My Wise Boss

Had a meeting with my boss today for the first time in what seemed like months. I was losing my voice, and all day was blaming the ragweed, but it was actually stress and being upset and feeling some low-level rage toward everyone. I wanted to cry and ask for comfort and propping up, but instead I gave him an update on current projects (all positive) and then asked some "coaching" questions. I was asking about calendar management, inbox management, that kind of thing, and whether the executive brain needs to be able to break tasks into small micro-steps and then have fifteen different tasks going at once - you do a micro-step of one, then while waiting for a reply, to a micro-step of another, and keep switching back and forth.

He replied by saying a very wise thing (he could see through my questions to the real problem). He said, we all, human beings, have a tendency to, when we see something is not getting done, rush in a do it ourselves, because we want to pitch in, and get a result, and have success. (I don't think all human beings are actually like this, but most of the people they hire at my company seem to be, and then more people in Marketing are perhaps like this because we're not motivated by money, but by the fun of the job and by achieving excellence in your ad or print piece or web site or other creative production). But, he said, often that means we're spending lots of time doing things that aren't our job. We might be doing one of two things. We might be acting as a crutch, for someone who is actually not doing their own job. And we have to do it so the whole project gets done, but we're being a crutch for that other person. Or we might be over-managing our suppliers or other staff. We might be underestimating their ability to pick up the ball and run with it. And by doing both of those things we're enabling.

Those hit home. Definitely. I think I've inherited some systems set up because certain colleagues and suppliers had to be worked around and slack taken up for. And I know I push myself to do things myself so that they're done my way, and with excellence. But I'm killing myself, and also not acting like a manager, I'm acting like an admin or a typist. That's not what they're paying me for.

My wonderful boss offered to help coach me on these things, and I'm so glad! I was worried that all bosses at my company wanted to hear was "wins" and successes and achievements with numbers against them. But no, line managers are there for coaching performance! So I can go to him, imperfect and in distress, and he can help! And I did it all without crying! Even one tear!

So, if I can start working on these patterns, I think things will look up immensely.

It happened

Tonight when I got home from work, the little weather widgets on my computer desktop all said the same thing.

Appleton, WI 13˚
Denver, CO 13˚
Sydney, AUS 13˚

All set to celcius.

My vote for saddest (but loveliest) video ever

Got it!

On the disappearing people - I know the connection now. I've had this same doubt before, I remember now.

I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead;
I lift my lids and all is born again.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)

The stars go waltzing out in blue and red,
And arbitrary blackness gallops in:
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.

I dreamed that you bewitched me into bed
And sung me moon-struck, kissed me quite insane.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)

God topples from the sky, hell's fires fade:
Exit seraphim and Satan's men:
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.

I fancied you'd return the way you said,
But I grow old and I forget your name.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)

I should have loved a thunderbird instead;
At least when spring comes they roar back again.
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)

- Sylvia Plath (of all people)

Getting Secure

I read a piece by a different Sam in the SMH that has got me thinking. It was a piece on jealousy, and one of the experts quoted it in argued that people, men in particular, feel sexual jealousy when they are sexually insecure.

This got me thinking about other pathological emotions, and wondering if they stem from insecurity as well. Lately I've been worried on a few occasions that I'm coming across as psychotically needy. We all know how attractive that is in a new friend, right? So I've been trying to carry on and hide it but it would be nice if the feeling would go away altogether. What insecurity could be behind the neediness? The worry that I don't deserve anyone's attention, I think. I should stop worrying about that, and then I wouldn't be so dependent on attention, and then friendships could just unfold however. I'm probably losing attention I could otherwise get by needing it so much (isn't it cruel how life works like that?).

I've been hesitant to go out and get acquainted because I've been feeling like I couldn't handle any crazy people right now. So I've been telling myself I've been being selective, but really I'm probably just being afraid. If I lose the insecurity, I will probably be centered and strong enough inside that I can be open to people without worrying that somehow their craziness will pull out my core and destroy me.

