maybe next week i will paint.  i haven’t done that in a very long time, mostly because i haven’t given myself permission to do.  but next week i don’t have to work until 3pm from monday through wednesday.  i have some errand things to get out of the way (like the substitute office, for instance—the tutee never called back, of course) but other than that?  would it be wise to see what i can do to make art?  i have so many other things that need to get done, but maybe…  maybe it would be a good thing, would be what i need?

i went to the knit shop today and sat with friends for 5 hours, pretty much finished a shawl.  then 5 hours at nola, with three customers.  sigh.  this blue-collar existence is, above all, tremendously boring.  just sitting and sitting, the wireless went out and so just sitting.  knitting.  the assistant manager from the walgreens next door came in looking for a computer so he could look in the county jail to see if his girlfriend’s ex, who didn’t get home last night, was in jail (and he was.) the light was nice slanting in the windows, i pretended i really was in the real nola.  but all in all, i’m really having to work at reminding myself that this is just another bizarre anomalous waiting period in my life, like i’ve had before, that it isn’t the rest of my life, which i get scared that it actually is.  i can’t let that be, i’m only half way through, after all!  surely it can’t all have come down only to this?  naaaah…only the halfway point.

spend a lot of time lately watching all of jack’s films, speaking of which.  all of them are freely and immediately available on the web now.  what can that mean, there they are, all of them, there they are.  i have them all downloaded into semele, i can watch them on picasa.  what would it have meant if he had hung on, anything?

today.  possibly because i have only been able to do my own work in my “time off” for so very long, now whenever i spend a day working on my art, or working up a knitting project, i feel guilty, like I’m goofing off instead of working.  I haven’t gotten it through my head yet that this is what i’m supposed to be doing!  i have set it up so that I can spend this year seeing what i can accomplish and the part time rec job will feed into that, and I must work on art now, it’s what the plan was.  I must stop feeling guilty doing it, it’s what i’m supposed to be doing.  instead i waste brain cells worrying that i’m not bringing in money, i’m not making enough to live on yet.  I’m supposed to be making things, not money!  Not just now, anyway. how can i convince myself of this?

R. came to the knitting group today and i was able to tell her about my new job.  of course, my mind says, r. is wealthy, she doesn’t know otherwise, but is that the case, that she doesn’t know?  does that make what she tells me incorrect?  they’re all wealthy.  does that make any difference?  that pedestrian view of money again.

i bought these particular guided journal list things, from among hundreds from which to choose (it’s a thing i do at the first of the year and then ignore; i’m always so hopeful for a new beginning) because they are by a woman i thought i remembered from art school.  she was a video art teacher, probably an adjunct, yes, i’m sure an adjunct and, although i never took video art (j had said i don’t do video and so i didn’t either, plus i always hated the look of video anyway) i have a hazy picture of her in my head setting up a monitor in a sort of anteroom off the old library courtyard; that specific, if meaningless, a picture but maybe i had the name wrong.  but it says in the bio that she was at otis art institute, so it must be her.  i extrapolate that she may have been involved in self doc, which I did do, of course, but no more than extrapolation and even that is spinning out into the realm of construction.  at any rate, now she is publishing guided journals, that’s a good day job, i suppose.  i should think of something I could do similar, some publishing venture, i know how it works after all.

but at any rate, connections or not, i don’t seem to be able to make the lists she invokes me to make.  still.  my mind freezes.  i don’t want to go there. even though i want so to be there.  what’s that about, i repeat?

i had prepared for this year of introspection by buying a couple of those guided journals, but then along came Our Benevolent Deity with this lovely new birthday present blog and i forgot all about them.  so I shall begin to work with them now.

only i can’t.  i never can seem to do it, as much as i love the idea of lists and questionnaires in which you inventory apparently arbitrary random categories, they cause me an anxiety just as soon as i get out of the introductory pages, as soon as i am bid to pick up my pen and list my x, or inventory my y.  i slam the book shut, i panic.  what’s that about, i wonder?

maybe that in itself is a place to start?

my to do list seems to have inside things on it for the next few days.  things i must do but if i did them next week that would be okay, too.  i’m thinking of giving myself the first block of navelgazing i’m supposed to be doing, instead. this year is supposed to be about figuring it out, after all, and i did a buncha practicalities this week.  hmmm.  perhaps.  reading, sleeping, thinking, that would be nice.  perhaps that is what i will do for the next bit of days, start again next week.  we shall see.  at present: coffee!  the last of this batch of donuts!  yum!

we are all in our troubled heaps.  at the very least three of us have employment emergencies, three of us, at present, have financial atrocities, two of us have relationship agonies and two others seem supremely dissatisfied with the lives they do have.  some of us are depressed, some of us have been, some are having depression thrust upon them.  and two of us are australians, so god knows what that might entail.  none of these categories are mutually exclusive but all of them, somehow, seem to be mutually supportive.

we don’t know yet what will ensue but being here helps insure that something will, i think.

there’s more to this gazing stuff than just stopping, just smelling roses.  i did nothing today.  i didn’t do anything i thought i would, i did nothing.  i surfed all afternoon.  i ordered pizza for dinner.  i did nothing, and i feel like…nothing.

well, that’s not it, is it.  i’ve done that now.  tomorrow looms and what will i do then.  other than surf some job apps for jobs i don’t really want but for which i must apply for obvious reasons.  i should find a realtor in port charlotte to begin the process of selling my land.  i should research the ebay store thing, i should i should, oh shut up, i’m not supposed to be thinking about that today.

see?  there’s more to this gazing stuff than smelling.  something else i must learn, o joy.

disconnected from the world, to which i wasn’t much connected in any case, preparing to do some of what jo spanglemonkey calls navelgazing. i don’t really know how to do that, but that’s nothing new, i don’t seem to know how to do anything i once knew how to do, like live, for instance. i know how to worry and wallow—i made a category for worrying over there expressly for such things, see if i can corral them there—and i know how to prepare for self-reflection—the lists, the books of lists, the proust (yes, the proust again; i’m hoping that the new translation will work this time)—but it’s much like the books i buy and then am chased from the room by the resultant book piles that i never seem to be able to read: i have too much on my plate to do anything much at all.

it’s always been that way but this is extreme.  since i’m older, i am finding that everything does really come back around again, twice even, and that does take some of the pressure off.  but i do know that i seem to have forgoten how to read, for instance—i who used to read without cessation once started—and haven’t really read a book for a year, ever since i went online.  i’ve listened to novels while commuting or laboring in the salt mines at the library, but read the way i used to?  i must recover that, that used to be what defined me!  perhaps it neen’t define me again, but i do want it back. i want a lot of other things back, too but reading is, as they say, fundamental.

i have decided to take this year to figure it all out.  i’ve decided that before, but there was never a year i could “take”.  now here is this year, right here, and time’s a’wastin.  so today i have disconnected, and will celebrate my own birthday without the worry that the phone will or will not ring, i don’t care, one day won’t matter.  this year will, though.  this year i will figure out how to do the rest of them.  this year i will fit myself back into my own life.  this year, and where will i be when it’s finished, this year?