mousme | Entries tagged with noodling

Normally working night shifts means I sleep most of the day away, but this morning I had my meeting with Ministry & Counsel at 9am, so exactly half an hour after I got home from work. Naturally the meeting went far past the hour it usually takes and lasted nearly two hours in total, and so by the time I was able to crawl to bed it was nearly noon. And then since KK was at the office today I had to get up at 4pm to medicate Rika, and then I only managed to catch a couple of non-sequential naps before I had to get up again to get the frogs fed and the dogs fed and groomed (we do "ears and teefs!" every evening) before bedtime for them. At that point it was too late to even try for another nap before work, so I just dawdled a little bit while putting on my work clothes and brushing my teeth and whatnot.

I wish I had something more interesting to write about, but unless I go into excruciating detail about M&C, there's not much else to report about today.

KK and I did have a chat which is part of a larger ongoing discussion about changing our spending habits to focus more on buying Canadian products. We've had conversations about this over the years, and our consensus has always been to prioritize local small companies as much as possible, but with the latest threat of a trade war with the USA and the likelihood of tariffs looming over us all, it now seems a little more urgent to convert some of our regular purchases.

Some things I don't think we'll change unless we absolutely have to. For instance, Peggy is on special food that I get from my vet that helps with her joint health, which is necessary due to her hip dysplasia, and it's made by Purina, which is a US company. I haven't been able to find a food made in Canada that has the same amount of glucosamine in it, although Orijen (which I used to feed to Sergent) comes pretty close. Orijen does have a much higher fat and protein content, though, which gives me some concerns about possible weight gain for her, which would be bad for her hips.

Anyway, KK is up to her neck researching alternative cat litter products for us. We've been using the Purina Tidy Cats litter for years because it's considerably lighter than your average clay litter, and that is very good news for my back, since I have to haul said litter up and down two flights of stairs. If my back objected less to lifting heavy things we could use normal clay litter, but right now that's not a great option unless we want me to be regularly incapacitated by back pain when I inevitably throw it out again.

Anyway, I fully expect this weekend to be a write-off. I will be working 12-hour night shifts, so supposing I get to sleep for 8 hours (which I won't), it leaves me two hours on either end of that sleep to drive to and from work, bathe and get dressed, and eat. Plus, tomorrow I have to carve out time in my day to program the announcements for Quaker Meeting to go out on Sunday morning, and that usually takes anywhere from 30 minutes to an hour. So I don't expect anything else will happen other than my being extremely tired.

Current Mood: tired

There's a screenshot bopping around the internet of someone asking: "What's the most boomer complaint you have?" And the reply is "Stop making me make accounts. A lightbulb that changes colours shouldn't require an account. A TV speaker shouldn't require an account."

This is one of the most relatable things I've seen of late, because I have had to create so many accounts for things that honestly should not require any such thing.

I have an account for my computer mouse and keyboard, I have an account for several "services" relating to my television, an account for groceries, an account for Canadian Tire, Home Depot, a couple of restaurants from which I order food sometimes, my Fitbit, my bus pass... I could go on and on and on.

This is, of course, because all of these companies want my data. It started out I don't even remember how many years ago with those points/loyalty cards. Remember when there were physical cards for those things? The companies figured out they could a) keep their customers coming back with loyalty programs, and b) track where people were spending their money. There have been stories over the years about how advertisers know more about us than our own family members, like that time Target allegedly knew about a teen pregnancy before she told her father (that story is likely untrue, but a lot of women reported that when they were "trying" for a baby they started receiving a lot more pregnancy and baby-related materials despite not making any significant changes in their shopping behaviours yet).

These days, it's all about the almighty Algorithm. The Algorithm gets talked about like it's a living, breathing, sentient being, and that's maybe not too far from the truth. It is something that learns and grows and is designed to try to read your mind, to predict what you might want to see next, but it's also designed to influence you to want more things, too. On social media it will feed you posts that it wants you to engage with more, and on websites like Amazon it's designed to make you want to buy more things. Sure, we can joke about the algorithm suggesting toilet seats to us for months after we bought the only toilet seat we're likely to need for several years, but the fact remains that it will absolutely suggest "related" things to the books and other doodads that we're already buying, and I have not been immune to the "Oh, that's a good idea!" effect of having it in front of me, the same way you impulse buy a chocolate bar at the checkout at the grocery store, only worse, because the website remembers everything.