And the sunglasses. We had a cold snap today and I was walking around in sunglasses and my Matrix leather coat, and feeling very rock and roll, and was scowling at the very nice Midwest people in the Walgreens parking lot, and remembered again that thing I know, that I put the sunglasses on and act all rock and roll when I'm hurt inside.

So, what's hurt? I think I've been battered a bit by a project at work that's not going well. By the politics and the obfuscation of excellence. And I've just done a really hard thing moving here, too, and it's not actually really getting done. Change, loss, doubt, hard work, courage, all those things take a toll.

If I could get secure, I could be open. I wouldn't have to scowl behind glasses, I could just smile at people, and not risk everything.

I'll get there. Knowing you have a problem is the first step.

broken record

Over my grumpy weekend I was chatting with a friend back in Australia and I was complaining about how I never get to go out or do anything and wish I was a tourist in this town instead of living here because then I could go out and explore and meet people.

And then I went back and looked at some emails from the last time we were in touch, January, in fact, and in them all I did was complain about how I don't know anyone here and never get to go out and wish I was a tourist becuase then I could go out and meet people but since I live here I can't.

I bore myself, I can only imagine how he's been putting up with me. So, resolved. I vow to go out, to explore, to have more fun (to always think how I could make every situation the most fun possible, like my friend Todd used to do in grad school), to be brave, and to finally discover this town at long last.

10:18 and still grumpy

Today I did get out of the house, although only moderately successfully - my original plan was to spend all day at work. I didn't get there until 2pm, and then when there were only two other cars in a parking lot made for many hundreds of people, it all got a bit creepy, so I just grabbed my computer and came back home.

But while I was out, my symptoms resolved enough that I could tell what it was.

Hay fever.

Oh, yes. I remember this place now. It's all coming back to me. The blossoming trees, the golden fields of ragweed beside the highway, the dandelion dust drifting gracefully through the air - I am allergic to this place.

I am experiencing all the sluggishness, overall irritation, frustration and loss of personality that plagued me during my whole entire childhood. Great! This is just the kind of thing I came back for!

I was reading an article in the New Yorker online and it was talking about the symptoms of a hangover. In one bit it said:

"Finally, the alcohol has produced inflammation, which in turn causes the white blood cells to flood the bloodstream with molecules called cytokines. Apparently, cytokines are the source of the aches and pains and lethargy that, when our bodies are attacked by a flu virus—and likewise, perhaps, by alcohol—encourage us to stay in bed rather than go to work, thereby freeing up the body’s energy for use by the white cells in combatting the invader."*

I'm sure allergies work exactly the same way. So I'm a sluggish, achy, uncomfortable, swollen, sniffling mess. When, on the inside, I am a shiny, powerful, glittering star. But how will anyone ever detect this, in Wisconsin in the summertime?

Bah.


__
*Joan Acocella, "A Few Too Many: Is there any hope for the hung over?" in The New Yorker, May 26 2008.

Disappearing people

I'm having trouble lately with the feeling that people are ephemeral. I'm sure it's a left-over abandonment issue of some sort. I want to think that friends are friends forever, that people are there for me, that I have unconditional love out there. I definitely feel this way about family, especially since lately I've been getting to know family members I didn't really know before but still feel strongly connected to. But don't know how this is going to shake out among my friends.

I can "disappear" people in my life quite effectively, and I suppose I do it often. Have done it often just recently - all those boys that didn't work out, that went mad and clingy on me. After long, painful hours trying to repair the friendship, it just got worse and worse - they demanded more and more and I was getting less than nothing out of it, just anger and frustration and guilt - and so a clean and thorough break was the only solution. They still send little messages every now and again - the especially Autistic one just a few weeks ago when he saw something in the newspaper that somehow reminded him of me. I didn't reply. The way I've handled those very bad entanglements is to drop them, bar them from communications, and ignore them if they try to reach me.

