Making Space and Making Excuses

There's a reason that it's a cliche that writing is simple, but not easy.  It is simple.  You sit yourself down in your chair in front of a terrifyingly blank screen and sweat some Hemingway blood out your eyeballs, and you write stuff, and that's that.

It really is simple in a way;  it's just not easy.  That's why there are so many people walking around who believe they have a book in them but they don't get nothin' writ.  They're waiting for the right time.  But the right time doesn't come.

The last uni class I did on-campus was a creative non-fiction essay-writing class where we were set 20 minutes to write something.  There was a very general prompt of some sort - I can't remember what it was now.  And of course I sat there in a mass panic for about 10 seconds thinking that I would never be able to come up with something, until I had an idea.  And of course it seemed like a shitty idea, not even worth exploring.  (In comparison to the ideas that seem totally amazing, and they're falling off the spoon as you jump out of bed or the shower and run to type them down and by the time you do, they've totally drizzled into the floor and you're just left with a mental spoon.  If you knew beforehand that this idea would be like one of those, you would have just stayed in bed and licked the spoon for your own enjoyment and been done with it.)

I'm worried that leaving Facebook isn't going to create the space that I need to do creative stuff.  I'm worried that it's not going to take that - it's going to take quitting the internet for hours and hours, plus going entirely through menopause, and stopping being depressed and anxious, and stopping feeling excessively paranoid so that I spend mass energy worrying that my friends hate me.  I'm worried that it's going to take my entire life and one day I will be 92 and I won't have any space left because I won't have any time left.

But that worry is really awfully foundless, and I know that it is so.  It is a worry that on my bad days I give in to, and on my good days when I have some sort of a purchase on perspective it is easy to smile at it as evidence of being Scaredy Scarederson and to sit down and write anyway.  

The bit from the writing prompt that I ended up writing in class that day became a My Word column that I sold to The Big Issue a few months later.  And really,  I feel like I've got a million of those ideas inside of me.  So quitting Facebook and trying to do other things to make space is a really good thing to do.  But in the end, it really is just making the time.  Not making up excuses that I can't do it because I'm too paranoid at the moment, or whatever the current almost-mental-illness is in vogue in my head (I must say, the paranoia has been in vogue for some time and I'm really rather tired of it.  Get here, menopause, and get here quick).


We really do make excuses sometimes, don't we.  (Some of us more than others.  A post talking about the struggles I have with getting myself writing and staying writing and doing other creative things is a replica.  There's probably about 50 others on this blog saying pretty much the same thing :) 

Really, it doesn't seem important so much that we're ready to do something creative, just that we need to make space and we need to make time, even if we don't feel like we can do it at all.  We can do more than we think we can.  That blank screen or canvas or page is always going to hold an element of terror.  That will never leave, like an actor's performance anxiety - and neither should it.  But neither should it stop you from getting there in the first place. 

Glowing Stationary by Ablipintime

Leaving Facebook

So Rima Staines finally joins Facebook ...

... and I leave it.

Again.

I've done this before.  I know how it feels - the familiar jittery, "What the hell am I doing?" feeling.  The awful thought that you have removed yourself from the entire front loungeroom of the global house.  That you will probably lose touch with a whole bunch of people who if you never get on Facebook again you'll probably never talk to again.


The "What the hell am I doing?" feeling is like when you quit smoking.  It's a panic.  It's a wondering what you're going to do to fill up the space where you used to look at Facebook 30 times a day.

Which is exactly why I'm doing it.  I want more space.

I partially blame Rima's post.  Because this:

I have a theory that using the internet occupies a very particular place in us. I think it takes the place of dreaming. Not night-dreaming, but that very shamanic soul-travelling that we all do to a greater or lesser extent when our mind wanders, when we create art, when we day-dream, imagine, journey in our minds and spirits to elsewhere, elsewhen. Internet-travelling uses the same metaphorical muscle I think, but is utterly hollow in comparison because it is not creative in that same sense. It is not magical. And worst of all it replaces the dreaming.

