of inner bag ladies and screwy humanity

lessons are learned when we hit our metaphorical heads against the obvious, which hitherto has been invisible to us.

I'm learning lots of lessons in this microcosm of time called a "Weekend".

Lessons about the art of practising loneliness without letting the human will rise up to scream that "It's not my fault!".

What one feels is always, at the human core, one's "fault". Not a fault that is bad mind you - just a thing we own; a conscious muddle of reactive and proactive, miniscule decisions based in part on our history and in part on our natural inclinations in the processing of thought. The mush of messages we interpret through the miasma of feelings decipher for us what these feelings might mean - though we often get it wrong.

Emotions are neither good nor bad. Emotions just are. They're the responsive tendency of our nature to life within and without. Much of what we emote we choose, even if we're unaware at the time of our actual decision. Much of what we emote is based in part on our sense of ourselves; the way we view ourselves in relationship to others.

Many human beings have a strong sense of unworthiness or fear of that. I do believe that many of us - myself most of all - are incapable of seeing ourselves exactly as we are in perfect balance to the world and other people around us. I for instance, teeter and totter between the attitudes of exclusive "Above-ness" over others and mortified "Below-ness" under others. My moral compass has thus far been mostly, skewed to the latter and I am apt to measure myself, relative to others as below them, albeit not to be humble but rather out of some vain hope they will elevate me over them in gratitude for my humility. Screwy humanity indeed!

Loneliness is one of those emotions we like to ignore for as long as possible. I have recognised its crumpled hang-dog face this weekend and have been a bit shocked at how unkempt and ragged my self esteem has become. I've done this - no one else. I've fought valiantly for a long time to be super independent and so on but now the shuffling feet of my inner bag-lady - so alone and crazed with lack of social engagement must be made over.

What I've yet to work out is just how to do that without frightening the poor thing completely into total isolation from the world.

More lessons to come I guess. The "how-to-overcome-loneliness" journey begins.

back

It's been a strange thing not writing in this place of late.

The heart is definitely willing but the will has been left high and dry through the use - and misuse - of a multitude of other distractions. Right now, my life consists of the treadmill of work, family life and Second Life and little else.

But anyway... I have plenty...plenty...of people telling me that I need to "get out there" and "meet new people" but quite honestly, I just can't be bothered you know! I'm in recluse mode this year and quite frankly, I think that's perfectly fine. At least for now! I'm having fun being on my own actually, and not being beholden to anyone. Well, more or less, as I do miss the "man-I-can-cuddle" thing if I was really being honest about this. Still, I'm not sure what I genuinely want out of life yet. I'm still figuring it all out. I do know I am way too shy to even think about going out and meeting real life men in real life situations and places.

Solitude is apparently only good in small doses and if one takes on board all that stuff about no man (or woman) being an island etc. then solitude is something that most people expect a person to give up eventually. Some people are naturally more inclined towards solitude than others and I may well be one of these types. I'm not sure how long this extended bout of solitude - and real life isolation outside of work hours - will continue, but I suppose it will be for as long as it is necessary for me to make the internal shifts I probably need to make in order to desire a different kind of life. Who knows?

I will admit, that mine is a bizarre kind of solitude though. I am not given to solitude in isolation! *smirk* (gotta love that little conundrum of a sentence *wink*). I may well be 'alone' on weekends despite kids and cats, preferring to be relatively undisturbed by other flesh and blood personages; but my social calendar is full to brimming with personalities all vying for my personal attention with stories to tell and banter to ply and flirty fun to be had

Oh yes! I am very much partial to long distance relationships where the full bottle of human behaviours is nicely chilled in a bucket of virtual fantasy. Second Life is like a zoo where I can observe the social proclivities of my own species from a slightly detached perspective. I learn so much in there about people! It's a cornucopia of chemistry through, mostly, written language and its fascinating to engage with and indulge in.

