in high school. So I have no real explanation for what it might be.

The net result, though, is that I've spent most of my life with the uncomfortable feeling that most people view me as a complete nitwit with no self-control whatsoever. Or at the very least a little weird and creepy.

It's like they say: You can dress her up, but you can't take her out.

Okay, not really. I'm sneaking onto my parents' computer in order to do some serious catch-up on LJ, which I think I've mostly covered. If anything important has happened that you think I should read, please point me in that direction. I dislike this keyboard considerably, so there will be little rambling on this 3rd of January.

In theory, I get my computer back on Thursday. Then I will probably have to reset all my settings and shit like that, so don't expect me to be online regularly in the evenings until Saturday or so. So much for that.

I ended 2005 by getting my car vandalized. Again. I'm starting to rival abiku in the number of times assholes have beaten chunks out of my car. At least no one has stolen the radio out of my car. But it's seriously starting to piss me off.

I have a number of things I want to get done before Thursday, most of them writing-related. In fact, I think they may well be all writing-related. We shall see if I can manage that.

If I ever get that post written about what I want to do with myself this year, I shall post it up. The summary of what's going on in my head is as follows:

Apart from some very specific Good Moments, 2005 largely was unsatisfying for me. I won't say it sucked, since it was far better than, say, 2000 through 2003. However, in most areas of my life I either stagnated or moved back a few steps. The two major "ups" in my life were Random Colour and moving out of my old appartment. While both of these are good things, the rest just wasn't good or was offset by suckage happening at the same time. NaNoWriMo was good, but I was stressed and unhappy for other reasons, the computer went on the fritz, I had a car accident, and my godmother passed away.

This year is in my mind being tentatively named the "Year of the Deadline." I'm going to work with a number of admittedly artificial deadlines in my head to give myself some sort of motivation to change what I don't like about what's going on.

I have come to the conclusion that, in spite of the positive changes I've made, I still don't like the kind of life I'm living. This is mostly my own damned fault. So I'm giving myself one year to turn all that around. There will be smaller deadlines for specific things over the course of the year, but the Big Deadline will be December 31st, 2006. I shall take stock periodically (probably once a month) to make sure that I'm still moving to where I want to go. The ultimate destination may change as the year goes by, but I at least want to start off on a more positive note than that on which I ended the previous year.

That's it in a nutshell. Off to dinner.

Indulge me a minute while I procrastinate, and answer a question or three for me, dear flist.

1- How long have we known each other? (Roughly. No need for exact dates unless you're the compulsive type, in which case feel free to research.)

2- How did we meet? Online or off?

3- Do you consider me more of an online friend or an IRL friend?

4- Do you think I've changed much since we first met? How?


Go forth and comment! :)

Ten minutes before work is over for four days.

Three days of Christmas-type stuff, then one day which I will (hopefully) take to do some re-evaluating.

Taking a quick mental stock even now, I don't like what I see, and it seems like a Sisyphian task to overhaul myself. There isn't a single part of me with which I'm satisfied. Every time I think I'm making progress, I slide back down the hill. It's not a very steep hill, compared to others', I'm the first to admit it. It's not a hill with many rocks in it, either, by comparison. And yet, I always find myself at the bottom of it.

So, on the 27th, I'm going to sit down with myself and take stock, a little more in depth, and see if there's anything I can do about it. If there isn't, well, I'll cross that bridge when I come to it.

I've never had any goals of my own. My goals were always someone else's goals. So now, here I am about to turn twenty-seven, and I have no fucking clue what I want to do with my life. I don't know where my strengths are. I have no real talents. I have a few small abilities, but nothing that's really my own. Just stuff that are pale imitations of the people around me. I'm a chameleon, and an unsuccessful chameleon, at that. I try my hand at everything and succeed at very little indeed.

Hey, look. Five minutes before work is out. That's exciting.

It also means that I won't have net access after this. I suppose I shouldn't post this. It's a very, very depressing post to be putting up just before Christmas.

Today is going to be a good day. I have decreed it so.

It doesn't matter that I had to deal with two crises that had nothing to do with me this morning. It doesn't matter that I'm up to my ears in filing. It doesn't matter that I'm behind for the NaNoWriMo wordcount challenge for tonight.

Today is going to be a good day.

1- The crises are over. I got to think "Lack of planning on your part does not constitute an emergency on mine," even though I couldn't say it aloud, and I still had to deal with them. It's over, and things are back to normal.

2- Another manager went to bat for me. She told off the CAM for making her crisis my crisis, when it's not my job or my responsibility. In fact, she told her so in no uncertain terms, and loudly. It was gratifying.

3- The filing is getting under control. The pile is smaller and no longer threatening to topple over and smother a hapless passer-by.

4- I will make up my wordcount at lunch and in the two hours before the meeting tonight. I did it last week, I can do it this week.


Today is going to be a good day. It will only be a bad day if I let it be a bad day. I am teh Captain of the Carpet Ship, and what I say goes.

Therefore, using my Great Powers For Awesome, I will turn this into a good day.

Ph34r me.

Yeah. Definitely what she said.