This Too Shall Pass

It's a liberating - or unnerving - concept that this too shall pass. But it shall. All of it, whether good or bad. For me right now, feeling bogged down by slowness and infected sinuses and molasses, it is a beauty of a thought, shooting me across the sky into some sort of perspective.

As some of you know, I work as a transcriber. Work that I am very good at, and which my conscientious self takes pride in doing well. And work that I'm also not very disciplined with, because it's not really suited to my temperament.  A word of advice:  if you're going to work from home, make sure it's something you love.  It makes it just that little bit easier :)

I'm also in the process of studying to work as a personal care worker for people requiring assistance in their homes, and to get out and about in the community.  The space between this job and the next feels like it's going to drag on forever and ever, but in reality I will be trained and ready to go in my new work in five months. Hopefully. I am still to organise my placement - all 120 hours of it - before I can get out and working.  Hopefully I will be able to have all of that done and dusted and in five months be off and running ... or as off and running as a CFSey person can be :)

My anxiety screams that five months is way too long because money. Money is tight and I have not been contributing much at all in recent times, leaving my partner to shoulder most of the burden, which awakens pretty much every demon that I have, giving ample opportunity to feel depressed and like a useless loser, basically.  I've been trying to drum up extra transcription work, but it's not been all that forthcoming.

And so once I move into my new part-time work situation, combined with the disability support pension I hope to begin receiving soon, and suddenly the world of Susie will feel a little less precarious. And I will be able to resume a regular writing practice again.  Because my world has been as wobbly as a fault line for some time now, and I need it to stabilise for my health's sake, both mentally and physically.

So I will hang on till then. Wait in the fire, wait in the fire.  This too shall pass, and what has felt like it's forever coming will be here and I can relax.

To be brutally honest, the thought of washing old men's testicles is terrifying to me. The thought of assisting the old man who lives on the end of the testicles to remain independent in his home for as long as possible is exciting and gratifying. The former I will get used to. Hopefully not the latter.

And so I wait until then. But it's a stressful wait. To be honest with you, I'm struggling. Money woes, old trauma that rears it's head up and threatens to devour. Health going up and down like a bride's nightie so I can't get any purchase on anything, so I'm not productive, so I feel like shit. 

I feel like shit. And I feel apologetic about it because I'm paranoid.  And I feel paranoid because almost menopause.  And so this post is turning into a whinge, but I'm sorry, I'm just simply not shiny.  I'm tarnished.  Too much time on my hands with menopause looming so close to be able to resist overthinking.  Which contributes to the extra health things.  But I'm trying.  I'm trying so hard to climb out of this pit.

(In fact, I think the problem with me is not so much that I don't try as I overtry.  And I overcare.  I know this, but I've come to know it just a little bit better lately.  I so want to be free of the past ...)

And so I can't wait to get out there working, in whatever capacity my chronically fatigued body will allow me.  I really can't wait.  I know I am going to be so much happier when I do.  Perhaps then I will be able to write posts that are about things that extend a little beyond my very own navel ;)

To finish, in my class last week we watched two episodes of Derek.  Have you seen it?  Ricky Gervais plays Derek, a worker in a nursing home, and all it took was 29 minutes or so to have me gathered in and in love with these characters.  A lovely light-hearted look at ageing, disability, and what it means to be human in the very best sense.  Gervais is so brilliant in this.

More Poet-Musicians/Less Private Equity CEOs

Pic by John Riordan

Sometimes you see and read things on the interwebs that bolster your faith in humanity's ability to continue cutting through the bullshit to the other side.  Past the cultural tipping point to actual change.

This morning it was this:  On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs by anthropologist David Graeber.  Ever wonder why the jobs that actually benefit humanity the most - say, for example, the ones that give it meaning, the artistic fields - pay the least while those that we wouldn't notice if they disappeared - telemarketers and private equity CEOs - flourish?

Like they say, if something seems fishy and incomprehensible, follow the money.  And in this case we find again that it's those 1% at the top who are framing, defining, and determining the world that we live in. 

This morning I feel just that little bit more hopeful that humanity as a whole will one day say no to our cultural overlords continuing to pull the wool over our eyes.



Here's to new reframes.  And to work that is fulfilling and which matters.  Work that benefits us all.  And here's to corporate lawyers who are really poet-musicians being able to work at what really matters.

*clink*

Possibilities

Possibilities, if they were to behave in a verifiably predictable manner, would surely bubble.  What else are possibilities going to do except bubble?  Unless they're a more languid sort of possibility.  I imagine that the longer-held ones, tempered with time and doubt but then boosted with more bubbles, would change consistency.  They would become more floaty, sometimes almost completely still, trailing their hands in the breeze :)

I am reminding myself of the possibilities this morning, the day of my return to work after the Christmas/New Year break.  Granted, a return not to the gruelling physicality of an eight-year-old working a 12-hour shift down the mines.  My work situation is a trial in other ways.  I work from home providing transcription and secretarial services.  It bores me beyond tears, but there are freedoms to my current situation that I so appreciate.  I can climb out of bed at 9 and still be at work on time.  That's if I decide work is going to start at 9.  Some days it's a much better plan to write for an hour before getting down to work.  Some days, when energy is low, work time starts after lunch.

Working from home is the perfect scenario while you're sorting out your health.  I have had chronic health issues for 13 years, but am now excitingly closer to having the pieces to the health puzzle sorted than ever before.  I really value the flexibility and space in my working day.  But there's not a whole lot of soul.  Really, it's boring as batshit and I am chronically understimulated.  And so that's why today, as I feel the chafing of the admittedly free and part-time tie tightening around my neck, I am thinking of possibilities for change.  New possible work directions that make me bubble on the inside.

