housewife's brain

and by "the tunnel of fudge", i mean feeling
like you're alone and helpless in a dark scary
place, immobilized with fear and mediocrity.



when the novelty of not working weekdays wears off, the distance between what you've always really wanted to do and what you're doing now becomes pronounced. cavernous, really. it's basically you, alone with some disorganized ideas about what you want to do, and the fear of not doing those things, and the fear of doing those things but having them be patently unsatisfying, all the while the mer-man of mediocrity just hissing and shaking his webby fist at you, getting kelp and pond scum all over your living room sofa, eating all the snack food that you bought for the dinner parties that you never actually have.

a surpisingly instinctual defense to this predicament is to try and sleep it off. you quickly realize that this will only vault you to a whole other level of constant sleepiness. i'm talking about sleeping at a competitive level. the kind of sleeping that bestows international sleep symbol status, and puts one in strong contention for "sleepiest man alive 2006".

so you fight the good fight, staying awake, listening to NPR, drinking tea, trying to eke out one little measly new blog entry, thinking that at least this will be something you did today. then a piece comes on NPR about a former housewife who, after reading the at-the-time recently published book "the feminine mystique", decided to take all the creative energy that she was putting into her kids halloween costumes and birthday cakes and channel it into writing novels after her kids moved out of the house.

you try to find encouragement in her story, hope that you too will someday be able to imagine your way into the fullness of your own potential. but mostly, you begin to think that everything that you've been doing up to this point is about as important and meaningful as decorating a birthday cake or organizing a closet. you keep thinking about that pathetic commerical from the early 80s where the woman is frosting a cake with a paper knife as if this is some kind of accomplishment on par with conducting a national symphony.

i wish someone would hurry up and write "the ted mystique" already. or i wish at least my kids would go ahead and move out.

one more cup of coughy

get well soon


the last time i remember getting sick was being slammed with a sinus infection on my girlfriend's sofa, lying there in an open-eyed catatonic sleep for days, vegetatively propped up in front of the television (until i was wrenched out of my stuper, with marty mcfly astonishment, after discovering on "access hollywood" that saddam hussein had been in captivity for four days now, while brad pitt was going to baghdad to lend his support to the troops).

aside from that episode, i usally don't remember getting sick. i remember almost getting sick, but somehow fighting it off at the last minute. this is probably because i remember very clearly the one time that i actually mastered the common cold overnite, through a combination of extreme blanketing, total stillness and the meditative practice of falling head-long into the feeling of discomfort rather than expending energy trying to avoid it. the idea was basically to free up any bit of energy i had and donate it to the just cause of the microscopic battle that my immune system was trying to wage.

and hand to god, it worked like a champ. i went bed with a sore throat and aching bones and chills and fever, pre-approved for a week of more of the same, and i woke up the next morning feeling tip-top a-ok number one. it was a pretty startling revelation, the idea that i could stop myself from getting sick simply by unleashing my awesome mental powers, and sweating a lot. what did my doctors know? with their "childhood asthma bla bla bla" and their "your tiny nostils make you more prone to infections"? i had found the second opinion i'd been looking for my whole life!

now in my third bout of the coughing head cold since january, it would seem that my wellness method, while tried and true, is not as easy to pull off as i was hoping. and as the sniffles once again go cat toy on my sinuses, i can also now clearly remember having watched "unbreakable" a couple of days before my little epiphany, which proabably gave me an inflated sense of super-poweredness.

it's not that i don't believe in the abilities of self healing, mind you. but clearly, with great power comes great disappointment.

me vs. the mailman

WWKD?



my life is divided into two halves:

one half pulls the curtains closed whenever he is not home, because he lives in a small single-floor bungalow in a charming, tree-lined but ultimately crimey city filled with what he imagines to be peeping thieves. he also generally closes the curtains in the evening, since the warm glow of open lighted window panes at night doesn't translate well when one's house is a mere gym-class-shoulder's-width-apart from his neighbors' homes. he understands the importance of this kind of squirrelly separation, and even relishes it at times.

the other half is a sucker for the metaphoric openness of allowing the sun and the green and the outside world into his home, and he leaves his curtains open during his weekday afternoons at the house. he even moves his home office out into the living room just so that he can have a little mini yoga/meditation studio to honor the idea of this openness and receptivity. almost every day, he can be found there practicing his kooky little "quiet calm and unobstructed beauty" exercises, usually dressed in his boxer briefs, because they're the closest thing he has to the "yoga shorts" the guy on the "yoga for athletes" tape wears. it's not his best look, as even at his most athletic physique, the whole thing plateaus somewhere around the level of a shirtless captain kirk kind of thing. but this half doesn't care about that because yoga and meditation and open receptivity is about getting the mind to let go of that which truly does not matter.

recently, the two halves collided when, just as one half finished some afternoon yoga, the other half began to panick about whether or not he had sent his mortgage payment this month. so he walks into his living room/office capatin kirk style and kinda sweaty, and sits down in his mesh office chair to quickly check his on-line bank account for the payment. just as he logs in, the mailman shows up at one of the living room windws with some letters and a small box.

with his sweaty naked back to the mailman, bare legs perched on the feet of the chair, hunched in front of his monitor in frozen terror, his eyes shift back as he tries to assess what his next step will be. any movement might attract the mailman's attention, whereas sitting still will afford the cover of the chair and possibly allow his presence to go unnoticed. "stay put" he thinks.

"knock-knock", he hears.

"the small box. he wants to give me the package. he sees me. just stay still and look like you're reading the screen."

(knock-knock-knock)

"oh my god he's still here. and he probably thinks he's busted me masturbating to my on-line bank statement. which is neither true nor plausibly deniable given my current situation. oh please just leave the package on the porch."

