Category: Uncategorized

My sense of time has been slipping: I keep turning my alarm off and dozing until 8:30 which doesn’t leave a lot of time for writing these pages or the morning routine before making my way to the desk. More and more reopening: July 4 is the big day. New rules, less strict. Everything can open up except a few places including theatres. I don’t like it. My agoraphobia has become pretty high. I don’t like being outside in crowds. But a move is a big thought. A very big thought.

My “ordinary life” alarm has just gone off. Thirsty. Sleep so elusive at night, seeks me now in the morning when I should be bright eyed and bushy tailed. Another week. Yesterday’s unfinished chores. Many intentions uncompleted: no tray of muffins. No writing of a fictional scene in my newly started commonplace book. Laundry unfolded. Did watch TV when I said I wouldn’t. Stayed up past midnight. Did not pleasure self. I did get my sewing done, and showered, and was in touch with a few old friends. I did my mid-year passion planner and looked up grave costs and finished my note about looking for a new job. I read in my hammock, and brewed tea. I repotted some of the plants and called my parents. In short, it was a very full day. No need to overstuff it with the unaccomplished. Yesterday Siobhan mentioned something I had no memory of happening, me larking about with a harp bag pretending to be a humpbacked shark when we were in graduate school–10 years ago. And it occurred to me my life has changed so much that those memories now take up a very narrow band of life’s whole frequency, but perhaps for her and for the others it’s a much bigger part of who they still are. Maybe not. But perhaps so many of the attention-getting and emotion-driving factors of my life right now will similarly recede into curious relics in another 10 years. Occasionally I imagine myself older and I’m flooded with an image of kindness and calmness I don’t yet feel I’ve achieved. This fills me with hope and with a kind of satisfaction or a sense of completion–but I know too that this kindly older self isn’t automatic, I must create the conditions for her: I must work to be kind and calm, and self-accepting. But the clarity of the vision gives me hope. 

Could I run away with the circus and write movies? Or would it feel boring if it were my job? Do jobs by nature of being jobs become boring? And could I write like that? Or am I too boring? Who wants to hear another middle class white lady telling her earnest story of self-discovery? Haven’t we enough of those already? Maybe I am where I belong: boring. 

The usual rigmarole with falling back asleep after my alarm. I promised myself I’d stop scrolling my phone at bedtime and go to sleep at a decent hour. 12:15 not too bad. And my scrolling showed me Amazon is pausing their facial recognition tech for a year and Nascar has banned the confederate flag. My goodness. What rapid changes. Will they last? The speed and vehemence makes me wonder if they’ll return to the mean as quietly as they arose. But then, it felt like this when Trump was getting elected: it felt like an inevitable, shocking, unbelievable sweeping tide. And Brexit. It feels…it feels like we’re snapping back to the timeline we lost? So what now for Brexit, I wonder? Can we delay further? I do hope so. Can we get out of this utter, utter mess? Redistribution–that would be the ultimate change. Dismantling the billionaire’s club. Great, lads. You accrued wealth like a black hole. Well done you. You did it. Now throw it all back. No point keeping it all to yourself: gameplay just stops then.

I could have stopped and put my creative project yesterday down earlier and gone to bed at a reasonable hour: I can’t run on adrenaline forever. I also intended to finish the emergency documents for my parents: another undone project. What DID I do yesterday? Caught up with Tim. Read a little of “Hustle and Flow.” Read a little of “The Souls of Black Folk.” Did my monthly passion planner and my weekly passion planner. Caught up with the Kellens. Went for a longish walk. Repotted the cactus. Saw the news about an old slaver’s statue being torn down in Bristol. Is that all? I thought I did more on the computer but perhaps it’s all blending in with the day before. I sat on the balcony in the rain with a cup of tea for a bit also enjoying the quiet and remembering when Dad and I used to sit on the porch in Magnolia. Not every day has to have an accomplishment.

Early walk today? Best check the weather. As usual didn’t finish all the stuff I planned yesterday–did get a lot of cooking done though. Long call with Mom and Dad. Mom looked alarmed when I started talking about looking for a new job–surprising as I’ve mentioned the idea several times in the past few weeks. Have to live my life my way, though, regardless of the approval of others. The world is a different place than when Mom and Dad were corporates. By the time I’m 65 it’ll be 2049–a long way off, impossible to know what the world will look like then. Rising seas? Rising inequality? Migration, starvation? Impossible to bet my current life on a future that might look nothing like it. What will I do to make a better one? These are the questions now, not how to return to status quo. But I feel too dull to make any decisions at all: I just want to retreat into my little life of baking, writing, small handmade arts, and leave the confrontational sweep of the world to pass by. But it will seek me out anyway, that’s the point, you can’t hide from the monsters forever, they find you. Work is wearing me, not bearing me up. But perhaps no work is energy-giving, perhaps that’s the point. I believe in better, I just need to know where to look for it.