"Undermining my electoral viability since 2001."

Light at the End of the Tunnel (?)

The law of diminishing returns is kicking in. This is the third straight weekend worked through, which is something I don't really mind terribly -- I've gone months and months like this before -- but which I recognize as questionable in effectiveness over time. If all you do is work, it's easy to slide into a mode of semi-constant semi-production: there's nothing to look forward to at the end of a task but the next task, so you don't really dig in and focus the way you might if, say, you had a big fun trip planned once work was done.

Yeah, 12 hour days at 66% productivity; belly up to the desk and stare into your pint of workahol, rummy. This is how so many "professional" people end up with broken relationships and no social life, I think, and it's frightening to see it might be happening to me.

Life is contrasts, a holy waltz of experience. Change is the only thing we can perceive. I believe it's true on a literal/micro level, and more importantly at a philosophical meta/macro level too. The feeling you get from moving fast isn't the speed itself, it's the delta, the change. It's physics. Force equals mass times acceleration, the difference in the velocity-vector over time. That's what we feel.

Which is a highfalutin way of saying I've been more than a little rut-stuck lately, and rolling with the dayjob 24/7 isn't helping much. I feel numb and restless. It was a convenient distraction at first, a nice excuse to shut out petty personal problems, but now we're down to the grind, and the pressure is throwing all my psychic flaws into sharper relief than ever. I'm struggling. The most important thing is to stop struggling.

Things I'm spinning my wheels over:

  • Ambition, the hungry dynamo within, is starting to give me heartburn. How is all this leading to global salvation again?
  • Having lived here for a year and a half, and still feeling like a social retard, not fully alive in my own skin.
  • Faces from the past, squandered love, etc. Don't ever let a girl tell you she's yr only chance at happiness, even in jest. Those statements have a way of sticking.

I suppose I'm questioning my whole situation, struggling through a particularly un-fun couple of weeks and feeling especially confined by my environment. This temporal crunch will pass, and I accept the fact that existential crises are persistent, that we don't ever really answer these questions. But still. The journey may be the purpose but I also want to feel some goddamn progress.

I want to feel. Change. Acceleration. Shifting vectors.

Progress. I want to believe in the divinity of my forward momentum. I want to make for that light at the end of the tunnel. I want something more than cliché catchphrases and bittersweet memories to cling to.

Fuck.

Oh well. Back to work. Next week I'll get my ass up to Oregon, see my mom, see some good friends I haven't seen in years. Perhaps swimming back upstream will help me renew myself.

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Responses

i haven't read your blog in a long time. but it's funny, i was just writing about the same thing... though you have a lot more university-polish to your writing that puts mine to shame. you can bring out fun (i guess fun) metaphors i couldn't possible ever dream up.
I want to feel. Change. Acceleration. Shifting vectors
this has a lot to do with the emptiness inside of us that destroys our relationships. we have the world around us moving and doing, yet we cannot perceive it that way for ourselves. you in particular have people you recognize all over the country and i'm envious! i'm very envious that you have so much, but i know that it's not always perceived that way.
why?
return to your pyramid. what levels do you really have?
i looked at it just now because as i was writing my blog, i remembered a post about it that was relevant to what i was trying to say, and wanted to use the same link you had posted.
i realized that even though i've artificially implanted one of the most basic levels into my life (safety), it was never there naturally. it should have been placed by my family, but that went out the window as soon as my mother... well... whatever.
so i guess my sense of safety is not really there is what i'm saying.
some days it seems like it's there but on these days, the days i'm feeling alone like this, the days i'm feeling most vulnerable and broken apart, is when i see that i've been alone for a long time. it's hard to feel like life can move when that happens.
i think you're amazing, really... even though sometimes i think you can be a little pompous. i think that if we had gotten a chance to get to know each other better it would have been a pretty cool deal.
one day we'll get that safety we seek (or whichever level). i think this kind of stuff helps that along.
free burma! ;)

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