But the ones I want to hear from, sometimes they go quiet for a while as well. And then you think, this is someone I shared experiences with, I enjoyed his company, we walked around looking out at the world together and had shared experiences, but now he's just an address in my email address book, just a name. Not a person. Is a person only a person if they're in touch with you? And is the person on the other end of an email conversation (or IM or etc) really a person anyway? I know, also from bad experience, that you can hide behind email, when you receive one you can project all sorts of things on their flirty and clever prose. Does this count as staying in touch? Is phone better? Video is definitely better - you get a much higher percentage of their presence, the way they move, their voice, their laugh. But what if the videoing stops? Do they go back to just a word in a memory chip somewhere? How do I sustain the friendships I want to keep?

I get the feeling they are all as insubstantial as smoke hanging in the air. If I lean on them, I will go straight through, and they will vanish. I don't lean on them. Sometimes they vanish anyway.

How do you conduct friendships these days, cyber-connected but new in town?

And once again, this doesn't apply to my family at all.

Reverse Seasonal Affective Disorder Springtime Haiku

Trees outside mock me.
"It's nice! It's nice out," they say.
Draw the blinds. Facebook.

Six Month Slump

It's the Saturday night of Memorial Day Weekend. I did this on purpose, I knew it was coming up and I on purpose didn't make any plans with anybody, so I can't complain, but I'm feeling blah and low regardless.

My plan was, today, to sleep all day and restore my body. Tomorrow, house stuff. Monday, go in to work and file, organize, and catch up. I guess I've been sticking to the plan. I slept late today, took a big nap in the afternoon, just knitted and watched partial movies on HBO, but never got dressed or went outside. I saw the sunshiny beautiful day outside, the green grass, the blossoming trees, but didn't worry about it. There's no obligation to go outside just because the weather is "nice". Outside is not really my thing, anyway.

I don't have much food in the house so I was cobbling together strange meals, and that might be adding to my blah feeling. I feel achy all over, definitely something up with the sinuses, and I think my face is breaking out. Blah.

It's been six months here, and so I'm sure I'm hitting another wall. Long enough that I'm feeling my old self slip away from me - can't remember names of things in Sydney, accent probably sharpening into Yank Midwestern again, spelling changing back. Not long enough to have all the #2!%###@! boxes unpacked, or a table. I've met a few people to have lunches and things with, but no best friend yet. I have been out for beers once (I wish I could go every night). I have been to the movies twice with somebody (one more tentatively scheduled Monday night so can't really complain bitterly there either). I have not been to any live music at all, or theatre or comedy or anything. I have not been to see any art with anyone in town. I have gone to nice restuarants for dinner only with people visiting from out of town - lovely, but it would be nice to go more often. When I see people on tv drinking red wine lately, my heart just aches. I grieve for dinners with nice red wine. I can't have them any more because I've got no one to go with and because I have to drive myself home.

I know I've felt this bad many times before, in many other towns. My back is stiff in that way you get when you're sick and you've been in bed all day. So, if I get up and move around tomorrow I should be fine. And if I get some groceries in so I can eat properly.

Work has done this to me - way way way too many things on, I can't keep hardly a fraction of them in my head, and one big project has been super-un-fun since the very beginning and is now at the pointy end and needing lots of hours before and after regular working hours. Plus I have to maintain the other site as well, and keep the appearance of enthusiasm about it. I catch myself all the time thinking, "I'm not coping." I thought of calling in sick every day this past week. I felt brain-damaged, couldn't think of words, couldn't remember why I'd opened that browser window, started emails but then never sent them and wondered why people didn't get back to me. Stressy. So, in a way, I was kind of sick today, and was lying around recovering.

In Sydney I was lonely too. I had found a group of people to hang around with, they'd always be at a particular place at a particular time, and they filled out the guest list of my birthday party. Many of them turned out to be ticking time bombs, given how crazy they all went when I was getting ready to move. Still, the essential loneliness was why I moved back here. It was the feeling I bookmarked when I thought, "If I still feel this way in a year, I'll look at moving home," and in a year when I checked again I did still feel that way, so here I am. But this isn't getting all that much better.