A decent baseline level of health is important when it comes to being able to step into your possibilities.  And I'm not there yet.  Sometimes I don't realise how restrictive health issues are until I get a bigger burst of energy, and then I see the world open up, and consider how many things I could do in one day.  And then, sadly, the bubble pops and the days snap back into a smaller place like a piece of giant elastic.  That's what happened this last week.  The day after Christmas we went for a bike ride, and then the next day I went for a two-hour walk, and the day after did some yoga.  It felt so nice to do those things and have a bit of leftover energy for other things as well.  The days opened up.

But then the day after that, my energy levels dropped, and all I felt like doing was sitting outside on the decking with a giant pile of books and the umbrella up, reading away the hours.  Which was lovely and delicious in itself, obviously.  And I soooo enjoyed it.  But it wasn't freely chosen.  I have so many pent-up bike rides in me, but yet again the window, at least for that day, was closed and the curtains drawn.

Something goes on in my body to make it more fatigued after anaerobic exercise.  It's a longstanding question, a big piece in the puzzle to sort out.

After reading about the experiences of one of the wonderful peeps on the Pyroluria page on Facebook, I've begun to suspect maybe ammonia overload is the problem.  Yeah, ammonia.  Slightly unpleasant smell on your floor or in your toilet, but sometimes after I have exercised, or when I'm having a sauna, I can smell it in my nose.  Which is sorta creepy.  My poor body, along with all of the other shit it's accumulated over the years, seems to have issues getting rid of the stuff, and takes the opportunity when some anaerobic activity comes along to dump it, and that causes my energy levels to drop a few days later.

I need to do more research into exactly what happens in this situation, but I feel like I've maybe hit upon a reason to the problem.  It makes me very grateful that I bought my sauna all those months ago to help my poor ole body;  it is proving invaluable.  As is the advice and experience of those on the Facebook group.  From the wisdom shared there I have now begun a protocol of taking activated charcoal tablets a couple of days out of each week, which help mop up the ammonia. 

Charcoal.  Burnt wood.  I mean, is there any end to the life-givingness of trees?  Even when they're dead, and burnt to a crisp, they're sexing it up.  Trees, I bow down to you with my hat doffed low.

Where was I?  Possibilities.  I have bubbly hope that improvements on the health front this year mean more space for bubbly possibilities.  Work possibilities.  Finding a niche or two.  Having some of those elusive spaces come close enough for me to actually touch them.  I'm feeling inspired by the example of others - like The Pollinatrix, who has come via spine bubblings of synchronicity into a fascinating niche of her own.  I'm feeling inspired by the different ways people find to do things which shake up the situation and bring freedom where there wasn't before.  One small example of that is these people, who run guided tours.  There are two options - take the tour for free, if you so wish, or pay what you think the tour was worth if you want to pay.

I love that idea of "pay what it's worth".  It throws out compulsion and opens up the possibility of generosity.  I suspect that many people, in that situation, would find generosity welling up into that space and would end up paying close to what they would have paid if there had been a set amount to begin with.  But freely given.

WDs and NWDs

There are two kinds of days - Work Days (WDs) and Non-Work Days (NWDs).  Today is an NWD.

(You could perhaps get an NWD mixed up with a WMD, but for a couple of differences:  (1) NWDs exist.  And (2) while WMDs are destructive implements designed to wield havoc upon your enemies, NWDs are beacons of constructivity whose most destructive implement is a pen or a pair of scissors and which wield joy and pleasure upon me (and the enemies which exist in my own soul, but that's another story and not this one).

When your waxing and waning energy levels are once again on the rise and Speedy Snail (see below, in my double-paged art journal entry, click to enlarge) is functioning in an upright position, then NWDs also become an exercise in comparison.  Cleaning the toilet becomes an enjoyable task because (a) you're not working and (b) you got here.  Physical issues over the last 13 years have meant that there have been more days than you could count where you would have liked to have cleaned the toilet but it would have to wait till tomorrow.  And even though cleaning the toilet uber quickly loses its lustre, even this version of chopping wood and drawing water becomes a pleasure simply by dint of the fact that you don't do it nearly enough because you keep running out of time (or energy).

Clock time is a pain in the arse at the best of ... well, times.  You just don't like each other very much no matter what day it is.  On WDs it marches relentlessly slowly while you're working, and your concentration levels being all over the place as they are you retaliate by  skyving off work and going and looking at Facebook instead.  Which, unsurprisingly, means that you're working at 11 pm some nights, berating yourself for once again not having the physical wherewithal to be able to focus, damn it.

In contrast to WDs, clock time in NWDs develops bipolar mania and flies.  Already it's 1.30 and what have you done today?  You've cooked breakfast and you've attended to some health matters, and you've done some prewriting, partially cleaned the bathroom, and done lots of work in your head about the creative nonfiction pieces you have brewing on the backburners.  But no matter how busy it feels in your head, it never looks as accomplished in your physical environment as it feels from inside your noggin.  There is more going on inside your head than there is energy inside your body.  This is the adrenally challenged, copperheaded land of Speedy Snail, where the mind is racing with creativity while the body, in various forms, lags behind.

Not too far behind lately, however.  Because the energy is rising, and you suspect it's rising to levels of stability you have not seen for decades.  You do not imagine you are going to be in this land forever.  But whatever land you find yourself in next,  you know this:  time (unless it's kairos of course) and its stupid, boring linearity will surely not be a friend of yours there either.

Chaos Theory

I love science.  We live in the most incredible time.  It feels like some sort of bizarre cosmic coincidence to me that so much is being discovered in this age that I want to learn about, and yet I'm so bloody information overloaded I could miss the most amazing things right under my nose.

