Habitland: Day 36

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Start early. Get the window rocking in its pane, just ever so slightly, so you can pop through it when you must.

I would like to write on what I would like to write on. Just mark it down under the long, long, interminable list of things that are out of my hands.

Lunch today was bacon-wrapped meatloaf and a salad which I definitely need to make some time next week for myself. That could make a good number of meals. Alexa, I would say, if my electronic overlord had access to me here, remember the meatloaf. I’d also have more control over the random wheat carbs that were in it because it’s institutional meatloaf and institutional mushroom gravy and everything needs a little sawdust to puff it up for another 100 mouths. It’s a good idea.
There’s something nice, settling, relaxing, protective about the realization that it doesn’t really matter in the end if I do low-carb, or low-cal, or keto, or some pickle soup diet. It is never about the exact restrictions or the exact ideology or scientific benefit. What matters is that I feel it working and I stoke that feeling and that belief and that discipline long enough to see a difference. Then, I’m standing with enough elevation to decide something. From down here, from the place of the same 5-20 lbs, nothing really changes or hooks. The habit is simply a habit. But you can’t get to the whole “lifestyle change” garbage/personal heaven without passing through habitland. You have to walk in the direction of your dream, regardless of how you’re thinking about it, so the muscle memory.
So I don’t want to frighten anyone, but my goal, I think is to change enough to frighten people. Not in terms of being unhealthy looking, not in terms of having so much control over this that I lose control and become mostly skin and bones.  A walking sack.  No, that’s not the vision at all.  The goal is to make people realize how much I can do when I settle in and dig down and put my mind to it.  To make the discipline that dances in and out of my life so permanent, so powerful, that I can’t be seen as I was before.  That I get all the power and praise that comes from effectuating that level of change.
That I get that moment where everyone understands an inside the same as an outside.
Fuck, it feels very trite, save for the fact that when you haven’t had a moment like this, ever…and you’ve lived through eons of cycles pretending you don’t mind, you don’t care, you can be ignored and forgotten and made to be secret and unnamed…maybe I need to accept what my trigger actually is. What actually motivates me rather than what is supposed to.  Good health, body security, ability to not get fluttery over hills.  Yes, to all of that.
But maybe part of good health is a good body image. And maybe a good body image can happen when you accept that you have a body – one you want to carry your skull around and show off your genius.  Maybe having someone tell you something good might interrupt the sonic shell of bad news.  Maybe it’s alright to feel like you could get a compliment and it wouldn’t be about anything more than that.
Maybe!

Improvident: Day 35

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I’m in relatively neutral mood, save for the headache, bloody nose, and the winds of solitude roaring at the edge of infinity  As they are wont to do.

More reporting, not less, was meant to be the theme of this year.   Situate one’s self and knuckle down and review what is rather than what might be if only we were actually doing as intended.  The things we hold in our head as our guiding lights, our best intentions, our sense of our very best self.  That ain’t the map most of the day to day activity of life runs off of.  We’re a slow slog in the dark and we move towards lights to steady ourselves.  We’re all living on very sunless seas.  And it’s really only at those lights that we get any clue about the where and why and who of all it.  That we see the blood on our lapel, some injury incurred along the way.  That we glance back and see on the far-distant horizon, some blip that we can say, that’s where I was.  That we can glance forward and make out some tiny scar of illumination, take a deep breath and move forward.
It can be pretty debilitating to have to realize that’s about all the options you have.  Flail in darkness or take the long trail of beacons to no clear end beyond being further from where you are now.  But it’s true.
So I’m dieting.  I’m altering my diet until I go to ECCC. Because I would like to be there and not have the full sense of negative self-regard that always follows me on trips amongst geek-kind.
We’ll see how it goes.  It’s only day 4 of doing so.  I just am not doing the wrong thing for a hot minute and that’s nice enough on its own.  If I could figure out this sleep thing.  I don’t drink caffeine and I am USELESS during the day.  I drink it even in slight amounts and I yawn my way to 1:30 in the morning and have to scrape myself with a pallet knife to be mildly functional at 7.  I ought to be up at 6, honestly, to do life properly.  I have never been able to do life properly.
No Dimash on that random-ass talent show.  Maybe Wednesday.  I am all half-thoughts.  I am distracted by not writing the thing I want to write.  Another waiting game.
Best thing is go to bed now.

The Fight: Day 34

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Wrote. Ate low-carb.  Did not succumb to the massive amount of sugar and starch everywhere at my parents’ house.  Thought things would go a certain way.  They didn’t.  Slipped on the ice, luckily, I didn’t fall on my arse.

Day 3 of a good try.  Didn’t fall on my arse slash ass.

Potatoes Are Not What We Eat…Currently: Day 33

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Take yourself to task.  There were far too many items in the washing machine and it damn near exploded.

The cat is slurping as she washes herself over and over again on the floor.  I am not sure how to make this post today.

I’ve been trying to be creative and limit social media today.  This has been not an altogether successful mission, but lately, I’ve been feeling the sense of doing such a thing.  I’m feeling bombarded, both in good ways and bad, by ideas.  Things to worry about.  Things to do.  Things I could think about and build into other things I’m trying to be creative and achieve.  And it has become more than the small dustpan of my mind can handle.  So I have taken a certain percentage of the day to do what I do best, and that is, fuck all.