This really speaks to me.  I haven't been writing much in recent weeks, after the latest sinus bout.  It fills up my head and makes it feel like there is not room enough both for sinus and for words.  And so I've fallen off the writing habit again for the moment.  But even if my head is relatively clear, it still feels full up with the internet.  With the mass amount of information I've taken in over one day that the majority of people in the entire history of the world would not take in over their entire lifetimes, I feel completely full, and often very overwhelmed, even when I'm rolling around inside the house all day all by myself with no work to do.  It's not very conducive to characterisation, to essay-writing, to thrumming.  And so while I can't get rid of the entire internet, I can at least get rid of Facebook.  Because it frees up space, and I know it does because it has done so before.  And I wish to fill that extra space with real-time interaction with breathing, living people, and real-time interaction with clay, with pens, and with the keyboard where I am writing stuff that sits in a document waiting to be added to tomorrow, instead of being pasted as a Facebook status update.

Rima is speaking about the internet as a whole, and I agree fulsomely that even if I quit Facebook, I still have to try to manage my internet info intake each day.  But Facebook is like the methamphetamine of the internet for me.  Even more so than Twitter, strangely.  Twitter annoys me too much for it to ever be a meth addiction.  Twitter is like a once a week bong-on sesh with your mates.  Facebook is like mainlining.  I need the space. 

I went outside before, after getting home from my Aged Care class, and sat, with my feet bare in the grass, and read a wonderful novel, and felt blissed out from the sun that had poked through the clouds on my way home and which was now heading his way in a slant over to the west.  And I made pictures out of the clouds, and thrummed in my dreaming space, and read a story set in the future generations and generations after a giant meteorite has hit the moon and flung it off its trajectory so that every seventh night it looms scarily close to the earth before moving away again in its new spheric orbit.  A story most certainly set elsewhen, further off into the future around a church of women, the Sisters of Selene, whose influence has already risen in their small periphery and, over several generations, now begins to wane.  It is a book captivating my attention, and hence I was incredibly rich sitting there, more than you could ever guess, out out on the grass, feet buried in grass, reading the words of an author who sounds like he's writing in some Icelandic country - his name is Torsten Krol, if he is indeed a he - but who apparently lives in Queensland.  There is apparently some mystery surrounding Torsten Krol, about whether he is a famous author writing under a pseudonym.  I think in some ways I like it like that - an anonymous writer.  There is sometimes something nice about not knowing who the author is, of the story just wafting to you all on its own.

But I also really like it when a piece of writing is attached to an author.  It's why I will always prefer blogs over Facebook, even as Facebook has stolen many bloggers away.  I prefer being able to go to read someone's extended thoughtfulness, where my reading is a little more longform, even if it means that I can read less, because it's more fun to spend time inside one person's mind for five minutes rather than flicking my attention between 13 different people in two.

And so my love-hate relationship with this online space, and my haggling with it over how much of an effect it gets to have on my attention span and mindspace continues.  Rima says it better:

But do you not also share my frustration and loathing for the way the internet has squirmed into our every minute, addicting us to updates, and overloading us with eons more information each second than we are naturally made to process in a lifetime? Even if we ignore the endless shite and horror that the internet contains, it is still spilling over with wonder. There are so many beautiful things out there, genuine heartfelt pieces of writing, ideas and images - too many - so we have learnt to skim, to take in only the bubbles from the top of every slowly crafted brew. And I for one feel this is not a true and considered honouring of these beautiful works, not to mention of the eyes and hearts and souls and bodies of the people who are consuming these streams of information every millisecond, utterly removed from the place and land where they sit, out in the ether somewhere, following a trail whilst their extremities get gradually colder and they forget to eat lunch.

... I speak from a concerned and somewhat frightened yet simultaneously grateful and amazed viewpoint. If we use this thing, we still need to remember the land on which we stand, remember our bodies and the faces of those we love. I think we should be frightened that all intercity trains these days are filled with blue-faced passengers, every one of them swiping their fingers across a tiny screen, oblivious of the people around them acting identically. If we use this thing, then we should use it to find other faces in the throng and go and really touch them, in real life. Arrange it so that you can look into their real eyes and hear their real stories. This amazing network can be used for proliferating inane fluff or it can be used to organize and gather for good and real reasons, and to stir souls.

Sometimes the soul you need to stir is your own.  To make more space for the daydreaming.  To not let connecting on Facebook replace connecting with people in real time.  To go cold turkey once again.  To disconnect to reconnect.  A mighty challenge for us all ~ internet newbies all as we are ~ to navigate.