Erin told me in an email exchange this morning that apparently they have discovered a neutrino that moves faster than the speed of light.  This has ramifications for the theory of relativity that I would like to have a month to sit down and solidly read all about - starting with learning what the hell a neutrino is - and then to ponder it, to turn it about in the sun, and see what it looks like in the dark, or when it's raining.  To see how different that makes the world feel.

Learning and understand more about science is an ongoing quest for me, because it's gotten bloody interesting.  What they've discovered over the past decades ... how it's so anarchic on that subatomic layer, that excites me in my guts.  But I can't hold together what I learn about subatomic layers and quarks and neutrinos.  It falls apart when I try to rearticulate it to myself, let alone anyone else.  And so I have to come back to it again next time.  And so I enter in the door again, learn and feel a little spun-out, and come out of it with nothing but a sense of wonder and a complete, utter inability to feed it all back.  It's like dream language.  It's a kick to my intellect but it's a buzz to my creativity.

I hate rigid systems that kill people's souls.  I'm very glad that the world we live on is proving to be anything but.

I decided earlier on that I would go and look up a little more about chaos theory ('cause this is what I do when I've got a spare five minutes, then I wonder why I feel informationally-overloaded).  I like this description here:

After nearly two decades now of work by Chaoticians made up of the leading scientists and mathematicians in a wide variety of fields, the evidence is overwhelming. The world is not a gigantic clock where everything happens in an ordered and predictable manner.The real world is fundamentally disordered, free. Chaos reigns over predictability.Simple, linear systems which are causal and predictable are the exception in the Universe, not the rule. Most of the Universe works in jumps, in anon-linear fashion that can not be exactly predicted. It is infinitely complex.Freedom and free will - the Strange Attractors - prevail over rules and determinacy.

Yet Chaos is no enemy and destroyer of Cosmos, for from out of Chaos a higher order always appears,but this order comes spontaneously and unpredictably. It is "self-organized." The creation of the Universe is an ongoing process, not just a one time event at the beginning. All and everything - and everyone - is part of this creative process. Over time all systems - from molecules, to life, to galactic clusters- are continually creating new organizations and patterns from out of featureless and chaos. The world is not a Clock, it is a Game, a Game of Chance and Choice. In the game random processes - chance and serendipity - allow room for free will, individuality and unpredictable creativity.

The Ultimate Paradigm Shift 

There is something about this chaos theory that reminds me of what it is that frustrates me when I look at how so many organisations operate with their employees.  I talk about this quite a lot on this blog.  It seems to apparent to me, but I find it hard to articulate what is so apparent.  I feel that the way business run shoots them in their own feet.  Ultimately it comes down to a control issue.  Because I think that humans operate best on a self-organised basis as well.  We need to have freedom to work spontaneously and unpredictably.  Or at least I do.

An organisation puts rules in place to keep it functioning effectively.  But those rules hamper and hinder and constrain because the people operating under them are not free.  For the rules to work properly, people would have to have enough internal freedom to be able to know WHY the rules are, their context, their meaning, what they're wanting to make happen by their existence rather than simply a punitive sort of a stick put there that will beat people who don't conform to them.  Then, if there are free people who understand the meaning of the rules, they still have to be not so rebellious as to be unable to function under the rules (my problem).  They have to be able to stand up under the rules so that they don't stop thinking, and using their nous and their consciences.  So that the rules don't make them feel claustrophobic so that it feels their personal turning circles are taken away from them (my problem), but that they point their thoughts in the right direction so that they can come to these conclusions themselves.

How does all of that work, though, when you are an employee at someone else's employment?  Even if you don't balk at being a cog in someone else's wheel, a chaos theory business would need to have a low fear level and a high willngness to make mistakes.  And I've never seen that in any organisation I've ever worked for in my life because they all by nature become conservative and boring.  Which is understandable.  People who start businesses are so invested, the business is so much of a reflection of themselves, that to let go, to let it fly off and be self-organised, is too dangerous.  Especially because you know that if you give that much freedom to employees, they will abuse the system.

But I've always liked that biblical suggestion to farmers that when harvesting their fields, to make sure they leave some for the gleaners to follow, those people who are poor and hungry.  I think that those who abuse the system are poor and hungry too.  Space should be allowed for people to fuck themselves up.  Because what is lost through those people is gained in the freedom of employees who have space to be individuals within a communal culture.  The right and the left combined.

But all that's pipe dreams, really, because I don't think I'm ever going to be able to find a company to work for that doesn't make my throat tighten with its rigidity.  Maybe some day I'm gonna have to do it myself.   Get me a co-op.  And a good idea.  Or maybe if someone publishes one of the four pieces of writing I've got out there waiting for a home, that'd be a start :)  In the meantime, I guess I'll just keep me and my rebellion here at home, typing transcription, dreaming about how it could all be so much better :)

The Job Interview

The suburb of Melbourne you find yourself in, with its emphasis on concrete, fast food outlets and bedding stores, is depressing and like a hundred others.  You can't pretend that it doesn't depress you, even though you know some other people for whom it doesn't clam them up in that way, and so who would therefore call you too sensitive, or snobby, because you are not like them and ergo there must be something wrong with you.  But all you know is that that environment makes your guts sag.  Whatever weather there is to be had in this place feels flat and breathless.  Even at the end of winter, the sun is beating down too harsh without trees to soften it.  You cannot hear any sound of animal life.

The office where you are going for a job interview faces out onto the McDonald's next door.  You have to press a bell to be buzzed in, and once you get upstairs to the first floor the overhead panel of fluorescent lights hits you like a moving morgue.  The air feels lifeless here;  partitions separate you from the unsighted workers who are going about their business with a low hum.  The atmosphere here makes you realise again why you are interested in doing a building biology course.