My imagination can fill in the gaps in between words with an entire picture of the person I am talking to through the screen. I actually "see" the metaphysical "shape" of a person through a miry world of story pictures, created from the syntax and rhythms of their speech in text.

Whether this image is truth is barely relevant because it is most probable that I will never meet their real life self. Often, in my experience, the magical quality of mystery which surrounds a person, never met, but known intimately in an online context, is severely mitigated once the real life, in person, meet up has passed. Sadly, this seems to often mean almost zero re-connection when back online in the virtual world. It surprises me how the intensity of online intimacy changes into mere aquaintance territory after real life meetings. There is a sort of kinship yes, but it's definitely less intensive than before a real life meeting. I've never really figured out why that is but I suspect its something to do with disappointment. This is natural of course, given our tendency to imagine finer and more lovely pieces fitting into the mysterious jigsaw of a person's physical self than is warranted. Rare is the human that under imagines things!

The interesting thing is that I believe I am perfectly myself in Second Life. Even though in there, I am not fat, I do not have wrinkles, zits or tuck-shop-lady-arms, I am quintessentially the woman that I am in every day life! My persona is fully intact except that I can express vanity in much more attractive ways :) I do not have to wonder where my blind left eye is actually looking and I do not have to worry about body odor, smelly socks, gas or garlic breath! In Second Life, my avatar is my beautiful, shiny self that can instantly engage in conversational banter with strangers without all that nervous, jittery angst. I can be witty and confident, playful and intelligent in there.

I soooo don't feel like that out here! And, barely anyone in real life knows that I am these things anyway, because I rarely feel its possible to display these aspects of myself due to real life social conventions which constrain and restrain my quirky esprit. Besides, I speak better through the written word than I do in my voice so that makes it even harder to be what I want to be out here anyway!

I am also exceedingly scared to have to "perform" like a seal for prospective new friends and lovers in real life. There is too much at stake, from how I dress, to how much weight I've gained (or lost), to an almost limitless capacity for gaucheness and a paucity of actual practical intelligence on my part! I'm a ditz and a goldfish (as in 3 second memory) and so implausibly skittish around men it's a wonder I ever got married!

It's a freakishly more difficult concept to get my head around in being told to "put myself out there" in the real world to meet people, than explaining to my sceptical work colleagues how to shop for hair and feet in Second Life, I can tell you!

Meeting real life people requires from me an emotional investment in courage I'm not yet willing to explore. The process feels unnatural and contrived for me right now. I'm more inclined to feel comfortably at ease talking to men - and women - from the United States, the Ukraine, Greece, France, Holland, New Zealand, W. Australia or India in Second Life and for now, that's where I am... and shall be, happily ensconced in my solitude :)

For now Second Life and Solitude are my hand-in-glove partners in emotional healing. I have not abandoned real life - I just want to escape its vicissitudes for a little while. When the time is right I shall most likely change spots yet again, and do something completely different. It's what I do!

unsure of everything

There is a line from one of my favourite songs from the mid 70's by the Steve Miller Band that goes

Time keeps on slipping slipping slipping into the future

Ergo the phrase is a little mundane given that time is such a difficult construct to pin down with any philosophical accuracy. Still...I need to go dig the track out and play it loud I think. It may actually soothe and answer where other balms have failed.

Bemused can hardly describe the conflicted emotional state I've been in of late.

Perhaps it is my work that is consuming my focus that I find it so hard to express myself as freely as I once did.

I feel shy. Impossibly shy. It's hard to know why other than the depths of self-consciousness and horror at my inadequacies as a person are overwhelming some days.

Once upon a short while ago, I was able to write creatively in this blog without fear of retribution or rancour. Now, I find myself scared to write in here.

Blogging is a public domain gig. You are, in effect, playing karaoke to a room full of critics with the sum of your thoughts. One needs to wear the consequences of the occasional "flat note" and ride the waves of derision that come afterwards with good humour. Not as easy as that sounds. How can honesty prevail when cloaks and/or masks must be worn to protect the innocent?