Distra-

At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless;
Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is
~ TS Eliot, Four Quartets

Chris Corwin

"Lacks concentration," they said on report cards of my childhood.  They didn't know nuthin' then about the giant box of distractorama that is the interwebs.  This inability to concentrate on one thing for longer than a minute is why I flit online and open 60 different browsers at once, even though I'm only half focussed on any of them.  It's why I send off pieces of writing to editors too early.  It's why I need to meditate and why I can't start and it's why I initially wrote this blog post by hand.  The repetition that comes via things like writing by hand, and meditation, and doing the dishes, and yoga, is the new black, the constant rhythm and flow of something-that's-the-same-thing a potential ocean of cohesive peace, the opposite to the siren call of the internet.

I'm not the only one who has problems with focus.  Even without the health issues from which a lot of my attention issues stem, like many other writers I would still be battling the call of the internet and the problems that it creates when our minds are so full of other people's words it's harder to find our own.

I read on an ADHD site yesterday that when you are fully present to what is in front of you, time slows and expands.  I know this space.  It's where all the beauty happens.  It's what I'm searching for, that peace where I become so fully myself and so into the moment that I disappear.  That's eactly the reason why I used to get stoned.  Exactly it.

Sometimes I can't get to that space.  On bad health days I flail around in a hell of fractured flittering from one thing to the other, thinking I'll find somewhere to alight.  I keep trying through more distractions to reach the spaciousness and it is going in exactly the wrong direction.  I feel so stupid and clotted and at the mercy of my body, my ragged mind, my knee-jerk reactions that send me to look at Twitter, at Facebook, at the next link, when what I am craving for is to look @ No-Thing.

The No-Thing.  The fullest empty space that feels big enough to roll around in.  The space where the stories come from, and where we can hear ourselves stopping thinking. Where everything's turned to white.

I Don't Understand

The kind people from the Microsoft Help Center in India called us up again before.  Their customer service is truly superb.  That's, like, the third time they've called in the space of a week.  They are very concerned, they told my partner, about the malware and viruses that are multiplying on his computer as we speak.

He told her that it must be because of all the porn on there, and did she look at porn?*

And she hung up!!  Now, that's not very good customer service.  I've got a mind to call Microsoft back and report her for being biased and unprofessional.

*This is not, of course, implying that my partner has porn on his computer :)

Facebook

Okay.  So I've pulled the plug on Facebook (at least for the foreseeable future).

It reminds me a little of when I quit smoking (minus the intense cravings).  Life feels a little ... emptier.  There's a phantom limb feeling, a wondering what I'm going to do with my hands without a cigarette in them, when I get those creative little thoughts in my head throughout the day, the "That would be a cool status update" thoughts.

The emptier feeling is exactly why I have disabled my account.  Trying to fight the sensory overload.  For me, working on a computer that needs to be online, flicking over onto Facebook is akin to taking 137 tea breaks throughout the day, breaking down my boring worklife into 38,592 segments that leave me feeling disjointed and out of my own body and wasting time like you wouldn't believe.

The "wondering what I'm going to do with my hands" smoking analogy is a good one.  It  may sound strange that since closing my account I feel emptier.  I notice the difference in feeling a little lonely at times throughout the day as I work here alone.  It feels like extra space has appeared in-between the molecules now that I'm not seeing status updates for a whole lot of people I will never meet or will never meet again.  (That however doesn't include all of my Facebook friends.  There are a couple who I really am going to miss seeing their thoughts each day, like Erin, and Barbara, and Kent).

The extra space has already brought me back here to my blog.  How weird it is.  And I know it's going to take me back to my ratty old notebook again.  A place to write down all those pithy little sayings that would make good status updates, channel them maybe one day into something else a little larger than a soundbyte.

But geez, I'm gonna miss it.

One Day's Head-Breaking Internet History

When I think back over yesterday, it actually feels like a reasonably standard sort of a day.  I began it with a two-hour indulgence in some creativity.  I followed it up with some meditation, then some work, then some yoga, then some more work, and then came the evening where I was online for a reasonable amount of time, chatted to my beloved, did some reading.  A reasonably uneventful sort of a day, I guess, looking in from the outside.  The sort of day I like, where I have plenty of time to do the things that matter to me, all while being able to work from home (I work transcribing court cases for a company in Brisbane here in Oz).

But even though in reality I had oodles of time yesterday to go slowly through it, the way I like, it felt full and constricted.  And when I look at my internet search history for yesterday, it explains exactly why I feel that way.