The woman who welcomes you directs you over towards the sign-in register.  You begin to feel as if you are going into a top-secret government laboratory facility, rather than a service agency.  After you sign in, the woman instructs, could you please go and sit in that chair over there, and wait for the interviewer to come and get you.  After signing in you notice a sign pointing towards the loo.  You think that you will just duck there quickly before taking your seat.  You only take one step in that general direction before the woman who greeted you rushes towards you saying, "No, no, no.  This way."

You tell her that you just want to go to the loo, and she shows you the way, and as you walk past more partitions and offices you have an olfactory hallucination where this space begins to smell to you the way the nursing home did when you went and visited your grandmother.

After your ablutions and your waiting in the chair reading Woman's Day and Reader's Digest, you are directed into the interview room where three people wait with pens and papers poised to inspect you like a stick insect.  Their questions are designed to assess your personality and aptitude a little further, to see how you would fit into their organisation.  After all, you don't have the requisite experience in dealing with volunteers, which is a large component of what this job entails, along with some desktop publishing.  The actual job itself sounds pretty good, to be honest.  They haven't had a lot of applicants because the agency deals with an area that is very unsexy.  The actual job is 32 hours a week, which makes you gulp, because you haven't worked 32 hours a week for a long time.

They continue asking their questions for what feels like 14 hours or so.  You have no idea if you are making a complete dick of yourself, realising a previously unknown psychiatric illness to everybody except you.  You think that you give an answer which pleases them sometimes because they say, "Mmm" with a bit of an upward inflection.  But you have no idea.  You bumble a lot and nervously drink from the glass of water they have offered you.

You are already thinking with longing of your home office.  It looks out on trees and trees.  The rosella has begun coming to visit outside the window on occasion.  You have your ioniser there, so the air always feels fresh.  You do not have to sign in and out.  Sure, the work you do is boring, which is why you are here.  But the work gives you the flexibility to have your mornings free to write and meditate (or at least this is the plan - you are struggling to get back into those regular habits lately).  You do not know how you would fit everything in with this job, and this makes you feel like a loser as well because so many other people you know work 32 hours a week or 52 hours a week and they don't complain about it.  You, you're feeling your throat tighten just at the thought of it.

You are, to all intents and purposes, far too sensitive to your environment.  And so this becomes the weighing factor - if you are offered the job, a job which you could quite like and could even see yourself losing track of time in occasionally, would that balance out the fact that the thought of coming here every single workday every week every month is already making your chest constrict?

You wonder - perhaps, to keep you motivated working in your home office, if you shouldn't just simply go to job interviews every week.  See what you're not missing.

The Big Bureaucracy in the Sky

For centuries and millennia, the "big mean god outside yourself" has ruled over cultures and civilisations.  There is nothing like something more powerful than you whose actions you can't predetermine to keep you in line.  Children the world over with unstable parents understand how that drains their adrenals, making shaky the ground underneath their feet.  Just waiting till the big god turns up in thunder and quake to tell them how they have got it wrong this time.

Then I think of Jesus saying things like, "No, no, the kingdom of heaven is within you.  Go searching there for God.  What you see out in the world is what you are projecting out onto it.  Go inward to find new ways of understanding."  And yet Christianity  was co-opted by the power structures-that-be and turned into a weapon to use against the people.  The same old same old.  A remix of the angry distant god in the sky, just waiting to send people to heaven or to hell, a destination you could never be sure of until you got there and it was too late.

I jump now to the workplace situation here in Australia.  We don't project our power out onto a distant god in this workplace.  We project it out into a big faceless bureaucratic book depository, so that now it is not enough for one person hiring for a position - say, a childcare position - to be able to use their intellect and intuition and understanding of the life experience of another - say, a mother with two children - to determine whether that person will be able to do a good job.  Even though the mother obviously has the experience, she must complete various certificates, jump through various paperish hoops, so that the childcare centre can breathe a little bureaucratically easier because it can tick the right hoop boxes and cover its legal bottom.  It is only with the pieces of paper in place - the police checks, the various certificates doing stuff she already knows - only then can the childcare centre believe that the mother is to be trusted to do the job she is asked to do.

It's the same-old same-old.  The everyday people's own autonomy overridden in the name of getting the safety and peace we crave by instilling it in something or someone outside of ourselves.  Rather than being able to discover our own autonomy by going within for it.  The internal autonomy that breeds creative thinking, a personal power that in the right wind can breed kindness.

A workplace culture where the people themselves are allowed to develop and use their wisdom and commonsense in assessing other people's fitness for positions would be a far safer one.  It would not be an easier one, though.  The people who are making responsible decisions would have nowhere else to run to but than to their own responsible decisions.  And that's scary.  Because people are different, and that is surely giving too much, well, space and authority to one person, is it not?  Surely better to invest that authority in dusty law shelves containing Acts and Rules and Procedures drawn up to govern the people, which nobody reads unless they have to because those things are dead.

So to enforce those Acts and Rules and Procedures, strangely-wigged individuals who neither know nor probably really care about these particular incidents judge the people according to the squiggles and lines in the Acts and Rules and Procedures.

In the workplace, the people who are walking around alive doing the actual position must go and get their authority to do that position from groups of other people who do the training and set up the hoops for them to jump through for their pieces of paper.  Other people who do not know you and will maybe never see you again doing your job you are allowed to do after you get your little piece of paper.

This is the continual, ongoing and dreary method employed by bunches of people who are so scared to make decisions from an internal authority base.  We need to make everything as safe as possible, and in the very process of trying to get that in some Excel spreadsheet form everything is awfully unsafe because nobody is allowed to act freely.  We always have our eye on What Is Expected of Us By the Outside.

There is no more unsafe a position than outsourcing the inherent authority and wisdom and power and experience that can be contained in one single human being allowed to live freely, to learn and to make mistakes.  That may not be bureaucratically safe.  But we are not bureacrats.  We live and we breathe.