(shuffle-shuffle. knock. shuffle. fading foot steps...)

"stand up and walk away slowly at first, then quickly. don't look back...i wonder what's in the box..."

have you seen this man?

suspect, aug 2005; computer simulated image of suspect, aged 6 months and more accurately depicted


the suspect was last seen on this site in august of 2005, fleeing the scene with 100's in unwritten blog posts. he has been known to use the alias of "terd", although he will respond to "ted", "edward", "hey mister, you dropped something", or "miss jackson" if you're nasty. suspect is considered well-intentioned, somewhat lazy and full of excuses. approach with low expectations.

if you have any tips leading to the suspect's happiness, please post them here.

it's time to...

having recently started a weekend nights job, you suddenly find yourself with more free time during the week than you know what to do with. do you:

a) investigate different career paths, possibly by discussing some of the relevant issues with a career counselor of some kind?

b) try your hand at writing songs like you promised yourself you would do?

c) try doing something completely unexpected in the hopes of shaking things up a little?

the midnight struggler

as it turns out, the money IS in the toilet


when i was a kid, i used to have these dreams about getting things that i wanted, but that never ended up being quite what i wanted. i often dreamt about owning a pool table just like one that my neighborhood friend had owned. except, without fail, my "dream" pool table came with hollow wooden balls that never bounced or rolled right. and they never made that satisfying noise that pool balls can make upon impact with one another. they just made these tinkly underwhelming lincoln log type sounds instead. the other regularly recurring dream/disappointment that i had was getting a ferrari just like the one in magnum p.i., excpet mine was this awful ford probe tan color. i think the idea i was trying to convey to myself was either, "careful what you wish for", or "sometimes the things you want aren't what you expect them to be", or possibly "you can't have nice things".

all of which is to say that, in a lot of ways, i've been preparing for my recent job change for most of my life.

in the months of worrying about my impending layoff, i spent a lot of time wondering about what my dream job would be. still without a clearly articulated passion after 32 years, i came to realize that what i really wanted out of a job at this point in my life was the most amount of money i could get for the least amount of hours worked, the least amount of responsibility shouldered, and the greatest amount of stability offered. the idea was something that meets my fiscal goals and engenders a modicum of financial independence, that doesn't require too much effort or worry, and that frees up a bunch of time to explore other interests and lines of work.

i suppose it's the average dreamjob for people who don't really know what they want to do when they grow up. but could such a beast exist? if it did exist, what would it look like? and perhaps more importantly, what would it eat?

as it turns out, it does exist. what it looks like is a three-day-a-week job doing more data network bla bla bla stuff, offering relative stability, comparatively low stress levels, and slightly more money than i made at my last job. here's the kicker: what it eats is my friday, saturday and sunday nights, between 7pm and 7am.

after having one weekend under my belt/down my throat, i can honestly say that this schedule is not as bad as one might think. there are definitely some side effects. for instance, i generally no longer have a solid idea of what day it is or what time it is. also, while i don't find myself particulalrly tired all the time, i do find that my general internal clock being suddenly imbalanced makes me think that everyone else around me is tired all the time.

by far the hardest part is being at work twice in the same day. that saturday morning/saturday night and sunday morning/sunday night thing can feel a little strange. i imagine it's something like filming a scene where someone was going to menacingly dunk your head into a toilet a few times, bringing you up for air every so often to see if you're now willing to cooperate. but it's not like it's actually happening to you. it's just like pretending that it's actually happening to you because that's the scene you're shooting, and you have to do multiple takes.

i'm pretty sure today is thursday.

put me in, coach

my god, man, put some clothes on


there are a lot of things one can learn from therapy, but at the end of the day the whole enterprise seems limited by two rather unpleasant axioms:

1. if you torture the details of your life for a long enough period of time, they will eventually tell you anything that you want to hear.

and

2. regret makes the world go 'round. (you'd think it was love, or maybe human connection in general, right? nope. as it turns out, it's the failed attempts to get those things that's the stuff of life.)

which is why i spent a couple of hours on saturday at my local coffee shop filling out the first homework assignment/questionaire from my new "life coach".

now, what is a life coach? well, webster's dictionary defines a life coach as "a trained professional similar to a pet psychiatrist for humans, often encouraging people to have better habits and to do things other than stew in their own head juices; see also 'american liesure class' ". so far, the main difference between a therapist and a life coach seems to be that a life coach is more forward-looking and optimistic about the future of your emotional diet, whereas a therapist tends to be more backward-looking, sifting through the stool samples of your lived experience with you, trying to identiy the things you shouldn't have been eating in the first place.

being that no one likes to touch their own poop (with the popssible exception of some german and japanese porn actors whom i've accidentally seen on the internet), my life coach homework assignment was a refreshing alternative to the therapy approach. mostly, it was about listing the things i'd like to change about myself and my current situation. i wrote a lot about being happy with what i have been doing so far with my life, and about how much potential i think i've got for more and better versions of that happiness. but i also wrote about my desire to have more follow-through with my own interests, and my own plans for cultivating them, rather than leaving them partially completed, in large part, because i so easily lose sight of how beneficial the results are going to be. i got pretty excited, actually, as i began to remind myself of how rewarding it could be to focus on seriously developing a career path in line with something other than simply money and stability, or putting my nose to the grindstone on hatching sustainable, feasible, long-term creative projects like writing short stories, or being a good enough musician to start a band.

of course, when i got home, all i did was think about this stuff some more. and then i got bored and took pictures of my middle finger dressed up in paper doll outfits that had my name on them.

the irony is lost neither on myself, nor my middle finger.