A rough count of yesterday's internet browsing reveals that I looked at over 600 pages yesterday.  SIX - HUNDRED - PAGES!!

Now, to qualify a little here, to rationalise the unrationalisable.  I guess when I look at the data, yesterday was a little out of the ordinary.  There were a few rather involved and specialised searches going on that involved a lot of trawling through different pages.  Firstly, my partner and I are escaping the pre-Christmas insanity this year, going away a few days before Christmas and coming back when the whole sorry empty consumerism is over.

Searching for accommodation online is fantastic.  Just a few mouse clicks ... or maybe a few hundred.  Because it's sort of hard to stop, once you start.  There's always one more place to look at, even though you've enquired at 25 of them and at least a couple will surely be suitable for you.

Another large component of those ridiculous 600 pages were work-related.  In my transcription work we need to check the correct spelling of all proper names.  And so yesterday involved heaps of searches for names, and streets, and checking to see if what the witness is asking for is really a "Mareva injunction" (it was).

I was also doing a fair bit of hardcore searching for recipes, yesterday.  My manfriend purchased for us our first vegetable box from CERES this week (found and organised online, of course)  It contains a variety of fresh, organic, veggies sourced from local farmers wherever possible.   Much cheaper than buying in an organic shop, and I feel like we're part of something sustainable that is helping small-time farmers.

You don't know what you're getting in the vegetable box - it's a lucky dip of sorts (anyone want a bunch of asparagus?  I can't stand the stuff;  tastes like what the back of my throat did last time I had tonsillitis).  Makes it interesting, and I am happy to report that I have found a way of cooking the FOUR swedes in this week's box.  The weather has turned a little chillier here again - it's been raining constantly this morning, for as long as I've been conscious and good casseroley cooking weather is on the cards.  I love getting recipes online :)

So if it wasn't enough that I spent all that time online, still it goes.  In a day where in some ways it didn't feel like I did a whole lot, I absorbed way more than I can handle comfortably.  But by far the most inspiring was the hour I spent last night watching the rather brilliant documentary Requiem for Detroit? This show was produced for the BBC in England, about a city in America, and was shown on my television station here in Australia several weeks ago.  I accessed it last night when I was ready.

I am still coming to terms with how life looks to us now, with the net.  Have not yet learned how to stem the flow.

Last night I also watched a 20-minute talk given by Elisabeth Gilbert, author of Eat, Pray, Love.  It was given in February 2009, posted on TED.com.  I came across it via a link from Robyn Jackson Pearson, who I have chatted to online over the past several years but have never met and probably never will.  She had linked to another clip on TED via Facebook, which I started watching for a minute or two till my ADHD sent me searching elsewhere on the site.

The world wide web, indeed.

Yesterday, in little bits mixed among all the other little bits, I researched jobs on the net, I updated my Quickflix queue, I looked at a few inspiring websites by people who are wanting to change things, I checked my bank balance, looked on eBay for a secondhand ergonomic chair, cos the one I got (off eBay) isn't holding me up straight enough to look at 600+ websites a day.  I looked at the Business Victoria website's case studies of people who have started up businesses.  I chatted to my manfriend at his house 50 ks away, read a few blogs, responded to a few comments,  read some emails.

Earlier in the day I did some yoga - a necessary requirement to stretch out my back after working the day before.  There are some cool yoga sites out there - how awesome it is to flit around and so quickly find out why I am loving fish pose so much.

So there you go.  Do you feel exhausted?  I feel exhausted reading and writing this (and a little embarrassed, too).  I felt exhausted indulging myself in it.

I am determined to curb my internet use, because I have to.  To make space for nothingness.  So that I don't have 40 million things running all round my brain like cocaine.

At the moment I am challenged by the practice of writing fiction from out of my unconscious rather than from my analytical mindspace.  It is very challenging at the best of times.

But when there's such a ginormous influx of information rolling around in my head from the 600 webpages I've inducted into my head in one day, it makes it even more difficult to go into that space.  It's why I write first thing in the morning, coming straight out of sleep, from the dreamspace, from that place that amazes me when I am able to decipher the stories I am telling myself.  My God, I go so deep and so wide.

It's such a beautiful release to fall into that space.

So much space.