There would surely be nothing safer (though life can never be safe) than a culture where people are allowed to learn how to feel at home in their own valuable skins, and how deep we people go, not just in stupid directions but also in wisdom directions.  It's not until you are safe in your own skin that you are free to observe the higher universalities that make a community a common fraternity rather than a gaggly group of people, isolated from within and from without.

The Black and the White

The black:  on Tuesday I got an email from the people who I do transcription work for, telling me that my work has been so below par the previous few weeks that if I didn't lift my game, they would not be requiring my services anymore.  It was pretty nice to have my boyfriend there to blubber all over when I got that one.

The white:  the very next day I got an email from the editor at MX newspaper (the local freebie that is distributed at train stations) telling me he was printing one of my train stories!  Not for any payment, mind, but hey, money ain't everything, even when you're not sure how the hell you're going to pay your rent (again).  But wow, a whole stack of people read my words on Tuesday evening on the train.  That's some sort of (scary) buzz :)

Life, it just doesn't come out all neatly packaged in sitcom-sized portions, does it?  But there's always so much good going on that to be focussed on the negative dilutes the positive.  And the timing couldn't have been better for that second email; it sweetened the bitterness of the first.

And the first gave me an opportunity to understand a few things about myself, to redouble my work efforts (it is all hunky dorey on that front once again).  But even better, an opportunity to incrementally toughen up and suck it up when I'm criticised instead of taking it quite so personally;  that's a sore spot for me, unfortunately, but that is improving as I am getting older. I am so grateful for the people in my life who help me along to seeing things clearer when I'm wallowing in my weak spots;  there is just no possible price that can be placed on them.  They are, quite simply, priceless.

Nothing too Serious

Gee, it's gotten serious in Susieland the last few days.  Worrying about money will do that to you, I guess. I've been more broke than ever recently and so this has been part of the decision to begin working from home.  Doing the same dull drear, but being able to slip it and slide it in at my own behest is a freedom I am taking great pleasure in.  It's also partly the reason why I have been blogging far less recently.

Still trying to find the rhythm.

Working from home, I am able to work more hours more easily.  Because I need to ramp it up now.  It's time to do that.  But I have been ramping it up a little the past month and I don't really have anything to show for it right now.  All this financial bizzo makes Susie stressed.  Far better a personality geared to bartering, but what do you do?

And now Olive, my up-to-now well-behaved 1998 car has blown a gasket - well, not quite.  She's worn out her crank shaft and her crank shaft gear and bottom pulley.  Apparently.  Cos I mean, how do you know?  Do I feel exposed and vulnerable when having my car fixed?  Yes, yes I do.  Do I need to dwell on the possibility that I may be being fleeced out of 650 bucks I don't really have?  Naw, I guess I really don't.

So working more hours in the land of Susie but so far it not really paying off could get a bit depressing.  It did this morning, I must say.  I have been working from home for a month but I am still finding my rhythm.  Life has suddenly gotten a lot busier.  And so all I can do is continue what I am doing.  Soon I hope I shall be able to begin to save some money (what a concept).

But it can all get a little serious a little to easily.  Therefore, so much better to turn my mind to the things that make me happy, to look forward to the weekend, to seeing my man, to make space in my head for the very things that I feel I don't I have time for.

And so hence this afternoon I flit about inside the playroom that has now really become a workroom.  And from the computer comes a column pitching idea to a local daily, comes two short stories that I have waited far too long to send out into the world once again, to writing a little something Jungian about a dream I had, to doing a little yoga, to blog.  To gaze at the beautiful bunch of long stemmed red roses sitting on my desk.

The things, in short, that I do not believe I have any time to do.  Or any business doing.  Or that will make any difference.

The things that make me feel alive.  That scare the hell out of me :)

Life's too short to fall into the well of seriousness about all of this stuff.  But even beyond that, I am very mindful of my energy levels, as a post-CFSer.  Sometimes it's physical.  But sometimes it's psychical.  Sometimes my energy levels are directly related to the blockages that are still being dislodged from within me, the dastardly amount of internal voices that stop me from doing what I want to do most.

It's those internal bastards I have in my sights right now.  And, miracle of amazing miracles, amongst the dirty dishes and the too-long-between clay binges and the joy and happiness that is a new romance there is also this - this ongoing dismantling of those things that have held me captive.  An everyday sort of a miracle.  Sometime very amazing.

I am Ariadne, and I am Theseus, and I am the Minotaur.  But one of us is on the way out.

Hello There, Everybody

Hi, everyone!

I do miss writing here.  Before I know it, it's been 10 days.

I feel like the creative cogs are beginning to spin oiled again.  They are always seemingly necessarily accompanied by more meditation and yoga.  I have learned over the years to sit up in the ivory tower of my mind.  Before I know it, my body is trailing out behind me like a pair of jeans flapping on the clothesline, and I wonder why I feel flighty, anxious.  I cannot still my mind enough, nor be centred in my body enough, to write from any kind of interesting/interested space without those two beautiful, beautiful practices.

It is entirely unsurprising to me that when I do practice yoga and meditation that I remember my dreams more.  It is a never-ending source of amazement to me how different life looks when it is centred from within my body. All the good stuff happens from this space.  The world regains some of its mystery and beauty from here, too.  I feel earthed, I feel whole, I feel slightly less loopy :)

Although the cogs are becoming oiled, the thought of actually sitting down to write here has been a bit unappealing now I've started working more hours from home and therefore typing more.  On top of that, I have also been chatting a whole lot online to a certain person, and so the last thing I have felt like doing the past 10 days or so is sitting down and ... typing more in front of the computer!