Did I make a mistake to move? I do miss the job, I know my current job isn't as good as that one was, although this new one is up a level and has its excitement and big responsibilities. I am closer to family, and get to talk to them all the time, and to see them next week and then next month. I get to be reacquainted with the landscape and culture (roughly) of my youth. But I don't feel connected to the place yet.

I was thinking of moments of perfect happiness in Sydney. Dialectics. Bringing a project off at work via IM'ing the developer and the designer - the "woo hoo" moment when things went live. Riding a train in from the Inner West by myself. My little trip to the Central Coast is an oasis of happy memory, but I know that when I was there I actually felt quite a bit like this - I remember thinking on the walk how stiff and sore I was, but now I remember the niceness of the walk and not the pain. Change of scenery, is probably what I need.

I have had a few moments of perfect happiness here too. Driving to my cousin's house and getting to that particular stretch of highway with those particular barns and that particular rise of hill, when it was still all covered with snow and the trees were that particular brown and the sky that particular pale blue. Just made my heart swell with the beauty of it. The dinner with my sister with the falling snowflakes and the rushing river. The evening when my parents were sitting on my furniture in my living room, just hanging out, Mom crocheting a potholder and Dad watching something on TV. Just pure delight, to have them here and so ordinary. And, actually, the inspirational speeches by our senior leadership at the work conference a few weeks ago. Many heart-swelling perfect moments there too.

So I mustn't let the turkeys get me down. I have difficult colleagues and vendors making a project un-fun, but my boss still loves me (as far as I know), and there are other good colleagues around who I can collaborate with to do things about which we can all have passion. I will find friends to do outside-of-work things with, and some will be boring and painful but some may lead to moments of perfect happiness themselves. My neck will un-kink if I do some exercise tomorrow and then I'll find another trainer in June. I can start to eat better - I was already starting to and having to pin my trousers because they are some of them too big now. I will find someone to take a flattering picture of me for my Facebook profile so I don't feel so old and dowdy and undesirable and unworthy. I will practice my mantra of thinking about my project instead of thinking about boys.

I need to do something creative. Maybe in amongst the house things tomorrow I can go to a cafe and have a chai latte and write something clever and beautiful. That should make me feel better.

And one day, if I wait long enough, it will snow again....

Mad at the flowering trees

The flowering trees all burst into blossom over the last week or so, making the town look a good deal more spring-like. And once again it is two months late, and once again it's making me angry.

The feeling I had about the trees when they came out was the feeling of being at a party, you went along out of a feeling of obligation to the host, and some big performance was promised, but you went there, you stayed for a while, and it didn't happen. Your good friends start to leave at about 10pm, and you're thinking of leaving too but you're stuck in a boring conversation. You're just waiting for them to finish their story and you'll go, "So! I think I'll head off as well." But before that happens, the host comes out, all a-twitter, and says, "They're here! They're ready! They're about to start. Everybody! Come here! They're about to start!" And so you stay, and you find yourself standing in the front row with a fake smile pasted on your face, and it gets to be 11, and 12, and you're still stuck at this party pretending you're enjoying this performance, which is actually pretty good, but it's really late, and you wish you had gone home hours ago.

That's how I was feeling about the flowering trees.

love and language

The other day my favorite blogger (although more of a journalist) Sam DeBrito posted a piece revisiting a theme from a previous article about a biochemical interpretation of love made famous by a scientist named Helen Fisher. I'm sure I haven't quite got it right, but she taxonomizes love into three different states, corresponding to three different chemicals in the brain. Roughly, there's lust, romantic love, and attachment. Lust is, well, I'm sure everyone's pretty much familiar with it. Attachment is something cuddly and affectionate that forms over time, like what you'd have with a parent or a teddy bear. But romantic attachment is the weird one - I think she thinks it's evolutionarily useful for bonding to one particular partner and not leaving them when you're raising your kid, or something, but it, of the three, is the most about the other's (or, the Other's, to be Sartrean about it) specificity.

Like, last time I remember a lustful reaction, it was a guy I knew who was of Chinese heritage, and not only did I feel lust toward him, it generalized to all Chinese men. So, not so much about specificity. And the attachment thing, I think that's just a question of doing the hard yards, you could develop feelings of attachment for your worst enemy if you spent enough time together.