Sleep Talkin Man

I was put onto this blog by a workmate today.  It's written by a woman who has started documenting the nocturnal chatterings of her husband.  He regularly comes out with such doozies as:

"I want to be a cowboy. I don't want to be a panda. Pandas are boring, stupid and boring. Bad panda!"

"Can you hold... can you hold my starfish? It doesn't like it when I'm getting excited. Oh look, it likes you! Its legs are all cree-py cree-py."

"Hey, don't... don't say anything. Why don't you put it in an email, then I can ignore it at my pleasure."

"I feel all rolley polley rolley polley. rolley pony PONY.... Splat!"

"If I wanted to see a long nose and a big ass, I'd look at a horse."

"Butt cheeks ahoy! There she blows!"

"You can't be a pirate if you don't have a beard. I said so. MY boat, MY rules."

"We haven't got a plank. Just fucking jump."

"Yes I'm sad, but if you stood further away, I'd be happier. No, further away. Well, let's face it, just fucking C*^% OFF! Thank you, I appreciate it."

And that's just from the past couple of days.  Lovely and mild-mannered during the day, a foul-talkin' pirate at nighttime.  You gotta love that.

Sleep Talkin' Man

Reflecting Reality

I have a faint memory of myself as a child, perhaps four years old.  I had been crying, and I stood in my parents' bedroom, looking at myself in the full length mirror on the inside of Mum's cupboard.  In the midst of my tears, I was intensely interested in what I looked like when I was crying.  At the snot running down my face.  As if it somehow made it more real to be able to see it.  Look, that is me.  And I am crying.

Flash forward circa 2009.  I am a 39 year old woman on Christmas holidays and I am feeling somewhat sad.  Life does not always script itself to fit into our holidays.  Sometimes I am as wise as the sea, as intuitive as a psychic, as knowing as a crone.  Embedded in the midst of that wisdom and surefootedness that four year old child still lives.  It was she who took me into the bathroom earlier, where the light is best, over against the darkness of the rest of the house where the blinds are all drawn against the stark sunness blaring outside, to photodocument the tears running down my face.

I did have the perspective just before to find the space to laugh at myself, looking at photographs of me crying.  I hope never, ever to lose that four year old.  She still has the ability to give me a laugh even while the 39er is belting out her worn tunes of angst.

I think I will treasure those couple of photographs when I look back in years to come.  There is such a harsh and sweet sadness about them. There is a place for such documentation.  Looking at them makes my sadness more real to myself.  And the more real it is to myself, the easier to let it go, to flow away on the breeze.

I was tempted to illustrate this post with one of the photos.  After all, why not?  I have just informed you that I have been crying today.  If I have told you I have been crying, why not show you at the same time?  But something shared publicly is something you lose privately.  I love to share elements of my life in my writing, my art, my blog.  I understand the fears some people have about that, but there is no fear in that for me (or at least not enough to stop me, though it sometimes makes my palms a little sweaty).  And although sometimes I get it wrong and realise I have violated a flimsy boundary, it is a calculated risk.  It pays off when people thank me for sharing deep darknesses.  But there is also something honouring and boundary-building about things not shared in a world where privacy has largely absconded.

There is a saying that a real writer will sell their own mother's secrets for a good story, but I think that is simply untrue.  There are 140 different amazing stories about asparagus if you are willing to sit and ponder a little.  And sure, ploughing the depths of myself as writing subject is a most healing way of making myself real.  It is sort of like that four year old watching herself cry in the mirror.  But both are after all reflections of real events.  But to think that my life is up for grabs as blog illustrations, as art, violates my own boundaries.  It is not up for grabs, it is my own right and my choice, but it is something that needs to be used with wisdom.  To be too open is to deny the deepness of myself as a human being, the sacredness of that dark space, the necessity of letting things ferment, of pondering things in my heart, of keeping them close to me, of sharing them once at a time between me and somebody whose eyes I can look into while I share them.

I finished a short story last night.  I will post it on my other blog when I have polished it up some more.  In that story the protagonist, thinly disguised as myself, finds herself untethered out in the world.  Her saving grace is place and people.  Real places and real people.  As are mine.

And you can see them all if you friend me on Facebook :)

"We met over the internet ..."

At the Gatehouse fundraiser on Friday night there were several people on Louisa's table who asked me how we knew each other.

The words "We met on the internet" still carry funny undertones, somehow. You feel like you want to add, "But it was all perfectly harmless really. We met via a mutual blog friend who introduced us and hey, isn't the internet amazing for meeting people!"