But I shall return.  Last week was my first week of working from home and I actually put in an extra 12 hours of typing time that were due to glitches and ironings out and stuff-ups that saw me transcribing without a foot pedal for a few days.  I plan on using some of those extra 12 hours on more edifying things like blogging and smoothing clay over the next few weeks :)

I do miss this space so!  Someone commented to me a few weeks ago how so many blogs across the board have slowed or halted completely in favour of Facebook.  I admit, I am particularly guilty of Facebooking myself into a frenzy.  But Facebook can never replace the likemindedness of blogging, for me.

I love this time of year.  It is a time of rebalance, after the heat of the Summertime and the relaxing of every sort of timetable possible.  Now, as the earth balances herself, with the Northern and Southern hemispheres experiencing the same beautiful sweet sort of weather, and the earth approaches the equinox, where day and night are equal, I find myself returning slowly to greater balance also.  How about you, peeps?  Wots up wif you?

Working From Home

I may possibly have the opportunity to work from home doing my current rather dull job. The upside of it would be that I would be almost solely doing Family Court stuff, which is the much juicier human element cases involving custodial hearings instead of Federal Court and Australian Securities and Investments Commission stuff about companies that have gone bankrupt and other such dullnesses.

The upside of working from home is that I would save on commute time, and I could do things like walk the dog on my lunch breaks, etc. I am trying to be honest with myself about how disciplined I would be; working from home, you really need to ensure that you get out and socialise or else it's all like four day old bread really quickly. And that whole deal of working in your PJs is charming for, like, a day and then it really wears off. I am finding it difficult to really be able to gauge how well I would go because the last time I did it I was (a) living with another person and (b) I was sick with CFS, so it's all totally different now than then. Socialising is a much easier option now than it was then.

Even though it's not like I get to socialise a whole heap at work, I still see people on the train, and in the cafe and in the lunchroom and stuff, you know? I can imagine there would be days where I was unmotivated to go out and would therefore spend an entire day at home without seeing anyone. How would I go with that? Would I go loopy loopy?

And yet I go entire days without seeing anyone regularly. I ROCK at solitude. I enjoy being alone for a couple of days in a row without seeing anyone and yet I am one of those strange people who are also extroverted and if I do not see anyone for two days running I will begin to wilt and start wondering if I am hallucinating my own existence. Too much time alone can be really crappy if you're on a muddledness and self-preoccupation binge, or it can just be great if you're in the Zenzone.

When I am in particularly earthed periods where I feel both grounded and connected to God, a day spent doing the most routine of things can be a long prayer. And always when I am in those sorts of spaces, my creativity is revved up also. I don't imagine working from home would really in the end be a whole stack different than what I am doing now, except that I would get to spend more time with my dog. It would be easier in terms of stopping for ten minutes or so to jot down a particular writing idea that has occurred to me while I've been focussed on typing. I guess that is one good thing about my dull job - and yet it's still not washing dishes. There is too much concentration occurring to be dozing off awake and upright the way I do when the dishes are being done, and the gloves are coming off once or twice in a washing session because a good phrase occurs to me :)

Workin' for the Man Sucks

He came upon a pond and as he swam there it became colder and colder. A flock of creatures flew overhead, the most beautiful he had ever seen. They cried down to him, and hearing their sounds made his heart leap and break at the same time. He cried back in a sound he had never before made. He had never seen creatures more beautiful, and he had never felt more bereft.

The Ugly Duckling

Listened to a podcast last night about a bloke and his wife and his four kids who launched out into an artistic career, because he felt God telling him to depend on him, with everyone around him telling him he was being "irresponsible" and quoting verses at him about "if you will not work you will not eat" and he felt like a loony but felt like God was telling him to. And he hasn't gone without a meal ever, even though the electricity has been cut off from time to time, and he still feels like a loony but he feels free and like he is doing what God is telling him to do.

Sometimes I wonder if God is telling me or suggesting things to me and I'm not listening. Or not believing because it sounds too good. I'm inclined to think, "Why me?" Why should I have a satisfying job being paid to write when heaps of people have shitty jobs bored out of their skulls? I don't want to buy into that Gen X thing we were brought upon that all of us are meant to have wonderful amazing jobs. But then on the other hand, why not? Hope deferred makes the heart sick and I've been working shit jobs for several decades. Writing and being published is right there in front of my eyes on the newstands but they might as well be on Jupiter if I don't believe it's possible. And I don't really. But I do. But then I don't. Sometimes I think the greatest yearnings I have for freedom, to run out the door and fly into the wind, to go and work in Alice Springs, to write and keep writing, are the most responsible followings after God I could do if I had the courage. Other times I don't know if I am hearing anything at all, or if I am it's just my own ego. Sometimes i think if I could just hear him tell me in that crystal clear/hardly heard way that I so love and hate, along with a few wet fleeces on the ground, I would be off like a rocket, going wherever or doing whatever. Other times my knees knock together at the thought.

I am at work feeling unwell. Feeling inspired by what I heard last night. Wondering and wandering. Working for the man.

Crappy Jobs and Combat Tactics

I'm feeling pretty hamstrung by my job, I gotta say. Some weeks I'm fine and it's all in perspective. It remains the dull, dreary job it was last week but it just stays flat in my mind, you know? I keep it interesting by chatting for reasonable stretches of the day to my workmates and by doing arty-type things and peopleish-type things when I'm not there. Then it all stays in perspective.

But there are other weeks where it just feels like the hamstrings ping every time I use my legs and the claustrophobia sits on my chest like asthma. Some weeks I want to pack a bag and run off screaming down the road like my hair is on fire, never to return. Some weeks it is obvious in every part of my square peggedness how bad a fit this job is for an extroverted, people-lovin', life-lover. And then I dwell on it and it depresses me, and starts pulsating, like the walls when Neo began to understand his onenness and stopped all those bullets from Agent Smith's gun. (That movie revisit was so enjoyable this evening, it didn't even feel ruined that I couldn't watch the part where Neo visits the Oracle because the CD was scratched and wouldn't budge through it. Still my favourite line: "I know kung fu." Heh :) And all that black leather's not such a bad deal either. And hey, yeah, alright, so Keanu could play Pinocchio and he would NEVER turn into a real live boy but stay wooden for the whole ride but he has a certain charm notwithstanding all of that, and it's not simply physically related either 'cos when I want that I watch Point Break ;)

Anyway, where was I?