Worst of all, we've gotten to a point where we can't opt out. I seeds from a Canadian retailer a few months ago, and found myself mysteriously signed up for something called Shop, which is now being used by a bunch of retailers that I frequent online. Okay, fine, it seems to be a weird combination of PayPal and Wayfair, and it's not my favourite, but if I have to have this account in order to get seeds, I guess it's fine. But then suddenly I couldn't track my orders without downloading the Shop app on my phone (very sus) OR allowing it access to all of my emails, including read/search privileges (SUPER sus). Like WTF is up with that? NO, THANK YOU. Why do you need the ability to search through my emails, Shop? Hmm? And it's the same with so many other things. Buy a robot vacuum? You have to create an account or it won't work (I had one of the early ones in 2006 or so, and it worked just fine because smart phones were barely a blip in those days and "there's an app for that!" was a cute new catchphrase). Want your landlord to make a repair? Make an account on the new residents' portal! Want to control your own thermostat? FUCK YOU, MAKE AN ACCOUNT.

*lies on the floor*

I'm fed up with being The Product (as in "if the product is free, then you are the product"), especially as I am more often than not paying to be the product these days. I would like to live my life without being in forty thousand databases, and I would like to do that without scrubbing every trace of myself from the internet and going to live in an off-grid hut in a swamp and becoming a bog witch. Surely there must be a happy medium somewhere?

Anyway, that is my rant for the day. Carry on. See you on the flip side!

Current Mood: frustrated

It's our annual retreat at my Quaker Meeting. This year's theme is Reboot. Reset. Restore, because of how *gestures widely* 2020 was.

I am having to do a lot of soul-searching about this, because a lot of the queries revolve around what the past year meant for me, what my most significant experience was, what I think I learned, all of that stuff, and it is making me really fucking uncomfortable.

For one thing, I am not sure I learned anything particularly profound, not in the way they mean. I learned a lot about viruses and how pandemics work, and I learned a lot about government response to crisis, and I learned a lot more about systemic racism and injustice, and I learned way more than I ever wanted to learn about the American electoral and judicial systems.

But the idea that I was supposed to derive some sort of spiritual lesson from it all makes me feel deeply uncomfortable, in a similar but not identical way to the idea that was circulating during the first round of lock-downs that we should all be taking the time to learn a new skill or start a side hustle or start a new exercise regimen.

Millions of people are dead, and many more millions are sick, and millions of people have had their lives irrevocably changed, mostly for the worse. It feels like the height of hubris to imagine that I am supposed to find meaning, or spiritual enlightenment, or anything like that, from my position of complete privilege. I have heard people say that they're grateful for the pandemic because it forced them to slow down, or to appreciate life, or to rearrange their priorities, and while I can't fault them for it exactly, because I do understand that our society is built in a way to prevent us from having any time or energy or space to reflect and so this forced pause gave them exactly that, at the same time I find it all horrifying. What reasonable person would be grateful for death on this scale?

Anyway, I am not sure if my feeling of discomfort is truly a result of this, or the result of a more self-centered feeling of having failed the spiritual enlightenment test of the covid pandemic. *insert eye rolling here* Intellectually I understand that this is not something that was required of me, but so many people are asking that it certainly feels that way, like I should have had a bunch of breakthroughs and understand myself and/or the universe better now, or arrived at some sort of grand cosmic truth.