And you exclaim at the end because you're trying to make up for the fact that when you say "we met on the internet" the idea that floats up is of meeting sordidly via a group sex with donkeys chat room or something.

I wonder when that stigma will pass :)

Off to Marysville. Toodle pip.

Fluffy Facebook Groups

You know what really annoys me about Facebook? ( I'd say it over there but I'm tired of being combative). One of the myriad things that annoys me is those stupid bloody groups that people keep joining. Groups like "Stop Child Abuse".

This may seem strange if I tell you that I joined the group "Everytime I hear Matt Damon's name I think of him in Team America", and that indeed I started the Air Appreciation Society :) Both groups are totally pointless, which is fine (pointlessness is underrated). The first was joined because it was fun and the second is ironic, started in response to stupid groups like "I love having fun". Like, shit, seriously?

But something like "Stop Child Abuse", what is the point of joining a group like that? Not for fun, obviously, or wit or irony. It is a political move to join a group like that. But what is achieved exactly? Who is the "stop" directed at? The populace at large? Some big thing "out there" that is going to magically stop child abuse if a million people join a Facebook group? Are they talking to the long arm of the law? In that case, they should join a "Make Taxes Higher So We Can Afford to Pay for a Better Police Force" group. I imagine that would not have as many members. Or join a "Hey, You, Yeah, You, Snap Out of Your Denial and Look at What Your Husband/Wife/Son/Daughter/Cousin/Next Door Neighbour is Up To" group. How about the "Bad, Awful Shit Happens in the World All the Time Every Day Because That is an Element of What Humanity Is - Even You, Unfortunately" group? Or the "Legislating the Human Condition Out of Existence is Unfortunately Not an Option" group?

Do people join this group to show everybody that they are against child abuse? Cos, like, um, duh. Their statement ends up carrying the same weight as them saying that they had oatmeal for breakfast.

Okay, I am being a little facetious here. I know people joining these groups is a way of standing up for something people think is important, their own little way of trying to give weight to something awful, to stand behind it, to say that their hearts are heavy. Trying, in a society grown so large that it's run away from us, to show that this particular thing is wrong. Perhaps I miss their lamentation under the irritation.

But in the end, it just reads like spam to me. Accords the same inch-high status to everything. Child abuse, oatmeal eating, Matt Damon, air appreciation.

Facebook Limitations

I walked the several blocks to my Christian meditation group last night (you can read vague references to it - insert cross-promotional link - here).

On the way, I noticed, coming towards me, one of my Facebook "friends". I have a funny feeling she noticed me too.

We walked right past each other :D

++++

Edit: I'm a bag of laughs, aren't I, hey, wot wot? Every post a drear and dark whingefest of whingeing :) But hey, whaddaya expect from a lonely seasonally affectively disordered woman who is just about impaled on the solstice? Come back in Spring, I'll be gushing geyserly by then :)

The Internet Giveth and the Internet Taketh Away

I love blogging, I love the internet. But it gives and then it takes away on the other hand.

It gives connection among people. It gives a medium for people to share things they may not often get to share out in the world. Imagine launching into a discussion the way you do online in your workplace. People look at you askance. Believe me, I've tried :)

Yet the internet takes away because dammit, you can't see me, you can't see the lightness or the weight of my words, you can't see my jesting, you can't see my cultural differences, you can't see me smirk because there is no symbol for that. I can :) and :D and :( and :\ and ROFL and ROFLLMAO but really, in the end, you can't see my context.

Sigh. Don't mind me. I am struggling with feeling misunderstood. Sometimes I get tired of feeling different. Maybe everyone feels that way, I'm not sure. And the internet fosters paranoia in me from time to time, usually when I say controversial things :) I do insist on being honest, and I'm sure it's too honest for some people! And sometimes it's too honest even for me. Some days I wake up and groan and think, "Did I really say that?" :)

How does one stop caring so much about the opinions of others, or whether you cause others offence or if you displease them or whatever? Some people, it just doesn't even really occur to them. Mocca is like that. I would talk about how I was worried about what so-and-so thought of me and he just wouldn't understand why I cared so much.

I don't really understand why. There is something here that needs to be sat with and examined and (hopefully) discarded.

How about you? Do you worry excessively about what other people think of you?