I think part of the problem with having something you're forced to do regularly that you dislike is not the thing itself so much as the way it looms and rears itself up at you like an ogre. Sits itself in the corners of your mind (alongside the misty water-coloured memories of the way we were). Even with a four-day week, I find myself struggling in the middle part; then I come home and feel depressed and don't do the things that would help me maintain perspective.

What is the deal with that? It patently pisses me off, dear blogger, that all it takes for me to keep my job in its proper perspective is art-making and meditation, and that very often I avoid doing the very things that will make it all feel bearable. Oh, who shall rescue me from this body of death?

Well, for the next six weeks at least it's Northcote Pottery who, for a reasonable sort of a fee, shall give me lessons while I immerse myself into clay in the presence of other living, breathing human beings and maintain my equilibrium at the very same time. I shall be making a human head and a standing figure and some sort of a bottle or vase or container, and learn some glazing and surface treatement techniques, and finish with a sculptural piece of my own choosing. And just typing this I can feel the bubbles flipping in mah belleh.

It's enough to make me dribble out the sides of my mouth. Hopefully I shall resist doing it onto my lovely new blue flanelette sheets I am about to go lie on. Gee, I hate shopping, but now I have shopped I have nice new sheets. The formaldehye fumes time have had time to clear (evil stuff, hence the "wash before use" directive that I have obviously ignored) so now I'm off to read in cosiness. See you on the flipside.

BE FEARMONGERED! BE FEARMONGERED! THE SKY IS FALLING!

*Picture the robot from Lost in Space flailing its arms around.*

At work today have appeared bottles of antiseptic hand gel. It's taken me all afternoon to click on to why they've appeared now.

It's in reaction to the flu season that is about to be upon us and also to the swine flu that, if you listen to the media, is also about to murder millions of us any day now. Hopefully. The Australian media is having multiple orgasms about it even though there AREN'T EVEN ANY FUCKING CASES IN AUSTRALIA YET. Even though there aren't even enough fatalities worldwide to shove into one office of a World Trade Center building or one square kilometre of African starvation lands. It's not that I don't believe there could be an outbreak. It's that every single time there is a tiny chance that something catastrophic may possibly happen, it is the lead-in of news reports. But the reports aren't about anything substantial that is actually happening. They are about what might POTENTIALLY happen.

Yeah, well, an asteroid might plummet through the roof of my work and kill me. I might get spinal meningitis. I might get a job I vaguely like. I might ever complete and have published a piece of my own writing. I might die a slow and painful death by being driven mad by the fucking media. Millions of things MIGHT happen. Meanwhile, children starve to death all around the world every single day. And I was sick for over six years and never once in my life had I inoculated myself against it by fearing it, and it happened anyway.

Get a grip, workplace. Get a grip media. Who is holding you accountable for your detestable practices? And as an aside, and for future blog posts, when are we, the people, going to start realising that in a very real sense the reality that is out there is the one that we create every day, collectively and individually, by our fears and our insistence on everything being separated, and begin to make some real changes instead of being told we cannot do anything?

(Yes, I know my swearing count has increased again, but when it comes to the media - and the willingness of humanity to be fearmongered - you can't swear enough. )

(I had a squirt of the antibacterial hand gel just in case :)

Links: 'We need to be inoculated against outbreaks of panic': Deborah Orr
The Swine Flu Pandemic - Fact or Fiction?: Dr Mercola

April breezes

It's very warm here today. There is a breeze, which looks like it is going to grow up and become wind and send me mad.

Oh, I want to fling myself out into the world. I want to walk down a road, and never come back. This feeling is impaled, agitating, in the middle of my heart and not even meditation can quell it. It's only a feeling, I tell myself. Only a feeling.

Are You talking to me underneath? Is this You or just my own anxiety? While we're there, can you turn down the wind?

Oh, and a new job. A new job before my marbles go rattling off down the street and into the gutters.

Ho Hummity

Okay, whinge alert. I'm about to have a bit of a whinge and you, sweet blogger, are therefore about to read it. (But here's a shortcut: I'm about to whinge about going back to work tomorrow, so if you just skip to the comments and say "oh, poor susie, it's okay, who knows what will come up this year for you workwise?" I'll never know you didn't read the whole post :)

There's nothing for it tonight but to comfort eat. A large custard tart, which may possibly be all gone by the time I've finished this post. My holidays are over tonight. Rushing in swirling is a compacted combined feeling of all the Sunday nights of my childhood. O depressing night. The claustrophobia. The frustration at having no option but to get up in the morning and go back to skewel.

I could do comparisons, I suppose. Even though comparisons are oderous to me. They deflect you away from really acknowledging to yourself what you're feeling. But let's try.

I could be working 60 hours a week as a boilermaker, or a chicken sexer, or a prostitute, or a politician. Really, sitting on my bum to clear 30 bucks an hour for 25 hours a week is a pretty good wicket. Right? Well, that still does not deny the fact that cricket bores me.

I could be going back to school tomorrow instead of going back to work. I could be at home, crying, because six weeks of fun at Andrea's has come to an end and now I'm stuck at home, boredom central, feeling like the next holidays may as well never even exist, they're that far away.

