life has been grey

I'm not sure why, but life has been very grey for me lately. I think that it has something to do with change. Everything will be changing soon. I'm not exactly sure what will happen, but my best guess is that I will be moving away, starting a new job and starting a new life. Beyond this though, I think, in general, I don't like the idea of working. I never have. I don't want to spend my life working in the sense that I don't want to waste time doing something that isn't really going to impact people's lives. It's hard to express exactly, but I've abhored the 9 to 5 and disdained the idea of having a position, a title. It's all too limiting. I understand why it must exist, but for me it doesn't fit. It strangles.

My whole life has been this adventure that God has placed before me. Going as the wind would take me, from here to there to the next place. I didn't care about anything else. I was caught up in what I could do and what I could be. I was in love with the world, trying to understand it, trying to grow, trying to make a difference. Perhaps now, I am burned out. Perhaps I am just older and things happen and you stop having the freedom to ride the wind. I want the freedom back. How dare they make me a prisoner...I am a spirit to not be tamed.

Maybe I can find my freedom... maybe I can find the wind...

poetry with an old friend

Today I'm visiting an old friend from highschool. We used to run free during physics class to sit in the flowers and write poetry. To bitch about the world and how we were going to fix it, when we were niave enough to think that it could happen. She brings that old warmth to me. Inspires me to do the things we once did... write poetry, good, bad and indifferent about everything we saw and felt. Paint and run naked or paint naked or paint running or all of the above. That was a very happy time. I'm here with her. She's taking a shower and I curled up on her bed to write poetry as I always used to ... my first poem in many years. Take it for what it is --

I don't know when I'll see you again
during the soft brush of lips
meeting for the first time.
The thought lingered spoiling some hidden corner of my mind
but my heart never listened

I don't know when I'll see you again
the tear streamed face holding me hostage in the airport lobby
and freezing my hand to the handle of the jeep
engine running, shaking with the anticipation of the rough mountain road ahead

I don't know when I'll see you again
falling out of my mouth at 3 am
after the circling logic of how to bring North and South together
left nothing but this single thought in an awkward silence
my eyes too heavy to stay awake,
my heart too heavy to let them close.

I don't know when I'll see you again

Frustration -- more of coglife

SO, I'm sitting at my desk. The clock on the wall is slowly ticking away the minutes - ten after five, I should be going. But, I can't and thus the source of my frustration. What began as a simple access database has turned into developing a BC4J application --> I am NOT a programmer. I know the basics of scripting, tagging and relational databases. But this is over the top. I've spent the last 2 hours staring at 5 lines of code wondering why in one case they query the database through a view object and the other with an SQL statement. I suppose it doesn't matter much at this point since I can't get either to work.

I can't stop daydreaming about places I should be going or other things I should be doing or even just getting in my car and driving home with the windows down listening to "Autumn in New York."

Last night I went out and bought a "struts for java developers" book from the supergeek section of Barnes and Nobles and then spent most of the night reading it, encouraging me that today I would understand this much better than yesterday... which to some extent is true. Unfortunately, I spent the day fixing something that broke for an unapparent reason putting me yet another day behind... and so I wonder as I look at the clock... "If I stay late and finish this tonight, will it work in the morning... or better yet, if I work on it this week, will it be finished by next?"

Why can't the next chapter in life come already? Do I have to live in Cogville?

Going on vacation

I'm just about ready to let loose and take a vacation. It been so long since I've gone away for the purpose of relaxing -- hm, Christmas Break 1999 may have been the last one... wow, that's a while. So. I'm going to the Poconos Mountains in Northeastern Pennsylvania with my mother's whole family. Interesting.

I can tell I'm ready for it. I mean there are signs all over the place:

1. Everytime I get on a computer to work, Spider Solitaire is opened within the hour.
2. Even though I'm super broke and having a hard time buying groceries, I bought bright pink nail polish and painted my toes.
3. I just graduated from Grad School (and if that doesn't prove I'm ready for a vacation, nothing will)

It's probably not the ideal vacation in the sense that I didn't plan it or having anything to do with what will happen -- or then again, perhaps that's why it is the ideal vacation. Nothing went into it. Absolutely no work on my part. No thought, no energy, nothing... yes, that is ideal isn't it?

never know when it will hit you

Yesterday, in the monodrom tone of being a cog, a spark went off reminding me of life before and after cogdom. Once, long ago and far away, I lived and worked in Haiti -- a place of beauty and turmoil that forever uproots and changes you. Life there beat me up and stole innocence I didn't know that I had left (I mean, you can only be so jaded right?) Anyways, for the past year, I have tucked these memories out of my mind to someplace even I didn't know where they were. Until yesterday. I recieved a phone call from a man who is traveling to Haiti and wanted some advice about what to do. It all came back like a flood, gushing out of my mouth before I knew how to stop it. I even felt that twinge in your throat and eyes that tells you, "I'm being fricken emotional here."