Google Maps Street View

How long until there is Google Maps Loungeroom View, or Google Maps Inside Your Undies View? Now there is Google Maps Street View. I didn't even know it had come to Australia until Monday afternoon when my Mum came visiting and wanted to take a look at her house.

(Her house looked fine. My grandma's house, though ... very sad. What once was a blooming garden has now been concreted and looks completely like the rental property it now is. Which is ... very sad).

Seriously, I think I might have a problem with this Street View in some way. It's not because I'm worried about people surveilling my house, or people scanning my house to burg it or any of that safety type of thing. (And anyway, where I live right now, and where I hope to live for 40 million years to come, is not even observable from the road anyway, being in someone's backyard).

It's not a physical concern I have with it so much. It is something a bit more spiritual and ethereal perhaps than that. I've been trying to put my finger on why it concerns me so much all day, but the feeling flits out in gossamer threads and I just can't tie them all together.

I think part of the problem for me lies in yet one more virtual thing to disembody our bodies. Which sounds stupid (and for reasons beyond the complete clunkiness of that sentence :). It's not so much the virtualness of it, it's the disembodiment of it. Which might sound the same but it's not. I don't have an issue per se with stuff being online and virtual. I think concerns about that, at least to my view, are like concerns people once had about the telephone when it was first installed. Online is just another way of communication.

But I do have a problem with the fact that maybe some people will be content to just look at stuff, stuff that they could go and walk around in, and somehow will lose the desire to go and be in it themselves because they will feel like they've seen it. But looking with your eyes is no alternative to actually being in a place, feeling it on your skin, standing on it, touching it, hearing it, smelling it, and seeing the crap bits that the screen didn't show you, and seeing the people that live in the spot. That's the bit that scares me sometimes. That we will forget to keep the differences separate in our heads. And that one day, we will prefer the virtual, nice, cleanness and the real will look unreal. And the virtual will suit us because it's so damn easy, and the real will be stupid and outdated and antiquated.

Internet Fast

I have finally chosen a new internet package. Something called naked DSL, which basically means I don't need to pay rental on a phone line (but I can take my current phone number with me). So for 50 bucks a month, I get 3 gig of downloads (in peak, and even more if I'm online after 1am), and local calls costing 9 cents. Bargain. It will cost me 100 bucks to connect the sucker, and then that's that. So I'm pretty pleased about that. For what I'm paying now for my phone line and sharing internet access with Nigel, now I'll getting the same amount but with a cable connection to my computer so it'll be faster than what I'm doing now.

The only downside is the 24 month agreement terms. Which kinda made me balk, you know? I felt like I was being asked to get married to a telecommunications company. How do any of us know what we'll be doing in 24 months? And if you cancel out early you get slugged 200 bucks, which really is truly disgusting. I mean, I could come at 50 bucks, but 200? That's just criminal.

The other downside is that I shall be maybe offline from this Saturday for a week. I'm not sure when I will get connected. But it was interesting to observe my reactions within myself when I was first informed of how long it could take to connect. My first thought was a mild flutter of panic. A week? Offline for maybe a week? Oooh. But then following closely on that was a feeling of acceptance and almost ... gratitude. Which sounds naff, but there you go. I was glad that I was going to be forced to be offline for a week, because being separated from something reinforces how I do not need it to be happy, that I do not need anything material to be happy, even though I enjoy it. (And of course, I will be able to get online at work, so it's not like I'll be totally cold turkey without the needle sliding in).

It's the same reason why I looked forward to going away last year, when I went to that country house that had no access. I got these mild pangs while I was there, but most of the time it was fine. In some ways a welcome relief. Still - when I got home, I threw my bags down right where they were in the doorway and wouldn't even put the kettle on until I'd got online :) Actually, I'm planning on going back there again, if I get some money back on my tax return. I wanna go hang there for a whole week and see what writerly convolutions can strike forth from my pen.

We get taught in so many ways to hang onto what we've got. And it's not like we need to get taught as such - we learn it ourselves without any lessons. Advertising reinforces it though, those snide little tendrils inserting themselves in your brain and twirling themselves in, whispering that you need XYZ. We don't need anything except a roof over our heads and food in our stomachs and I remember some dude somewhere talking about the simplicity of such things. (But our wounds, our wounds, they muddy up the waters, and our grasping, our grasping, muddies them even more. Oh for clear waters for all of us).