Well, it's true, it could be all of those things, which would be worse, but that still doesn't change the fact that tomorrow I go back to the job that bores me. And I can't quite keep the sadness at bay tonight. It feels like the year is stretching away ahead of me, week after week of "Yes, Your Honour" and "Can you tell us what the tablets were doing located in your house, if they don't belong to you?" Sigh. Is there any chance, o great flying spaghetti monster, that this year my life could expand somewhat, maybe even in several different directions, so that I can possibly actually feel like I am a part of the human race? That would be dandy, thank ye.

Breathe Susie, breathe. Okay. Easter's coming up, right? And I am an optimist of sorts. I can say things to myself like, "Who knows what is around the corner? Maybe something else will come up." Well, maybe. Maybe maybe maybe.

My brother came over today, brought the last of the furniture and what-not that's been kept in a self-storage container in Clayton, brought it over to store in my garage. And now off he has gone, to the state forest beyond Bacchus Marsh, with an air mattress and a portable fridge in the back of his car. He is heading off on Friday, after a few days in the bush, wending his way to Geelong, and from there to Warrnambool to follow the coast into South Australia. He plans to stay with my auntie in Murray Bridge for a while, painting her house for her, and then to perhaps see if he can begin afresh, a new life.

I'm a bit jealous. Oh, I know it's easy to be jealous of someone taking off like that from the outside. But as it happens, he hasn't got the foggiest what the hell he is going to do. His work options are much more limited even than mine. And as it is he has been without a house for the past three months, and the gypsy lifestyle is beginning to wear thin. Still, off he drove, in high spirits, optimistic. And despite him not knowing what the hell he is doing, I remain jealous.

I want to be on the road, free, with no boring job to go to tomorrow. Living out of my campervan, driving around Australia, writing and selling articles and short stories that fund my trip. Picking up friends and family from local airports and bus stations to come along and have adventures with me.

Okay. So I'm fantasising :) It is an occupational hazard to fantasise about being out and free when tomorrow you are going back to work for the foreseeable future. Oh, fuckity fuck :(

Come on Sue. Focus on something. Okay. How about this: in a couple of weeks I am going to an information session about Kidslink, a small organisation that Heather is involved with, which digs wells in Mozambique and which is constructing a school building in the town of M'Batwe. It is a sort of surreal scary thing to consider doing something like this, but nevertheless I am going to go along and think about whether maybe, in July, it is possible that I could go to Mozambique for a couple of weeks. Do something for other people and maybe expand my small little life. Get it moving again. Maybe.

Speaking of Heather, I got together with her and Louisa last night. It was great to meet another fellow blogger. We chatted, ate Mexican food, drank a Pina Colada, got kicked out the restaurant because it was closing. We went to a pub down the road, drank coffee, chatted, and got kicked out because the pub was closing. We drove to the Espy (much cleaner than when I was last there), sat in the little side part next to the pub, chatted, drank bourbon, bacardi and champagne, got kicked out because it was closing. We went into the pub, in time to see the last song of the last band. We left before we could get kicked out and stood and chatted in the street about how, next time we get together, we're gonna try for a Saturday night next time so that things won't keep closing :) It was fun. But I'm not allowed to tell you about how Louisa walked up the aisle to a Hillsongs song, and Heather walked down the aisle to one. Don't tell anyone I told you.

Yikes - Possible New Work Beginnings

So I just got back from an information evening about becoming a community support worker for intellectually disabled adults. One of the things that was concerning me the most when I first got there was wondering how "institutionalised" the philosophy was going to be. You know, dear blogger, what a bugbear that kind of thinking is in my life ;) I find it difficult working for organisations or companies or any organised group of people, really, because they seem to just end up sucking the life out of their own bones and it drives me mad, gives me claustrophobia.

Well, I'm pleased to say that this organisation feels like a breath of fresh air. Their approach is very relational indeed (just with heaps of documentation). Their aim is not so much to be a carer as it is to be support worker, and with that approach they had us talking through scenarios about what the best approach would be to enable a client (I do hate that word) to live their life, while being a support to them. This necessarily involves a lot of creative thinking, a lot of thinking on your feet while also not allowing your inner control freak to take over and do stuff for them because it would be the easiest thing to do.

It sounds very exciting. But more than that, it scares me. Although I have been long interested in working with intellectually disabled adults, it feels very daunting. Of course, all of the things that make me feel scared all ultimately have some kind of root in fear of me doing the wrong thing, of feeling like an idiot. It's all about me, me, me, me, me and how goddamn boring that is :) But their induction process seems pretty good. Their training seems really good. They employ about 60 support workers and they seem to have a pretty good retention rate and a lot of happy people.

So if I'm successful to be interviewed, I will enter into that process, which I think is a rather long one. But I kinda felt at home there, you know? I think this would be a pretty specialised job. I'm not sure if I'm up for it, but I'm willing to give it a whirl.

I think. I'm scared. Scared. Scared. Scared. Scared. I'm scared.

Edit: I just got a call from them today (Wednesday). As these five positions they're offering are relief positions, the majority of shifts they're offering are sleepover positions. Fantastic money. And you get paid for sleeping. What could be better, right? Well, the only fly in the sunscreen is that the end of the shift is in the morning, from 7am to 10am. In the past, I may have just thrown myself in anyway, because I really am interested in this work. Problem is, my body clock just ain't gonna cut those hours. I am 37 years old and I am still a night owl. I have spent years trying to fit myself into "normal" work hours. It doesn't work for me.

And so maybe this position isn't going to work for me either. Which is a shame, huh. But you just gotta know your limitations. And early morning starts are a non-negotiable for me. I spent years feeling "lazy" and like there was something wrong with me. These days, I just think it's one of the quirks or chinks in my personality. It's just frustrating when it conflicts with something you want. But you live and learn, I suppose, bloggers, don't you? Thank God for a philosophical attitude :)