Reset.
I get days like this last one every now and again, and I really, really hate 'em. I know what I want to do, I know why I want to do it, and I can't focus on it and instead spend my time in fantasy -- either rewriting my life or imagining fantastic futures of the impossible/magical variety. The stuff I want to be doing is *realistic* fantasy -- future visions I can cause to become reality. I can't make magical faeries that grant wishes, so that doesn't fit the bill. And the time machine doesn't work either.
So I can't get a do-over on today; it's gone. I can get up tomorrow and get done all the stuff I had been intending to get done today. Starting with finishing the Projects page, and then writing up all the little bits Grant'd catalogued for me in email. And calling Gabe again and see if I can get him involved with doing an artistic brainstorm for the Art section. And doing my follow-up calls from the weekend, and also taking care of the mundania of doing my INR blood test and two meetings of different teams from the Global Justice committee. That's a not unreasonable day; I can do that. Assuming I can crawl back over the event-horizon of my navel. Much like we don't really understand gravity, I don't really know how I end up in there in the first place, or what's attractive about it. (I do at least keep the lint-levels down, but that only explains why it's not unpleasant, not why it's attractive.)
What I'm doing is in Hebrew called "Tikkun Olam"; the usual translation of which is "healing the world." (Literally, closer to "Repair Everything," Hebrew's weird.) I don't really do it because I want to, I do it because I'm intimately familiar with my connections with the rest of the Universe and I need to make it better. Fixing environmental catastrophe feels to me like splinting my own busted ankle, tho' the only time that happened in real life I had a doctor do it for me. I'm fine with delegation, but while I could find a doc who did a better splint than I could, I don't see enough people around doing well at planet-fixing. So, me.
But planet fixing doesn't get me laid, or loved, or even fed and housed. My last fantasizing resulted in the Busy House Polyclan, which ran from '89 to '03 and also involved me being the leader of TriState Polyamory, and being able to do things like invite 3 dozen polyfolk over to my house for a holiday dinner. Maybe doing this work will help me make enough friends to start a new poly-family, but when I built the last one I was younger, cuter, a lot richer and conventionally "successful", and had already put ten years into building a model marriage, tho' my ex's narcissism wasn't something I'd acknowledged or coped with yet. But I could point to a very successful woman who believed in me, and that's what convinced a lot of other folk that maybe they should give it a shot also.
And I suspect that's why I end up in fantasy-land; I'm dreaming up time-streams where I get something out of it personally. One of the elements of my birth culture that I had already deeply internalized by age 3 was that we can get by on closer to nothing than any other critter ever evolved. This works, kinda, but it works by surrendering desire rather than by satiating it. "Oh, I can't afford that. Guess I don't get one, then." And life is about fulfilling desire, not surrendering it.
I'm about halfway through a stein of hyacinth tea, which my friend James from FNB turned me onto and which is available at Winco for about $5/lb. bulk. (And a pound of tea is a *lot* of tea.) After that, I go to bed. I don't know if that will have me in fantasy-land again; as I've said before, when my head hits the pillow the world goes blank and I wake up in the morning. But when I do wake up, I want my fantasy-generator to be secure in the idea that I will again build a big loving family, and have toddlers to play with, and live in my own nice house, and write life-guiding fables for my older offspring. (Any child of the family is a child of mine; I don't need to actually sire any, tho' that's fun too and my genes are proven good.)
I'd *love* for all of that to become real. But that's not required, as long as I can build a coherent and detailed enough dream of it to live in I can continue working towards it, and the work is the thing.
G'night.
So I can't get a do-over on today; it's gone. I can get up tomorrow and get done all the stuff I had been intending to get done today. Starting with finishing the Projects page, and then writing up all the little bits Grant'd catalogued for me in email. And calling Gabe again and see if I can get him involved with doing an artistic brainstorm for the Art section. And doing my follow-up calls from the weekend, and also taking care of the mundania of doing my INR blood test and two meetings of different teams from the Global Justice committee. That's a not unreasonable day; I can do that. Assuming I can crawl back over the event-horizon of my navel. Much like we don't really understand gravity, I don't really know how I end up in there in the first place, or what's attractive about it. (I do at least keep the lint-levels down, but that only explains why it's not unpleasant, not why it's attractive.)
What I'm doing is in Hebrew called "Tikkun Olam"; the usual translation of which is "healing the world." (Literally, closer to "Repair Everything," Hebrew's weird.) I don't really do it because I want to, I do it because I'm intimately familiar with my connections with the rest of the Universe and I need to make it better. Fixing environmental catastrophe feels to me like splinting my own busted ankle, tho' the only time that happened in real life I had a doctor do it for me. I'm fine with delegation, but while I could find a doc who did a better splint than I could, I don't see enough people around doing well at planet-fixing. So, me.
But planet fixing doesn't get me laid, or loved, or even fed and housed. My last fantasizing resulted in the Busy House Polyclan, which ran from '89 to '03 and also involved me being the leader of TriState Polyamory, and being able to do things like invite 3 dozen polyfolk over to my house for a holiday dinner. Maybe doing this work will help me make enough friends to start a new poly-family, but when I built the last one I was younger, cuter, a lot richer and conventionally "successful", and had already put ten years into building a model marriage, tho' my ex's narcissism wasn't something I'd acknowledged or coped with yet. But I could point to a very successful woman who believed in me, and that's what convinced a lot of other folk that maybe they should give it a shot also.
And I suspect that's why I end up in fantasy-land; I'm dreaming up time-streams where I get something out of it personally. One of the elements of my birth culture that I had already deeply internalized by age 3 was that we can get by on closer to nothing than any other critter ever evolved. This works, kinda, but it works by surrendering desire rather than by satiating it. "Oh, I can't afford that. Guess I don't get one, then." And life is about fulfilling desire, not surrendering it.
I'm about halfway through a stein of hyacinth tea, which my friend James from FNB turned me onto and which is available at Winco for about $5/lb. bulk. (And a pound of tea is a *lot* of tea.) After that, I go to bed. I don't know if that will have me in fantasy-land again; as I've said before, when my head hits the pillow the world goes blank and I wake up in the morning. But when I do wake up, I want my fantasy-generator to be secure in the idea that I will again build a big loving family, and have toddlers to play with, and live in my own nice house, and write life-guiding fables for my older offspring. (Any child of the family is a child of mine; I don't need to actually sire any, tho' that's fun too and my genes are proven good.)
I'd *love* for all of that to become real. But that's not required, as long as I can build a coherent and detailed enough dream of it to live in I can continue working towards it, and the work is the thing.
G'night.