The reality is that nothing of the sort happened: I continued on, wore a mask, washed my hands more, and tried to follow community health guidelines. I kept going to work, which makes me one of the luckiest people in this pandemic, and limited my interactions with people in order to minimize community spread. I failed at cleaning my house all year, and struggled with my ADHD, and had a shitty time at work for a while, and then I had a less shitty time at work, and then I got an opportunity that made my job enjoyable again. For all intents and purposes, my tiny bubble of existence was not affected by the pandemic except in a larger sense, because the pandemic is all around me and I am trying to do my small part to keep my community safe. I am incredibly privileged, and the idea of having gained something "extra" because the pandemic turned the world upside down feels like I'd be ascending to soaring new heights of privilege.

Current Mood: pensive
Crossposts: https://mousme.livejournal.com/1245371.html

It's not a secret that I really enjoy external validation. This has been part of my identity since I was a kid. While I do derive some satisfaction out of the things I do, I've always liked it better when I played to an audience. Music, writing, cooking, whatever, I never enjoyed it more than when I could share it with other people. Sure, I can cook myself a nice meal, but why would I do that when I can cook a nice meal for more than just myself, and have other people enjoy it too? What's the point of writing a story if I'm going to shove it in a drawer, literally or metaphorically?

( Cut for length )

Current Mood: contemplative

Since I didn't post here much during the year, I guess maybe I should try to recap the last year a little bit, see what sticks out in my mind.

( Year in Review )

Current Mood: tired

Wow. Three posts in as many days!

Don't have much to say, alas. Doing a lot of thinking these days (never a good sign), and eventually I'll be able to parse it all in my head. I think a lot of my handy obsession with SPN these past six months has been to keep myself from thinking too much and freaking out.

Now that summer's on its way I think I can get it all sorted out.

I wouldn't expect anything too long-winded out of me just yet, but I'm getting there. :)

Current Mood: complacent

Contrary to what the title may lead you to believe, this is going to be a short post, in bullet-point form. These are thoughts that are rattling around in my head, and I want to put some of them down before I forget.

1- Have you noticed how we're in a society that teaches us we ought to be dissatisfied with our lives, no matter what? "Success" stories are all about individuals (individuals, mind you, not communities or groups or anything) who realize that their lives are empty and meaningless, and they go on to make a huge difference in the world. You can't start out by being okay with who and where you are, you *have* to change first before it counts.

2- Success must originate in suffering. I wonder why that is? If we don't suffer, does that make our success less successful? Or maybe it just means it's not the right kind of success and we have to realize how empty and meaningless our lives are before we achieve "real" success.

3- a)What is it about the sudden need for people to publicize illness, especially chronic conditions? (N.B. For the love of God, don't take this personally if you're on my flist and have a chronic illness. Shockingly, this post is not about you.) Does constantly being in pain/discomfort somehow make all their accomplishments more noteworthy? Or, conversely, make everyone else's accomplishments mean nothing because they didn't accomplish it while having no arms or legs and suffering from a crippling neural disorder?
b) The flip side being that if you don't accomplish anything noteworthy (by some weird outside standard), it's only okay if you have some sort of crippling condition or another. As though the only thing that makes your life important is if you become one of those "inspirational" people they make movies about.

4- If so many books have *the* answer to being a balanced and happy person, then why are there so many damned books on the subject at all? A cynical person might wonder if it wasn't all about the money rather than happiness...

5- Have you noticed how, even though we're supposed to strive for happiness, we're not really supposed to talk about it if we have it? Other people are *suffering* after all, and it would be rude to shove it in their faces. Unless, of course, you have a multi-million dollar book deal on how you got to be happy.

Okay, this post turned cranky very quickly, and I have to go to work.

Current Mood: annoyed

In no particular order, these are my hobbies:

Reading
Writing
Knitting
Playing video games
Futzing on the internet
Occasionally heading out for fishing/shooting/tramping in the woods

The problem? They are pretty much ALL mutually exclusive.

*siiiigh*

So very frustrating when there are so few hours in the day.

Current Mood: frustrated

And no one dared
Disturb the sound of silence.

I have found increasingly that I don't listen to music at home anymore. I don't watch that much television either, overall. I go through crazes in which I'll watch an entire TV series in one go, but overall apart from the computer I don't switch on any electronics at all.

