Letting the brain fly as it will

Fly brain, fly.

I get sucked into other people's problems and projections too easily sometimes. Especially when I'm procrastinating on my dissertation and I'm hungry for a distraction, oh anything to remind me of something that matters, to remind me of something that resembles REAL things in the world where people feel and love each other and maybe even sometimes fight for each other? Even if the fight is nuts, as it often is in the games of love and war people co-construct in their minds, it's a fight and you get energized and your heart beats like an eager little soldier boy's drum da dum.

Something to trigger the passion in the brain. My stories of heart ache, where I ached until I couldn't ache any more.

It's too easy to become the target of someone else's insanity. The fixation for someone else's depravity. The cookie jar for cookie monster.

I'm no cookie jar. I'm a vat of infinite light and sound
watch the colours swishing round, colour fish
singing magical dolphins,
seas of infinite creatures

you best learn to swim in these waters, swim with me. Breathe like a mermaid. Serena. Serene. Ocean Yemanja Emerald Queen

Third Life Crises and Central American Predators and Such

A friend of mine talks about how she needs 6 hours of uninterrupted time to get 2 hours (?) of work done. For me, sometimes it's days of reluctantly transforming myself back into a monk. Or something.

This morning I wondered through my half-sleep about having a third-life crisis. I did so well in that play last weekend--maybe I was supposed to be an actor all along and here I am having spent most of my 20's in a PhD program for Self-Torturers in which I haven't been nearly as productive as I know I could be/would like to be. But the nature of this activity is such that it's hard for anyone to sustain constant motivation and productivity. You are on your own with usually no support whatsoever and you're supposed to keep imagining that what you're doing matters, that it's worthwhile, more importantly that you want to be doing this.

The whole point of running off to Central America for a couple weeks, (yes I just did that,) was to turn it all off. Because at some point you become so bombarded with expectations and obligations and emails and calendar reminders that it seems normal. But that trip, though lush and full of jungle views, was quite weird. It's like I forgot how to be properly defensive with strange men. I was overly friendly. I smiled, I wore adorable outfits. I had so many stalkers that there was a limited period of time during which I could actually stay in one town before it would get to be too much and I would have to move on.

Now I'm back in Chicago clamoring for space, on some nights opting to spread out luxuriously in the huge apartment I rented instead of going to parties. Luxuriating in my own territory. That trip left a bit of an antisocial (more like anti-random-men) taste in my mouth and it might take a little while to get past it.

The trick I'm sure is not to stop letting people in entirely, but to let them in selectively. You don't want the whole village thinking you're a welcoming target. It's a tough negotiation for women. (And more obviously so in a country where everyone's blood is boiling from the heat and more insidiously so in a country where everyone pretends to be polite and pc.) On the one hand there will always be endless numbers of predators looking for a babe with a friendly grin...on the other if you become too defensive when do you meet someone nice and decent? Barbie would have drowned instantly, that plastic lipsticked beauty pageant grin is there for the whole wide world to aim for. And we all love her, don't we.

My clearest voice and sense of self has always been right here, in writing. Which you would think should be my answer, probably is my answer. The trick is somehow using all this other stuff (i.e. PhD torture,) I have devoted years to in some kind of positive, useful way--whether in academia or outside of it or both. I mean certainly flushing five years down the toilet seems pretty self-obliterating. But that's impossible because I'm a different person now whether I like it or not. My mind has been trained and sharpened and looped into deep, meticulous thinking processes. These five years have changed me, regardless of what I do next.... Some say you can do multiple things, be a Renaissance Man. My father used to warn me against being a jack of all trades, master of none. I hear all these voices. And here I am sitting with them, echoes of echoes. My own dissertation topic a reflection of something I ask myself--something that can seem incredibly clear on some days and the warped, ever new day dreams of a little girl on others (be a fireman a ballerina an astronaut)--how do people figure these questions out, I mean really? And how on earth do you let go of The Bell Jar's tree of possibilities?