I didn't know that was left anywhere in me, but apparently it was.

I think this blog would be so much more interesting to read if I were still in that life. Running around on the back of pickup trucks hauling computers through the jungle to a fishing village somewhere in the mountains of the carribean. I mean, how can I compete with that building databases in the midwest -- I think the point of cogdom has been made here.

Life, I suppose is full of trade offs. History teaches that. Adventure traded for stability, freedom for security and onward. But we all have our limits in both directions. No one can live without a certain amount of freedom or security. So you define your limits and live within them. Sometimes life pushes you beyond those limits, and I suppose that's when you grow or you stretch your limits. I'm planning my next adventure. Well, not planning per se. I don't have any concrete thoughts about where I'll go or what I'll do. But in the sense that I am preparing myself to head back out to the wide open spaces where I belong. I took these jobs temporarily to gain a measure of finacial stability and freedom, but my eyes are scanning the horizon -- waiting -- knowing I have something out there that will again call me.

My friends are all having babies. All babies, no weddings. I'm a bit old fashioned in that I think children should be raised in stable homes with parents who are commited to each other. Our generation wasn't, half of us were brought up through divorces. I suppose that's why we don't think about marraige as the foundation of family. From a sociological / anthropological viewpoint this transformation in our socity in so interesting. From the dawn of humanity we have had ceremonies for passage of rights / the foundation of family and the tying of kin but these traditions, so important for thousands of years are disappearing. I can't fully believe that they are dissappearing though, I would imagine that they are being replaced with new traditions, new rites -- but what are they? What are we doing to signal ties of kinship? I am curious.

A cog

I realized yesterday just how many people are cogs and why the idea of getting a job never appealed to me. It is not that I do not like to work -- for those of you who know me, you know this for sure -- its that I love to work with the passion of what I'm doing. So many people work without being connected to their work, without being concious of what their work is producing and that is why I never wanted to work. I never wanted to be a cog.

Even now, I am at work but I have nothing to do. I am simply waiting. If in another situation, I would develop a new project or something. But I'm waiting.... waiting for that time.

The first of many ordinary days

Since I have been terrible at journaling and letters have turned to emails, perhaps I can refind that journaler in me through this blog. We used blogs when I went with the team to Haiti. That was great. It was reflection and communication in one fail swoop.

So today, what was it? Hmm, sunny. I laid in bed late this morning. That's one thing in particular that I love about the summer time. I seem to wake with the sun, and on saturdays, I still wake up early with no where in particular to go. So I get to enjoy that rare feeling of half awakeness with sun pouring in through my half-closed shades. I then further indugled myself by re-organizing my closet before going to work. I find that closet organization is a hidden quirk of humans. We all do it very differently. We never talk about it, and yet, it has some hidden importance that seems to change the outlook of a day. We have so many of these little things -- traffic, our gardens, the way breakfast smells, the kind of soap we use, our favorite shirts and shoes, that pen that we love the way it writes. It seems like such a shame that such immense pleasures are hidden away for us alone. But I suppose that very fact, the ability to enjoy them irrespective of the rest of the world, is what makes them so great and makes us who we are.

Work was uninteresting. I spent 8 hours editting video for a project that I've been working on for the past few weeks. I like the project well enough, but was one of those things that somehow I ended up on, not really know how. It's ok though, I'm having a good enough time with it.

I hurried out to my parent's house just after work around 8:00. The windows were down in my car and the cooling evening air was blowing my hair. It was boogy nights on the radio and I was jammin to my paragative and poison as I pulled off the highway. After passing through Dexter, I was nearly home racing the sun down Island Lake road. The sunset was beautiful and I realized that was one good reason to live through another day, just to see the unique and beautiful painting that flashes across the sky. I was escaping to the country. Every weekend is a mini vacation where I can smell the fresh air and breathe in the smells that come with life. I was meant to be near land. To work outside. Why I have a master's degree that ties me to a computer I'll never know.

I had at best a 1/2 an hour to pick up work on the projects that I have been doing. Mainly, I have been digging small fish ponds in my mother's garden where my dad can grow his trout and mom can have her goldfish. Two ponds are dug, one's full of water with two semi-neurotic fish inside, but the edging has yet to be completed. The earth is mostly clay, so along the edges we have decided that we will dig out sections to grow different herbs. I have been thinking about how this would look and have wanted to try it for a good week or two. I got halfway around the first pond when mosquitos reminded me why you don't work in the evening in the country. (At least they aren't Haitian mosquitos which seem to bite at every hour of the day including at the heat of a 100 degree noon.)

I turned in to vegetate with mom in front of the TV, bring this ordinary day to closure.