I kept wondering about that, because I used to have music on all the time. I couldn't imagine my life without music in the background (and I often still have earworms that make for a soundtrack in my life). Now, though, I find that I'm not really drawn to putting anything on to play at all.

I figured it out a couple of days ago, in a flash of inspiration: it's a backlash against my job. I work in a high-stimulus environment. The phones ring all day, the radios beep, the faxes ring, and there is noise all. the. time. People are talking loudly (no matter how often we tell them to keep it down), there are constant comings and goings, and it's just... always loud. Always.

So when I come home now, I revel in the quiet. It's my downtime, and the most precious commodity for me now is absolute silence.

Current Mood: quiet

I'm just thinking of all the things I'm letting slip by while I bury myself in work.

- writing
- gardening
- knitting
- cooking
- baking
- seeing friends
- seeing my parents
- being outside

I am being morose and mopey today. Hopefully I'll be in a better mood tomorrow.

Current Mood: contemplative

I wonder what it is that makes people in Canada (or maybe North America? Or "white" industrialized nations, or something?) so very coy about discussing religion, especially if their religion is not "mainstream."

ai731 posted about her path in her other blog the other day, and mentioned that one of the problems with trying to suss out one's religious beliefs is that, at least in Canada, we don't talk about that sort of thing. As she put it: "Canadians in general don't talk about their religion much, and I was raised to feel that it's vaguely impolite to ask."

I was raised very much the same way. One simply doesn't speak of these things. It's as though religion is something so very intensely personal that it's kind of like prying into someone's dresser, or their medicine cabinet. It's Just Not Done.

So either one just drifts away from conventional religion (organized Catholic/Christian dogma, for instance) and never really goes anywhere, or else one is left with the sometimes-overwhelming job of having to figure it all out on one's own, reinventing the wheel over and over again.

This post isn't going anywhere, in case you were waiting for my epiphany. I don't actually have a good answer. It's just something that's been nagging at me for a few days.

Current Mood: contemplative

Oy. I arrived at the gym in time fore my appointment, only to be met with puzzled stares: turns out my appointment was yesterday. :::headdesk::: Agenda-checking fail. :P

Otherwise, there's not much to report so far today. The weather is glorious, I'm stuck at work, and things are chugging along.

bodhifox has been writing things that are making me think, damn him. ;) The entry is locked, so I won't copy what he wrote, but it echoed what I've been feeling on a subconscious level, that it seems like all the important things in my life (my friends, my writing, my garden, my cooking, my desire to feel fulfilled by what I do) are being subsumed by things which are... less important than that.

( In which Phnee tries to examine what it means to be a work in progress )

Anyway, the short version is that I am the product of eighteen years of on-and-off consciously changing who I am. In some ways, I am exactly the same person I was as a small child: by nature optimistic, quick to smile, less quick to talk in social situations, in love with nature even if I don't understand it, quick to trust, slow to forgive, possibly a little too open for my own good. In all the ways that count, I am still me.

In essence, I have never found it entirely impossible to change an aspect of myself that I didn't like, within reasonable limits. I am no stranger to self-examination, and I am pretty lucid about what makes me tick. The fact that I am aware of all my neuroses doesn't make them go away magically, but at least it means I can bring them out into the harsh light of day, and ignore them as best I can when they threaten to interfere with how I want to live my life.

Getting back to what sparked this, I am in the midst of changing things again, and this time I think the changes might not be small at all. As usual, I am not especially good with change: it makes me intensely uncomfortable and makes me want to run and hide under my bedclothes. Luckily I have lots of experience to tell me that change is usually beneficial, so I'm going to forge ahead. I have no idea if it'll work, but if it does, you'll be the first to know. :)

Current Mood: thoughtful

I'm going to be 30 in nine days. It's kind of nice that my birthday coincides with the beginning of a new year (give or take a few days), because it allows me to take the opportunity to look back over any given year and associate it with the age I was all year long. I know this isn't how it works for most people, but it works for me.