But romance. Very specific. It's them you want, only them. You want them around you all the time because of how they make you feel, and when they're gone you ache with a hunger and grief that overcomes you and makes everything else dull. Other people invite you to do things but you don't want to accept because those other people are not as good as your One, your Other, and you'd rather be alone than with anyone but Them. Thoughts of them haunt you all day when they're not around, and you rush to check your email at every opportunity for any little message from them, and you daydream of their face in certain poses showing certain expressions, and you remember how their voice sounded when they said certain words, and it's all a bit creepy and obsessive.

A similar thing is when you find someone who speaks your own personal language. Not just your culture's language, like English or Wisconsinite, but someone who really understands you when you talk. They're not afraid of anything about you, you can (and do) say anything, you can be as exuberant as you want and you don't scare them. They talk back in the same language and they make you laugh. And think, and feel things, and learn things in the very moment that they say them to you. (Hi, JB). (No, not the local one, the philosopher). The experience of having a conversation like that, where you're wholly you and open to them and they're being pretty much them and you just seem to get each other - that's as addictive as the particular curve of your loved one's face as he turns away in the half-light and turns back to you smiling.

I'm lucky to have a few of these folks around. But they do ruin things for ordinary people, who don't speak my own personal language, and who do not mesmerize me and change my life and fill my thoughts. Sure, I should call some of those ordinary folks for the upcoming long weekend, get something or other arranged so I'm not struck with paroxyms of three days of loneliness for lack of planning. But if I can't make a plan with one of those special people, I'm not really enthused about spending any time with anyone else, thanks.

Photos

This morning I had to go through the photos. Not all of them, I was looking for a particular one, but quite a few. All out of chronological order, so I saw myself grow fat, grow younger, grow geeky, grow long hair, grow happy, grow tired.

The ones that struck me most were the photos of buildings that you can only find in Australia. There was a photo of my place in Brisbane which was in a gigantic old Grand Colonial Queenslander on Dornoch Terrace in West End. There was a photo of the pub in Forbes, NSW, where I stayed with my friend Jeffrey and Wanda the weekend of my very first week in Australia when we did a big drive out bush - all Victorian lacy wrought iron on the balconies and the red tin roof. There was the big hotel in Cairns were I stayed with the boyfriend before S.

The thing that made me sad is that no one I meet here will be able to share those experiences. I won't be able to turn to them and say, "You know Queenslanders, right, with the vertical joins and the big verandahs?"

I remember feeling a similar thing when I moved to Australia in the first place, mostly about childhood experiences. No one watched the same Saturday morning cartoons as me, no one would have heard the Oscar Meyer Weiner song on the ad, because the ad didn't show there.

This is a similar experience, but this time it is my fault. I chose to do this. I did this on purpose. I made the break with people there rather than continue the history and build upon and within the shared experience. I have no one to blame but myself.

But then, I did get to see a palm tree, a mango tree and a Hills Hoist (!) via web cam today, so maybe it's not all that far away after all...

Problem Solved

Remember I was worried about a conflict within the project, of life being essential meaningless but the narrative being the tool to give meaning? Problem solved!

I got to this principle in bold-face type in the Story book:

"TRUE CHARACTER is revealed in the choices a human being makes under pressure."

Of course! Meaning is not intrinsic to life in some external way, meaning is given by the individual to his or her life THROUGH the choices and actions he or she makes.

Duh. The answer is of course the Existential answer, all about choose/act/do/be, and all that.

Now, next task is to study the verbs a bit more: "to narrate" and "to author". Because I'm thinking what the individual does through his or her choices and actions is to author a life, not just narrate it.

More soon!

-SAD

I've worked it out - I think I have Reverse Seasonal Affective Disorder.

In this very northerly latitude, as it gets toward the Solstice, the days get longer and longer and longer and longer. Tonight at 6:45 pm while I was driving home there was still full, blazing hot, bright, sunny sunshine, coming down on me from a still rather high angle in the sky.

