October, 2006

But the good news is I found my Heathen CD.

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My microcosm:

• It has been two weeks (maybe longer) since I wrote a single word. I officially suck.
• I cannot keep up with all the things I have to do. I am constantly behind. My only hope of catching up is to fail to do enough of the things I must do by their deadlines, thus making the question of me meeting my obligations moot. This has happened with about five things already this week, so this method actually works (for values of working that will incur unpleasant consequences). I do not thrive or become motivated with this level of stress. I shut down, as I did yesterday, where I spent four hours sorting my bookmarks. This is actually productive work and it made me feel good to tackle it, but it was neither urgent nor important and I should have been doing a bunch of other things instead. This multitude of things I must do each day is probably a major contributing factor to the not-writing mentioned above.
• There are several small but significant economic woes besetting me at the moment.
• I have at least three things building up inside that I really just want to rant about here, but stupid constraints (like fear of hurting people’s feelings) are keeping me from doing so. The anger and annoyance are just putrefying inside me.
• I am totally under siege by spammers. Even with the reasonably effective double barrel of comment control and a blacklist, I am spending many minutes, several times a day, cleaning up trash that actually makes it through the filters. This is depressing and irritating. I don’t even understand the logic behind comment spam on a low traffic site such as this. Or, to be more accurate, I don’t understand the logic behind comment spam at all.
• I am trying a new yoga class and teacher in an attempt to bridge the times when my other yoga class does not meet and I am not satisfied with the new class. I feel like I should be able to overcome my misgivings and be centered and flexible and find my practice within this other yoga and blah blah blah but so far, it’s not working and this seems like a shortcoming on my part. Also, I cannot seem to make myself get up in time to do early yoga sessions on my own, which would be the alternate solution.
• Last week my fantasy hockey team was making me sing but this week it has decided to perform outrageously poorly.
• Because my mantra has long been “I will not have battles about food with my daughter”, I have just come to the end of two weeks of battles about food with her. Gah.

The macrocosm:

• Genocide is still happening in Sudan.
• My country is wandering from the true and righteous path. First it sanctioned torture and now it suspends habeas corpus. My country has broken my heart. It is not the country that I know and love any longer. I don’t think it even notices its changes; it’s becoming a stranger to me. When my church did this, I had to leave it. I feel like I ought to be posting every week that I am (still) against torture, lest someone forget and assume because I am a voting citizen of this country, I approve of this reprehensible behavior on the part of my elected officials.
• Right, because I need more nuclear weapons sharing space with me on this earth, and I need them to be in the hands of crazy world leaders who think kidnapping actresses is ok. That’s going to make me sleep better at night.
• Julio Lopez’ disappearance, following testimony about his internment and torture during the dirty war is a terrible and devastating sign for a country that has yet to come to terms with its past of arbitrary violence and repression.
• That Amish shooting thing? It practically broke my brain. Also, in a less than perfect mommy moment (of which there are many, of course), my daughter heard about it on the radio while I was listening. She asked me “Did that happen in this country?” (I deflect a lot of the news about Iraq by explaining that it’s terrible and sad but it’s not dangerous to her because it’s very far away. She’s five, she needs a sense of security way more than she needs to be worried about bombings in Baghdad.) When I said that it had, in fact, happened in this country she got very quiet. I asked her if that was kind of scary and she nodded, without speaking. Man, just rip my heart right out.

At times like this, I totally get the flood. I understand Sodom and Gomorrah. Just torch the whole thing. Press the reset button. Start over. This is not working. Try again later.

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Have any of you seen my David Bowie CD? The one with the awesome cover of the Pixies’ song “Cactus”? Man, I’ve a yearning to listen to that, and I can’t find my CD. Apparently I didn’t think to rip it. So sad.

Also, my laptop is making periodic ping of death noises. I keep waffling between trying to get every possible second out of this ailing drive and not using my computer at all because it might crash and burn when I’m doing something really critical. Not conducive to work. I don’t want to be two weeks without my laptop, but it’s coming.

Cultural differences: the word “ice house” has diametrically opposed meanings, depending on where you are from. To me, an ice house is the place you go to get ice (or, you know, the gas station that used to be the place you went to to get ice for your cold box back in the day). It is associated in my mind with the middle of July…with heat, lemonade and squinting at sun glare. Apparently, in other places an ice house is a house built on ice used to shelter yourself from the snow and wind while you stand on frozen water, fishing. I cannot imagine why one would do such a thing, but there you have it. Ice house.

I did real well with the blogging for a week, then dropped off the face of the earth for a week. Fortunately, each new week is a chance to be more assiduous.

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