I'm both very pleased and displeased at how this year worked out for me. I got a lot of things accomplished that I had been waiting for for quite some time, and got to a place in my life where I feel secure and balanced in a material way. I managed to hang onto my job for an entire calendar year, for the first time ever, and that's saying something. Come spring, I will have only one T4 to file, which I have been anticipating with quite some pleasure, I must say.

I moved into an apartment which suits me and my needs much better than the places I had before. I have begun to furnish said apartment, and feel more at home there than I have in any place since 1999.

My current job and a more attentive attitude toward my finances has allowed me to remain completely solvent for two years now. My situation isn't perfect (I am still lousy at budgeting), but it's miles away from where I was even three years ago.

I have made a number of very good new friends, and have reconnected with old friends, and kept in touch with current friends as much as I could this year. This one was a mixed bag: my work kept me isolated a lot more than I would have liked, and a few good friends got neglected as a result, which I regret a lot.

On the whole, it's been a good year.

That being said, there are things which I need to work on for myself this coming year. I am highly dissatisfied with myself for not doing any of this last year, and so this year I hope to make some pretty big changes.

I completely neglected my spiritual life last year. I got immersed in work, and with all the overtime I was working on top of my regular shifts, I don't think I managed to go to Meeting more than a couple of times. I miss it. I want to go back. I feel as though I've kind of lost the good direction my spiritual life had taken back in 2007, when I was living more mindfully in many ways. So I'm going to go back, starting this Sunday. The Sunday after that I'm working, but afterward I'll have several free weekends. January is a time for new beginnings for me, and I'm looking forward to it.

I completely neglected my writing last year. Again, there was work and overtime and other shiny things to take my attention away from something that used to come easily to me. Now writing fiction takes a major effort of will on my part, and it saddens me. I tried "easing" back into it, and all that does is give me an out, an excuse to continue not writing. So I've set up a schedule for myself, and come hell or high water, I will stick to it.

For the last six months, I let ALL my good healthy eating and exercise habits go by the wayside. As a result, all the progress I made between January and the beginning of July has been reversed, and I'm back where I started. So, once again, I am clambering painfully back on the wagon, and starting again. I am really, really disappointed with myself about this, because I did so well starting out, and then lacked the staying power to stick with it and build on my successes.

Essentially, my work this year will be three-fold: mind, body, spirit. I got caught up in external things last year, but this coming year will, I hope, afford me the opportunity to take a step back, regroup, and forge on once more.

Current Mood: pensive

( Nattering about failed relationships. Nothing to see here. )

Anyway. This is me processing. Nothing to see here. I'm also disabling comments, because my lovely friends have already given me enough advice (often very good advice!) on the topic. I'm just talking to myself in written form in order to make sense of this in my head.

I'm not looking forward to talking to her. I can't see any way in which this conversation can go well, and I don't really feel like explaining myself. I know I probably owe her an explanation, but so far she either doesn't understand or doesn't believe anything I say. So the emotionally and physically exhausted part of me keeps asking "Why bother?" The cynical part of me is also needling me with the thought that I may be meeting her only because she still has some of my stuff which I want back (a book, a CD, a pair of expensive socks, and my keys). That thought makes me very very uncomfortable. Part of me keeps telling me just to write them off as a loss and move on.

I don't know. I'm tired, and really unhappy about this whole situation. Once it's done I'll go back to the way things were, and I'm not sure that's a bad thing. I like my life: I have a fulfilling job, fantastic friends, and parents who love me. My life is really good, overall, and while it hurts now to have BorderCrossing leave, having her gone is not going to make a huge difference in my life, except possibly to reduce my stress levels: juggling a girlfriend along with all the other demands in my life was hard, although I thought it was worth it at the time.

If that makes me a bad, selfish, horrible person, then so be it.

Current Mood: drained

I sometimes wonder if I didn't break somewhere along the way, in an undefinable fashion. Either that, or I've got the heart of a romantic with the brain of a pragmatist.

( This doesn't make sense, even to me. Feel free to skip. )

Current Mood: thoughtful

A bronze statuette representing Ganesh sits on one of the small shelves in my kitchen.