Background is I had a very busy day, lots of meetings and introducing people to each other and social things to coordinate, but also lots of political things to coordinate, and some of them went better than others (have you ever had the experience of introducing two friends to each other, and you're nuts about both of them so you're really excited for them to meet and you think they'll all be as excited by each other as you are of each of them, but when they meet they each sort of give you a confused look like "Why did you bring me here?" Three meetings in a row were really a lot like that).

So I'm feeling frustrated and vulnerable and like a dork, and I'm driving home from work. And I pull into my street and there are people out walking their dogs and the sun is blazing down on me from a high angle, and I just feel baked and exposed and want to hide. I want it to be dark when I come home from work! I don't want all this light, especially at this freakishly late hour of the evening.

So, I think I have reverse seasonal affective disorder. I do just fine with lots of darkness, and cloud and overcast and rainy days, and even sub-zero cold and blizzards and wintery conditions, but I can't deal with all this sun!

Existentialism revival

On that (see above), (or below, actually, isn't it?), one snag I might hit with the project is in living my life as a narrative, because I really, really don't believe that actual real life has one. I read too much Existentialism at too impressionable an age, and it defines me still too much, to think that actual real life has any structure or meaning at all.

So, going about my actual real life, I can't be doing The Project. I suppose I'm spinning raw materials for some sort of storyish thing that could be made up afterwards, but it's not intrinsically a story.

Damn. I really need to go on that $8000 autobiography retreat in Paris. I need to try to write my life as a story and see what it does to it. While of course taking the meta-stance as the philosophers that I am. Who I am.

I suppose this counts as working on the project, by finding out a conflict in it.

outlet - or, the popping balloon

I suppose one reason I've been neglecting you, Blog, is that I've been experiencing some artistic outlets in other ways. I've been getting up earlier than I used to go to bed in order to do Morning Pages before work. These are a practice described by Julia Cameron in her book The Artist's Way, designed to cure writer's block, but they do bring on their own kind of magic to even non-writers. If I can roll over and catch the pen in my hand in the same motion that I turn off the alarm, I can get the dreams down, I'm still sort of half having them as I start to write. And that's really easy, the three pages fill up really quickly with all that description and events. But the slightest little thing can evaporate the dream (I always remember some description I read somewhere as a very young person, something about the dream being as delicate as a spider's web and easily broken on waking, and I think that every time I can't remember what I was just dreaming about seconds ago). Snooze alarm, rolling over and coming to consciousness slowly, conversation with the monkey, getting up to brush teeth, or today when I'd accidentally left my phone (which I'm using as an alarm clock) in the other room. So, when I can't remember the dream, I just write about what's happening (when I get stuck my mantra is "Get it down, get it down," because this time in my life will be so unlike any other that it will be important to look back on these pages to recall all the detail and texture of this time). And so, I haven't been writing those little observations here, as much. Which is not to say that there are certain thoughts that are bloggable and certain ones that lend themselves more to first thing in the morning diarizing.

And then the cable. I got a digital box, all the HBO/Showtime/Cinemax channels, and a PRINTED GUIDE which makes all the difference, that and the little "information" button that tells you what this is, how long it's been on, and what's on next. So, now my time is wasted by richness and artistry, rather than endless home decorating shows. Probably better for my brain, but hard on the heart - tonight was American Beauty, which I hadn't seen since The Before Time (Ellen Part I), and it's very emotional. His speech right at the end about the love he has for all the little things in his life filling his heart like a balloon until he feels like it will burst until he just lets it flow and doesn't try to hold it, and he is swept up in a spirit of gratitude, or however it goes - how much does that sound like what I'm going through? Boo hoo hoo. So, gushy this evening.

And then I've got red stuff all over my life now. And strategically placed a red thing in my office to bring about some Feng Shui magic. Is that wrong? Is that silly? But it's working! I mustn't be afraid or spook. I have to keep wanting what I wished for, even as it comes true and scares me, right?

I am DEFINITELY making too big a deal of this. I am my own woman, I am surrounded by Mission furniture and red things, I've been sent to Appleton for some reason, and I need to keep focussed on the project. Which is whatever it is.

