BLEH

I am burned out.

I am sick of working nights and weekends.

I never see my friends. I don’t even think they notice anymore.

I am sick of a job where I just sit on my ass and stare at a computer screen and deliver page proofs to people like some kind of copy boy.

I have grown tired of some people’s refusal to recognize me as having earned the creative freedoms I feel I’ve earned.

I am pissed at myself for deciding that my love of journalism/visual editing should trump my more practical concerns about a sustainable career that wouldn’t be gutted by short-sighted corporate overlords who only care about fattening the bottom line AKA eventually making my job redundant.

I think I am overworked and underpaid.

I figure I don’t do anything about it because I am lucky to just be employed.

I am terrified of making a radical leap but I wonder if it’s the right thing to do, given the prevailing attitudes about people with my job description, and what my corporate overlords have in store for me in the next year or two.

I am being cryptic for obvious and obviously annoying reasons.

I am positive that blogging about these things is a really bad idea but I figure I have nothing to lose.

I want nothing but the best for my employer (and therefore my community) but I feel completely hamstrung by outside forces.

Thanks, weed

I trudged out into the back yard just now to hang up the bird feeder and gauge the weather (judging from the temperature inside my house, it’s a chilly 60 or so outside; this is hardly the case), and scope out the flowerbeds, which have yet to get any real attention from me, as I am waiting on my mom to come to town to tell me what to do with which bed. I just get paralyzed when trying to plan anything beyond container plants.

I noticed some weird little spindly weed in the flowerbed behind the back bank of windows, and went to yank it up. As soon as I grabbed it, it shot a dozen seeds at me — PINGPINGPINGPINGPING!! — and because I was groggy and still headachey and not exactly sure what had happened — did a plant just shoot seeds at me? — and I felt paranoid for thinking I was under attack, I grabbed its identical neighbor weed as a control group. And that thing sure as shit shot the same amount of little yellow seeds at me.

I brushed myself off and came inside, leaving those damn things in the ground.

(I bet some of you saw the title of this post and got really excited for some scandal. Sorry, as always, to disappoint.)

This is a picture of Now

I am on the balcony, laptop pulsing heat onto my uncovered legs, nose stuffy from a summer stress cold, red wine (Malbec) in a Graceland mug on the window ledge behind me, three citronella candles and a mosquito coil flickering around me, yet I see the mosquitoes in silhouette against my screen, darting here and there and up and down and, occasionally, settling on a patch of skin still enough to penetrate and make me flinch and slap at ghosts. The fact that I have covered myself in cancer-causing agents doesn’t matter to these creatures; I have been mosquito bait my entire life and they all want in life is what’s inside of me. The Red Cross couldn’t covet my blood at the level that these fucking mosquitoes do.

I have spent a week not off the grid, but beneath the grid, opting out of the constant give and take of certain social networking sites and programs and devices and notions. I usually love it, that cascade of constant information, but sometimes it feels a little less like a waterfall and a little more like water torture and I have to say enough and take a break. It was good to not have to deal with the constant pop-ups of the latest “news” but it left me feeling a bit clueless about even the most incremental bits of the zeitgeist. I’m an info addict and I’m not proud and I don’t know how to “fix” me and frankly I don’t think I need fixing and I’ve got a lot to say about the matter, see, but there’s no need because life is too short to keep having to explain myself to everyone else.

‘No feelings except this is right’

I am full of lust lately, the kind that propels you toward ways of living that most people consider silly and decadent and hedonistic and unsustainable. Aaaand that’s because they are. But it doesn’t matter; a person who can’t get behind hedonism is a person you shouldn’t care to know.

I want things. Things that have no real-life counterpart. Things that can only ever exist in digital daydreaming. That’s okay. I want to imagine the universe indulging me, and the actual oxygen-assisted feasibility of these circumstances is no impediment to my brain’s insistence on producing them.

(I want to stop typing sentences like that last one right there, but … no promises.)

I want to be on a beach with you. At dusk, the sun retreating and throwing long shadows recklessly onto the ground around us. I want your hand in mine, your palm finding its way to my stomach, my shoulders, my face, our grins meeting goofily, we are stretching, we are pretending to resettle ourselves on these towels because we are uncomfortable, but we are really just trying to get closer without seeming needy. We are sober. Hungover, slightly, maybe, but we’ve not had a drink yet today and the sun burns our backs but we are entwined and dozing off and trying not to snore and we will not move until there is a breeze that is so cold it makes us shiver and yawn and stretch and think about where we parked.

I never want to feel the need to write something like that last paragraph ever again. Ridiculous.

About that last post

hibiscus?

I need to say these things:

I bruise easily. Perhaps too easily.

I occupy no moral high ground.

I need to give people room to fuck up because God knows I have made plenty of room in my life for me to do so.

I … I’m trying.

Day 132: Blur

Day 132: Blur

I don’t even know how to keep up anymore. And they say the ride just keeps spinning faster and faster the longer it goes.

I had one of those moments tonight where I let some bit of the news get to me, stop me with a screech, hold my jaw tight in its hands until I paid attention and processed it and it made me feel sick. I read the pilots’ transcript from the Continental crash back in February, and just sat there with a heavy gut. To read that co-pilot talking about crashing with no idea that’s what’s going to happen to her less than five minutes from the moment those words left her mouth? I could vomit.

[Project 365]

I can’t stop listening to this lady

I love it when music finds me at the right time and I don’t have to do any work. I was getting sick of all my CDs and suddenly my friend Ay swoops in with a disc of ditties that I’ve not been able to stop listening to for two straight days. I’ve not even been able to pause it for long enough to listen to another CD she made me.

I sure hope that if you were in Nashville tonight (the 18th), you saw Thao Nguyen at The End.

In which I meet people I had previously only known as pixels

I met Field Guide today. She brought ice cream to my apartment! And now — don’t tell her — I’m getting her a ferret for Christmas.

I also met Howell, he of the Zooey Deschanel/Winona Ryder/girls-who-look-like- they’re-wracked-with-guilt-and-self-doubt infatuation, but his blog is private so I can’t link to it.

I love it when I meet online acquaintances and they turn out to be even awesomer than I had imagined.