I've had this little Ganesh since 1993, when my father brought it back from India. My parents also have a wooden bas-relief carving of Ganesh hanging on a wall at their home, from that trip. I am very fond of him, and he has accompanied me through four moves. He invariably sits on a shelf, and watches patiently as my life unfolds. Whenever I'm home, my gaze invariably strays to him, and sometimes I'll reach out and touch him. My father told me at the time that he was a divinity of Luck, something which appealed to me greatly at the time, but which further reading has led me to doubt.

The Wikipedia article I linked to has this to say:

Ganesha is widely revered as the Remover of Obstacles and more generally as Lord of Beginnings and Lord of Obstacles (Vighnesha, Vighneshvara), patron of arts and sciences, and the deva of intellect and wisdom. He is honoured at the start of rituals and ceremonies and invoked as Patron of Letters during writing sessions.

I think my attraction/fascination is explained much better by this. In spite of this apparent affinity, I'm still kind of perplexed by it.

I have never identified as a pagan. I don't believe in the gods of any pantheon. If I believe in any God at all, it's the Christian God, or rather my own version of a Divinity present in all things. I don't understand my attachment to this god who isn't my own, who belongs to a religion that I have never studied and never belonged to, that I really know nothing about. I wouldn't know what to do with a deva if it came and smacked me upside the head.

Yet this little statuette has followed me faithfully for more than fifteen years. I can't imagine my home without Ganesh, sitting cross-legged and pot-bellied on a shelf, two arms folded down, the other two held aloft, a mouse creeping along at his feet. I can truthfully say that I have spent more time with this deity than with any other in my whole lifetime.

I'm not sure what it means, if anything.

Current Mood: thoughtful

Apart from this morning, which I spent sprinting for the bus, I usually like to walk in a leisurely fashion to the bus stop, taking in the scenery. It's been especially interesting this year, because I've been able to see the gradual change of the seasons even better than usual due to the early work hours I have when I'm on day shift.

This summer I became accustomed to walking in the glow of the pre-dawn, and as the days began to grow short once more, I began pinpointing first individual stars, and then entire constellations in the morning sky. On a clear morning, I could see Orion and the Big Dipper, and what I think might be Cassiopeia (I can't figure out for the life of me how to spell that this morning). I am not an avid star-gazer: I don't know the names of the constellations except for two or three, and I can identify one planet with a little difficulty (Mars, in case you were wondering), but I do love looking up at the sky and seeing it blanketed in small lights. It gives me great pleasure that the light pollution in Montreal isn't so bad that it blots out all the stars.

In the afternoons this summer I took a little more time to look at the trees on my street. I am fortunate enough to live in a neighbourhood with lots of greenery, which makes living in the city that much more bearable. There is something terrifically restful about watching the way the sunlight hits the green leaves (while my brain shouts "Photosynthesis for the win!" gleefully at the top of its very metaphorical lungs, because I'm a dork). Sometimes it's so beautiful it takes my breath away.

Yesterday morning an oddly-shaped cat slunk across the sidewalk into some tall grass about fifty yards ahead of me. I thought to myself: "Every time I think something is an oddly-shaped cat, it turns out to be a raccoon or a skunk." Sure enough, this one was a skunk, but instead of slinking into the underbrush, it turned at a right angle and began trundling rapidly along the sidewalk just ahead of me. That's when I discovered that I walk faster than the average skunk (or maybe just this one skunk), and got very very worried that I would get sprayed if I got too close. Eventually, when the skunk showed no sign of leaving the sidewalk, I compromised by switching to the other side of the street.

In short, a lot of little things come to my attention when I'm walking along my street. The flora, the fauna, the new bits of graffiti, what my neighbours are up to. I don't know why I've been paying extra attention to it all this year, but it's been a rewarding experience, overall.

Current Mood: serene

You have wonder what's wrong with our society when so many people envision a brutal apocalypse as the only solution to our troubles. After Armaggedon, people seem to believe, we're going to settle into some sort of agrarian utopia (after we shoot all the ~~zombies~~ starving looters/suburbanites, that is) and live happily ever after in a world without yuppies, SUVs, or water shortages.

