looking in and looking out
just so we’re clear: navelgazer’s getting back into the dating game, once again. it’s time.
and time to start drafting a new personal ad for CL (seeing as how I was somehow dumb and neglected to forward myself copies of the old ones, gr. well, anyway– a fresh start is probably appropriate).
so this is one of my current writing projects.
another one is an RFP for work website redesign.
I leave it to my reader to determine which writing project is more fun.
one of the things I miss about my old morning commute to rogers park is the pigeons– I’d get stuck at a light behind a line of cars on clark street, sucking my teeth in frustration, and then I’d glance up– and there would be a giant flock of pigeons turning and swooping through the air. it consistently stopped my breath– and teeth-sucking– and transported me, for a few minutes at least, to another plane of being, a calmer, sweeter one.
today around 3 in the afternoon I hit my customary wall and climbed into bed, half afraid that I wouldn’t be able to snap out of it for the rest of the weekend– so when I woke from a lovely nap a couple of hours later, I stood myself up and took george out while there was still an ounce of daylight in the sky and I could still enjoy the experience of walking.
and set out in a different direction than one of our standard, get-it-done dogwalks. we headed over the wilson street river bridge– just as a pair of canada geese flew low just ahead to alight on the water, gracefully, side by side. and I let myself stop and peer down over the railing to about ten or twelve ducks below, paddling around in the swirling water like little quacking tugboats. mallards, males and females. I gave myself the opportunity to stand there, without rushing on, just watching their orange feet go and their compact bodies cut through the current. and then I looked up– to a flock of pigeons as it turned in a wheel over my head and swung south along the river to bank and turned back again, and again and again in a shifting gyre that carried them finally out of view. the cell phone camera does no justice to this experience.
and then george and I continued onward into terra incognita– across the river into ravenswood manor, past a house with many birdhouses– across the street-level el tracks just before the bar came down for a train, past a string of closed shops– a ballet school, an oil painting studio, a place with posters for tai chi and yoga, a coffee shop, string lights in the window.
and then on down francisco and over lawrence into ronan park, which runs along the river and which I’ve been meaning to visit ever since I moved here a year and a half ago.
and there was not another soul around. only the cold quiet of a late weekend afternoon in late winter and me and george, walking, making discoveries in our own back yard.
I honestly know that self comparison with the outward appearance of other people’s lives is both inaccurate and unuseful– and yet there seem to be these moments of large life transition that come in waves. right now I feel a certain swirl around me– friends who had waited out the initial earlier moments of such things are now getting married and having babies. other friends are deeply involved in further developing their professional careers and areas of expertise. people have projects. identity constructs. and I am largely without one, currently.
lately I’m feeling like I have occupied too many subject positions without a deep level of commitment or sustained ideological identification. I’m using big academic words. signifies just how clunky my understanding of where I am right now is. I’m trying to get a handle on it.
it’s not just one thing or another, life never is– it’s a complex network of factors that conspire to leave me feeling a bit adrift and nonplussed. what do I believe in? what is important and worth my focus and directed energy and care? this is, probably, a postmodern dilemma: result of too many opportunities, too many perspectives conspiring to leave nothing at all certain or decisive. granted, I tend to be a P, in myers-briggs terms, and so incline toward open-endedness and indecision. but this feels like a larger, longer sea-change– a point at which I’m feeling, perhaps, that I crave a somewhat more consistent self-definition.
for some people the drive is internal: I am X or Y. I do Z. these things define me so. for some people the driving factors are external: they fall into a line of work, they need the money, or they find themselves pregnant inadvertently and choose to proceed– and the necessities of life to some extent dictate the course of decisions.
when you live so much alone, so thoroughly independently, without any sort of religion or culture or really overt doctrinal guiding systems of thought, existence can be a little overwhelming and unbearably arbitrary. I know I tend to generalize and engage in all kinds of distorted thinking– I may still be doing it here, though I am trying, this morning with a sudden boon of clarity and strength to begin to address it, somehow, to scratch the surface, to do so without huge distortions– as much as is ever possible for a person enmeshed in their own existence.
