Things Are The Same. Things Are Different.

Bullet-form blog entry because I am a lazy, lazy human being:

• The car is dead. Long live the car. Basically, it is broken in an expensive way that will take a month or two to save for, and then it will be paid off and will need to be put into my name and insured all over again, so fuck it, we're taking the bus for a while. I'd be sadder if we lived in BFE where there wasn't a bus that ran practically outside my front door every day, but since that isn't the case? Meh. Catching up on my knitting in a BIG way.
• It is... I guess...?... springtime headed into summer here, but you'd never know it by looking. Mother Nature is being as bipolar here as she is everywhere else, and as such has seen fit to dump bucketloads of rain on us instead of sweet, tremulous spring sunlight. Again, meh. I don't have a seed planted anywhere to be impatient over, so I am doing okay. Although that makes me wish that I had a yard to plant seeds in to be impatient over, kind of.
• Coming up here in three days is my mother's birthday. Should I tell you, Internet? I think I will. The last time I went up to the cemetery, I couldn't find her grave. I ended up wandering the general area where I remembered her grave to be, wild-eyed, on the verge of tears, feeling like the worst child in the history of children, even though it has long been my philosophy that I don't need to visit a patch of earth to love and honor my lost loved ones. Also, I have specifically requested that my loved ones scatter my ashes in some top-secret place of no value (the side of the highway would even be fine) so that people will do the same for me: honor and respect my memory wherever you happen to be, and place no value on the place where my ashes are deposited.
• Like how I sidestepped how my mom's birthday will be making me feel? Alright, I will admit it. It will be miserable. I will pretend to be normal, all the while feeling a bitter, churning mixture of emotions on the inside. But nobody will be able to tell, and I will spend another year trying not to feel sorry for myself because nobody is able to tell.

And on that cheerful note, that's all the news that is news here. What's going on in your world? (Donna, I have been following along. I'm so glad your knee is working out so well. Really, really glad.)

Time To Move On

How do you know when it's time to move on?

I've always been told that quitting is for failures, for people who give up too easily. Quitting is a sign of weakness, a sign that you just can't hack it, that only the ones who hang in and hang on will find true success.

But in this case, I don't want to repeat a mistake I've already made - hanging in when the situation is obviously not right for me. I stayed at a shit job for eight years because - well, there were a lot of reasons, not least of which was fear. I don't want to do that again. I don't want to be the sucker who sits around and gets the stink end of the stick because I'm too nice to say, "Hey, you. Yeah, you. Fuck you, fuck this, and fuck off."

I genuinely like what I'm doing right now. I even - mostly - like the people I do it with and for. But there are a few people that could quite frankly never appear in my line of vision again and I'd be so okay with it.

I got a phone call this morning about a small thing I apparently did wrong last night, although since I wasn't told not to do that thing I am not exactly clear on how I would have known to avoid it. I don't start work until 2:30 this afternoon. Everyone, including the caller, knows that I am generally asleep at the time the call came in, so... what was the purpose? You had a cranky moment so you thought you would spread the joy? NO.

I don't want to get sucked into the petty. I don't want to get dragged down to that area. I just don't think I'm made for that, and I'm concerned that "blaze of glory" will not be the metaphor used for me when I get fed up and speak out about the way I feel on this.

If I move fast I might be able to work my way into a different job that would last at least a few months. It's a business owned by friends, and I'd be really good at it. I just know that if I do this, I'll be dropping a major bomb in the middle of the current place's plans. They wouldn't even begin to know where to replace me, considering the extremely beneficial (as in part-time volunteer) terms under which they have me.

What would you do?

I love you, Infinity

I was talking to my aunt on the phone this evening. She's had a rough time just lately; she's had to stand by and watch as several people she loved fought their battles, unable to lend anything but hope and sorrow as each won or lost their individual struggle.

So when she told me that she went to the beach to recharge her batteries, and that she felt more at peace and close to God there, I knew exactly what she meant and what the ocean had done for her, because it does the same for me, only in a different way.

When life is just too hard, when things have come to a place where I feel that the box full of emotions I keep locked tight inside me is about to burst its chains and spill forth on everyone around me, I make for the ocean. When I stand on the shore looking out to where the sky and the water become a place of mist and illusion, each echoing the other until they are an indistinct, twinned line, I feel as though my seemingly insoluble problems are a waste of infinite space and time.

When I watch the endless, repeating cycle of water lapping the shore, pulling away and overflowing back again forever and ever and ever, I think: How is it that I feel that my little problems are so large? On this scale, where these waters will come in and go away again until the Earth ceases to hold tight to the Moon, my worries are as fleeting as a breath.

When the wind blows the tingle of salt into every pore of my skin, chilling me and sealing out the babble of all of my more trivial thoughts, I am set free from old ideas and old fears. I am able to be alone inside my head, in some way more alone than at any other time. I am able to dispassionately view the things that have haunted and harried me and put them into perspective.

As an irreligious person, I don't feel the need to be close to a creator, but I do feel a great sense of wonder and awe that I am a part of such a beautiful, complex system as this shore, this world, this galaxy. My tiny little self is a part of something so immense, so wonderful, so amazingly complicated, I can't help but revel in that sense of delight, of oneness with all things. I can never forget that I am made of star-stuff:




Symphony of Science - 'We Are All Connected' (ft... by wamane


So when my auntie tells me she feels better and closer to God after her visit to the ocean, I get it. Oh, I get it. She was reminded of her part in the great Infinite, and how beautiful it is to get to be alive as a part of it all.

Actually, that makes me want to get away to the ocean myself, and as soon as I can. I need to refresh my sense of my place in the infinite, as well.