Have things become so bleak that we can't envision things getting any better without most of the world dying off?

Current Mood: thoughtful

The Five Year Plan is looking a little shaky tonight. I did some very inexpert number crunching, and the numbers are depressing. For the kind of mortgage I'm looking for I'd have to come up with a down payment of at least $30K. $20K is doable (at the rate I'm going it'll happen in five years), but the extra $10K (or even $20K if I want to have some wriggle room when it comes to my price range) is going to be trickier.

Add to that the purchase of a car (likely on a four-year-plan), and suddenly I'm looking at a whole chunk of cash I didn't really consider when first coming up with the Five Year Plan.

The long and short of this (don't mind me while I angst pointlessly) is to talk to my Finances Guy and figure out just what I have to do in order to make all this happen. I think it's doable, but for the life of me I can't figure out how to do this by myself. What I need is someone better with numbers and finances than I to walk me through a bunch of options, to see what I can come up with.

Someone please remind me that I'm not insane for thinking I can do this by myself?

( In which Phnee goes on a tangent about lack of romance )

Mostly I'm kind of terrified that I'm going to fail epically when I get out there. I'm one person, and there will be lots of acreage to take care of, and livestock, and so many things that can go wrong which would be more easily dealt with if I weren't on my own. I just worry that I'm going to get a mortgage approved, move out to the godforsaken howling wilderness, only to fall flat on my face financially when things don't work out. Usually I'm more optimistic than this, but usually I don't think quite so hard about how I'm supposed to manage by myself what most people manage as a couple or as a family.

Current Mood: anxious

Minor epiphanies are great, as long as they happen at convenient times.

I've been wondering lately why this latent sense of dissatisfaction with my life has been following me around. I have a pretty good job (frustrations with certain aspects of it aside), prospects for another really good job, and for the first time in, oh, about five years, I'm not worried about money.

So what's the problem? That's what I was asking myself. I haven't been writing, the apartment is not clean (*sigh*), and I've mostly gone into hermit mode except for long-standing commitments.

I think I've figured out at least part of it: things are going too well. Yes, yes, I know, poor me. That's just the thing, though: for the past, oh, eight or ten years, something has *always* been going wrong for me. Sometimes it was small stuff, a lot of it was financial suck, and a lot of it was getting over being crazy. I learned how to exist in survival mode only. The only way I know how to keep myself together is if there's an actual crisis (whether real or in my head), and I can therefore say to myself: "Self, you have to hold yourself together until this crisis is over."

So now that there's no crisis, my head is happily helping me to create some artificial ones ("The apartment isn't clean! Oh noes! Whatever shall we do?" "Oh noes! There's no writing happening!"), and engaging in the subtle-but-happy art of self-sabotage. So I accidentally forget to plug in my phone when I'm expecting an important phone call, or "forget" to make other important phone calls, or I procrastinate on sending out important documents. It's like I don't want to be fulfilled, because then I would lose all my coping mechanisms.

...

Y'know, on paper (or on the screen, as it happens), that looks a lot more screwed up than I thought.

Anyway, minor epiphany for Phnee. Now I just have to figure out how to fix this stupid problem I've created whholesale out of thin air.

Current Mood: thoughtful

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Page generated Jun. 18th, 2025 10:11 pm

Corner of Bourbon & Division

Her Words of Wisdom Scratched Into The Door

Entries tagged with noodling

Night shifts sometimes make for very long days

I would like to opt out of being a product now, please

Retreat!

Disjointed Thoughts on External Validation and the Concept of "Self-Care"

Maybe I should sum up...

Still out from under the rock

Random thoughts about existence

Too many hobbies, it seems...

The Sound of Silence

sigh

Invisible elephants...

Scheduling fail, and thinking about cabbages and kings

End of year musings

Maybe I need to add more warning labels

A little too prosaic

The elephant in the room

Things I notice walking to the bus and never blog about

You gotta wonder what's wrong with our society...

Why Phnee should not be allowed to think about numbers

It's an art form, really