This, when it doesn’t coincide with someone’s plans, can be…a touchy thing.  We so rarely have touchy things.  But he says nothing and I say, tell me if you’re tired and want to sleep and aren’t going to go to bed unless we speak.  Don’t wait around for me.  I’m not…as I’ve heard it said…your girlfriend.  I am bending over backwards as it is to be generally available, to be generally present and picking up the phone.  A few hours without having to drop my train of thought to get on yours is all I’m asking.  One night to not have to live the reality of this half-fulfilled existence, to take my ball and go home.

Ah, sigh.

Instead, writing projects.  Instead, some MST3K.   Some Sunless Skies once I worked that little bug out. Some not giving into sugar and carbs so I can say Day 2 of the low-carb till ECCC plan is actually happening.  Going into a few fugue states – metaphorical ones, in actuality, more of a Pinterest freefall for writing inspiration that is a really bad idea on a number of levels.  More of that digital overwhelm when I just need to rely on my own brain to think up the details rather than relying on constant predigested inspiration.  That’s the worst, least effective kind.

Tomorrow:  we cook.  We see my mother and I square how she sounded on the phone with how she looks.  Nobody’s called me so, I’m assuming it’s okay for now.   Like she said, what else can you do?  Like Prof. Brian Cox said, the forward motion of time is a constant: everybody’s going to tomorrow, there’s no getting around it.

I’m yawning.

Let’s wrap this up and emerge from our psychic chrysalis tomorrow, fresh and awake and ready for life.   I’ve picked my spells.  I know what I’m needing to do.  There’s some intent in the haze.  Time to give myself the sleep necessary to make some of that happen.  Sleep sounds really, aggressively, objectively wonderful right now.   I think I am going to close this laptop up just after I press post and try and make shit happen in the land of Nod.

 

 

Fluff and Bother: Day 31

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So, I had good intentions, I guess.  To eat the nice food I made.  After running around like a madwoman, getting my phone which I had forgotten in my fugue state,

And then, because I had to walk across 5 parking lots to get to my office and have it drip all the hell over the marble floors to even get it to a sink, I thought, you are staying there.  So I have that to look forward to tonight, this evening already burdened with holy obligation.
I have decided that I can’t deal with all the things in my head to do with J.  What he should be.  What he is.  What he isn’t.  What I’m becoming as a result of standing in someone’s natural and organic fallout zone.   I can’t figure out what the universe is telling me.  Or I am so plugged up with scars in my mind and heart around the idea of it that I can’t act on any particular instinct – to stay, to go, to accept, to fight, to laugh…everything seems weird now.  My instincts themselves feel like they’re based on dodgy inputs.  That can’t be true, ultimately, if the impulse is to take care of myself.
If I am calm and sit very still, the Faithless Light says I’m fighting her.  Says I am not hearing her, I’m hearing a story I want her to say.  I’m too filled up with…what is at this moment…the final slice of my birthday tiramisu…to let what is true in.   It is let him go, but then it is quickly, let everyone go, everyone that ever was.

Stuck in a Vortex: Day 30

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Paraphrasing from a recent TED talk I heard: The energy it takes to get you out of a warm bed into a cold room is the exact same energy required to change your life.

I heard this two days ago and still hit the snooze button until the last of the last possible moments before the hellfire and threat of unemployment finally rousted me from my agitated half-slumber.  This morning, at least, I found a way to get myself moving at 6:15am and in that pre-dawn hour, get out the door with enough time to swipe the massive drifts of snow from my car and get to work by 7:30am for an event that in no way required me to be present.  But here I am, with that extra half-hour of work time under my belt and enough positive energy to start writing this now.
I want the time tonight.  To do taxes, to think, to write something else, to deal with some true truths.
Therapy was today.  And after rushing to get myself out and there, it was sort of this agonizing, powdery exploration of the basic terrain of my heart.  Stomping in the dry, musty fields of teenage hopes and dreams.  Trying to excavate and tamp down at the same time.  To circumnavigate it all and yet not move a foot.
I’m so confused.  I answer the phone almost with a weird feeling of self-awareness.  Of falling for the ol’ three-card monte.  Just enough vigor on his part, just enough exhaustion on mine and suddenly, he’s crazy about me.  Thrilled and desperate for me, wild about me.  Rapturously moonstruck over me.  For 30-40 minutes, I am entirely convinced that I have it all wrong.  I am his and he is mine and all the things one thinks when one is cooed over and the center of attention.  Even in my terrible mood, I feel immediately beholden to his better mood.  I feel silly and girly and cared about and chosen and selected and accepted and flattered.  Ultimately, flattered by the intensity of the whole intimacy thing.  Eventually, I say I can’t work on the writing project until this weekend, he says no problem.
We hang up.
I think, beneath the roar of the heater, about how my therapist told me to think about things – about the things I’m choosing not to think about – and I feel in this moment like I’m trying to take a sobriety test.  I go back to the usual rack of tabs that await me, including FB, and see the same post that was driving me mad last night.  I see at the bottom, and there’s a comment indicating he finds this woman a cool drink of water.  An hour’s passed.  Or something.  One can register these things lightly or heavily as one chooses.
Sigh.  All of which is within his purview, I suppose.  All of which is in his remit as a person on this earth who has no commitments to me.  She’s as far away as I am.  She’s surrounded by heaving, turgid masses, of men, each of which appears to be hoping to be chosen, in a casual, text-based way.  She’s probably a real human being with feelings, thoughts, personality – about which, in this moment, I’m electing not to give a shit. It’s all a game. Nothing matters and the longer I hold onto hope, the longer I stand in the fire.
I re-read the first sentence of this post and would like to dive into the sea.  The frozen, vortex-locked, endless sea.