I have a very good therapist. I believe in the kind of work I’ve done and continue to do in therapy. honestly, I tend to think many more people could benefit from a little guided self-examination than choose to do so. I also know, after all these years of doing it, that analytical thinking constructs can very easily be circular and as much of an illness as any other. analysis does not solve. thoughtful action solves.
and so this morning I am hanging up clothes and organizing my space as I organize my thinking. I am putting up a bulletin board by my drawing table and pinning up scraps of ideas that have drifted around the clutter. this weekend I am going to try to follow through on a few small things. and to take a couple of small steps up out of the mire of my own lack of motivation in any particular direction. this morning the horizon feels lighter than it has been feeling. and tonight we spring forward.
who can say where it will end? but at least some controls are in place– such as the ability to set commenting to neighborhood-only or friends-only– so that when some person comes along and makes a vox account simply in order to leave comments promoting their online business, I have the ability to approve or delete such dreck.
beyond that, the job is up to the rest of us– to maintain the vitality of the connections that we make in this space.
just re-watched vanilla sky. each passing moment is another opportunity to make things… I’ll say meaningful.
(oh, I know— I’m busy posting about sashes and generic cough medicine. sometimes finding the meaning is a bit of a stretch. rule #1: use your imagination.)
good golly.
I discovered the merits of robitussin DM during a bout of bronchitis in boarding school. this was eons ago. the stuff was magical– it calmed the coughing, and when I did cough, it actually got the crap up out of my lungs.
more recently I’d heard mention, somewhere, anecdotally, of how robitussin DM had moved behind the pharmacy counter due to some hallucinagenic effects. well, apparently this rumor was untrue– because, when I had the flu recently and was coughing up a lung with a spooky squeak to it, I was thrilled to see my old friend on the regular pharmacy shelf– and even better DM in the generic store brand. awesome. cuz I’m cheap that way.
only– what’s this? “non-drowsy formula” on the label? well, okay. not the way I remembered the stuff, but that couldn’t be such a bad thing, could it?
it could be malarkey, is what it could be. home from work at 6:30, coughing, squeaking, take a dose of the old standby cough syrup and lie down to rest my eyes just for a bit– and, oops, hello, midnight.
I’m thinking walgreens has a definition of “non-drowsy” I’m unfamiliar with.
so I decided I wanted to photoshop up a spiffy little “Embassador of Vox” sash for karen, just, yknow, because it’s so her (and, uh, yeah, this is the sort of thing I do at 3 a.m.).
so I did a little google image search for a sash image I could manipulate…
and ended up just getting all waylaid– because sashes are some freaky &$^*(%#@, man…
and now I do have to go to sleep before my brain implodes. so no sash for karen– but really? honestly? it’s for the best.Â
sometimes I want to have something coherent and profound to say but just don’t.
not that that stops me from opening my big gob a good portion of the time regardless. ;)
lately this blog seems to be doing a lot of skating along the surface of things– mostly pictures and media posts and not a lot of commentary. i should perhaps count this as a boon, as I well know how durned bogged down in words I can get. just that I find it odd, kind of unnatural, like some sort of holding pattern. well, maybe there’s a change afoot. isn’t there always a change afoot? a foot achange? step-ball-change.
one change is that I’m trying to have less insomnia, because it is insalutary. except here I am, hello, awake. I blame navarone time. well, not really. I blame the cat and also the profound and irresistible appeal of the internet. and also the dog who seems to have figured out how to snow me into thinking he reeeeaaally needs to go out, even at 3 a.m. when apparently he doesn’t all that badly.
sometimes it seems my life is one long series of distractions that don’t really amount to much. uh huh. like I said, sundayitis.
if I can simply get more people to read richard russo’s straight man, I will feel that much of my work in this world has been for the good. it is Comedy in the grandest sense.
I’ve realized something about myself– I have always gravitated toward love affairs and best friends– it’s the really really digging people, getting excited about other people, that gets me up out of myself. it’s kind of adolescent, maybe, and maybe exhausting and maybe difficult at times, but by and large the way I tick. it’s envigorating– and I think, I hope, the vigor I put into the world increases. whatever it takes, perhaps.
it is good to enjoy other people and to feel connected.
it’s kind of odd what a largely solitary experience moving to a city can be.
I was obsessed with this book as a kid– the haunted houses, the bizarre occurrences of talking animals, the whiff of an underside to this prosaic world. just thought of it.