I have been enjoying my meditation classes (not least of which on Monday night was the THREE HOURS my dear cousin and I spent sitting in her car afterwards talking about Buddhism, Christianity, reality, Jesus, life, love, pain and suffering ... and eating McDonald's. It was edifying as it so often is with her. We talked so long though with the car heater on (it was c-o-l-d) that Andi's car battery went flat. I learnt that the red plugs are for positive charge, black for negative. I've never put jumper leads on a car before. I get great gratifying gulps of accomplishment when I do something manually basic like that, like using a screwdriver for something. Such small enjoyments at small accomplishments :) I find that the more I simplify my life and try to hang on loosely to everything, the more I enjoy what I've got without feeling beholdened to it. It's a cool thang.

The meditation classes are edifying too in themselves. So much about hanging on lightly to things, about our own ability to still our minds, about the way to peace involving loving others. I love sitting and stilling my mind each morning, the sense of mastery it gives me, the reminder that here in the moment is where it's going on. The book I am reading at the moment talks about a type of meditation where you examine your own mind, observe how it is working, to enable you to search down for the roots of certain problems instead of dealing with just the outflow. I don't know how this is done. I don't know how it squares in with my ideas of only God being able to heal things, but somehow I think the distinctions are quite fine blurred, thanks very much. God doesn't seem to be having to gather all the kudos to himself, despite being the originator of all the fine things. He seems to be quite happy to allow us to enter into our own healing as co-creators, seems indeed to have granted us so much self-determination that it extends upwards and outwards and goodwards just as much as it extends in the downwards ways that some legalistically minded Christian sermons are so intent on dwelling on.

It is an edifying thing, to find the roots of certain behaviours. Sometimes I feel like I am hitting upon the roots for the behaviours that have damaged me the most, roots which have been pulled out in some measure but which I won't be happy until they are fully gone. This tree is rotten to its core. I always knew about its rottenness, but I guess I never quite saw as openly as I'm seeing lately how ugly the fruit is. This is a painful thing, to sit and watch your own ugliness. It is so painful that sometimes we spend forever running away from it. When we need to stop, turn and face, to integrate the ugliness within our selves, name it, until we can begin to dispel it.

These roots are not really something I can name or talk about because there are no real words for it at this stage. But it is dispelling certain angers, and it is giving me some hope that maybe, maybe, there is healing for me. A thought almost too lofty to contemplate, but therefore which must be embraced. Embracing unembraceable things is not only accomplishable, but it just changes the whole complexion of the moment. Sometimes it causes chinks of light ahead; sometiimes it's like I am in a room made up of large stones, and one of them shifts slightly, filling up the room with an earthy smell, making me see that an opening is coming where none has been before, even though I can't see the light chink just yet.

Embracing the unembraceable is the ultimate in adventure and freedom. All without white water rafting or leaving your house. Stilling my mind shows me the possibilities, quietens me down so that I can hear Love whisper. I take a deep breath and remind myself, Love is in love with me. That changes everything. Fans the flame in my heart, the one that extends inwards to myself and outwards to other people. Maybe I can do the things that make me want to wet my pants. Maybe not today, maybe tomorrow. Love never fails. Love heals your heart.

Cleaning up my online act

I've been having fits of guilt about posting the pics I do here from DeviantArt. My rationale for using them has been that I only use the ones that are available for download. I figured that it would be okay to use those ones on my blog - but still, it's really just rationalising away the fact that all of them are copyrighted and I'm violating it.

So, down they're comin'. From now on, I'm only going to use public domain or creative commons licensed stuff. Whee. Do I feel righeous ;) It's going to be harder to find stuff, but the lastest version of Firefox has this really cool search feature for creative commons, so let's see how we go.

I've deleted my Facebook account and I'm just about to delete my MySpace one too, when I get my old blog posts downloaded. I am bored with both of those places and sometimes, when my inner conspiracy theorist kicks in, I feel quite uncomfortable about them. Apart from that, they both shit me. No, Joe Blow from Texas, I don't want to be your friend. I don't need to build up my self-esteem by having 486 online buds, ta very much.

I have been trying to burn a whole lot of Mocca's CDs but my laptop isn't coming to the party. Do I feel guilty about burning CDs? Yes. Do I do it anyway? Yes. Do I feel guilty about doing it anyway? Yes.

But not enough to stop.