Furniture Essentials

In my previous apartment, I had a six-seat dining table but no couch or lounge chairs. I lived there for almost two years, and it was fine. I would sit at the table with my feet up on the opposite chair to watch tv, and when people came over we could sit around the table, I even had a couple of dinner parties, and it all worked out quite well. I ended up with better posture, I think, from sitting up straight all the time.

In my current apartment, at the moment, I have a sofa and a comfy chair, but no tables. And you can't manage. I need a place to sit and write, I need somewhere to sit and knit complicated parts of the sock like the heel and the toe, someplace I can have good posture and the work is up closer to where my eyes are. I have a dining table coming to me, and I have a coffee table all picked out for the living room, and I'm even thinking about what I want to put out on the balcony, but right now it's all soft chairs and sitting on the floor. And you can't manage.

So, there you go. The sofa is not an essential piece of furniture, but the six-seat dining table definitely is.

There's a truck out on the fourlane, a mile or more away....

I just realised that if I lie on my stomach cross-ways on my guest bed, I can see the lights of the trucks going by on the highway that runs past the barn across the way.

The fact that I had close relationships with Midwestern interstates as a young girl is something I want people to be interested in and ask me about.

Guess that's why you guys are here, isn't it?

So where've I been?

I made a fundamental mistake that I should have remembered from trying to keep a travel diary. I made notes on "things to blog" on a few different Fridays at B&N, and then thought I had to get them all written and down, in order, before I could start any new posts.

Isn't that dumb?

Blogging isn't homework. You can't give yourself the assignment of getting everything down, in detail, in order, because you spend too much time doing the stuff to be able to fit in the recording of the stuff.

So, stuff that. Here I am back, and if you missed something things I thought but didn't get down, oh well, they're still scribbled in a notebook and will form part of my archive of collected papers when I die.

Here are some scattered things that occur to me tonight, reviving the old tradition of the Festival of the Bullet Point:

• The grass has been such an intense, ridiculous emerald colour that I understand why there's a town just south and west of here called Spring Green.
• The fact that the daffodils don't come out until it's almost my birthday makes me angry. Summer is too late. Summer will be too short. I'm sure I will get used to it, but I wasn't prepared, and it's having a bigger impact that I imagined it would.
• In contrast, it's only 50 degrees but everyone at work has switched to T-shirts and sandals. It's too early! I don't have any of those kind of clothes, and I'm used to wearing sweaters all year to work. So, one more wardrobe refreshment, pending.
• I got a message from my favorite person back home but have to get a video camera, microphone and headphones to talk to him. So, hopefully tomorrow. I wish I looked and sounded better - had a week or two of feeling in the zone and on my game, there, but it has lapsed and now I feel bedraggled and not on my game.
• I was imagining posting a post titled "Maximum Security Prison" a few days ago, because what with work and money and having to run a household, every spare minute and quite a few that aren't spare are scheduled and taken up, and there's absolutely nothing I can do to get around or out of them. Feeling very overburdened and defeated. I supposed that's continuing but I'm trying to continue to find things to be grateful for.
• Knitting, I'm at the heel part of the sock, and you have to concentrate, and I don't have a table, so I'm blocked. I hate this stage of redecorating too, just can't seem to make any progress at all. Everything is a priority so nothing is. Time is my enemy.

See? I keep thinking of other things to put in the bullet points, and then I think, "No, that's dumb. No, that's a wrong thing to think. No, that's easy to solve, don't complain about that." In a defeated, weary and somewhat beaten down mood. I know how to solve this. Just do the next right thing. I've had fun recently. Just not much fun tonight.

But anyway, I'm back, I've karmically dropped the class for which all that blog homework was due, and so I can just start from now, and write what I write, and if there's a gap, oh well. Should treat it like a flowing conversation - if it was important, I'm sure it will come back up and we'll get to it as a topic later.

Bloggers, don't write lists of things to blog about! Don't be a slave to the "oughts"! Just blog!

E