This is flux time. A time when words are re-directed into other pursuits. It is a time of curtailing and a time for exorcising inner demons in other ways than through the power of writing a basic introspective self-important blog.

Perhaps aMusing is coming to an end?

Perhaps my genius... formerly named 'constructing coherence'... is re-baking its usefulness for other purposes?

It is a time to be aware that everything is unsure and uncertain and accept it is so.

As my dear friend bat always said, "We shall see".

never the same again

Life has changed a lot!

Some for the better, some not so for the better.

When I chose to leave my marriage of 18 years, I knew that any changes to come could be difficult. At the time I thought little of what might be positive about the future other than a chance to start again and for life to be "different". Certainly, I was feeling there would be more pain and distress in the staying than in the leaving for the Big Unknown.

Over a year now and there have been tumultuous tides of change and yet hardly any to be seen on the surface of life per se.

After the initial shock of catastrophic physical change and the tumult of emotional pain passed, and time has morphed into days of more smiles than tears I still find that I've been huddled inside a shell of sorts this past few months. Like a tortoise or some ascetic hermit on a lonely mountain - I have battened down the emotional and social hatches of real life social engagement to recoup and thus nurture a changing emotional and social landscape within me! How ironic it is to say it in that way. I both cringe at and welcome this new phase of growth. The old wood is withering and I am in wait, under the ground, for the blooming season of Spring to begin something new. I now wonder if old tree trunks feel this kind of quiet accepting remorse as they shed one history in preparation for a move to the next.

The people I used to know are busy and I do not bother them. I have nothing to say. There are no common interests anymore, no familiarity of spirit ... just a bit of shared history now tainted with suspicion, repressed anger and the repose in their demeanour, which to me, suggests I am now a proven, betrayer in their eyes. I knew this would be so and I had prepared myself for its inevitability.

When it is cold outside, we close the doors against that cold; we light a fire at our hearth and sit beside it to wait out the bitter seasonal winds for the duration. All that frosty blustering, clamouring for reproach against us outside our emotional doors? I do not want it right now. It has been ....it is.... a time for nurturing me.

Normally, I feel guilty during phases like this. I am so hive-minded for the social collective I have an innate distrust of cloistered self protections. Depression, when one lives under a blanket of fear and isolation, can be ever present. But as much as I am wounded by the loss of what was before, I am positive that what will come will be worth the wait.

The changes being wrought in me during this shut-in time are in response to the changes being wrought out there where I do not yet have the courage - or the tools - to tread. The old life passes. A new life will emerge. In between - as it is now - is the Wintering of the Soul.

The girl who couldn't cry: Chapter 9

Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8

The Psych-doc was sitting in a large faux-leather chair, the back of which towered above his head. The top of the chair had a panel, which incorporated a camera, sound equipment and recording devices. The person sitting in the chair merely had to pose the questions and all information was processed through his or her chair into the mysterious chambers beyond the Perspex walls of the “Counselling Room”.

“Tell me Ariadne, about your request?” the man said smoothly. Ari knew that each Psych-doc they sent her was trained to keep their emotional feelings and thoughts as quiet as possible. They were drilled in the art of merely asking rote questions, prepared well in advance and rehearsed with as much repetition as to inure the questioner against imprinting the question with their own emotional energies. Ari never got to really “know” a Psych-doc because “They”, on the outside of the Perspex, deliberately kept them on a wide enough rotation that she only saw each one a few times a year, at most.

She could still sense the rush of their heightened emotional energy as they entered the Counselling room, they could never quite mask the combination of fear, awe, excitement, self-focus, horror and sadness inside of them when they initially entered. They would never engage Ari in “idle” chit chat while they composed themselves for the session, and she would often find herself sitting in her own chair, watching them shut their emotional radars down as best as they could. Some were better at it than others. Women were always easier to read for the most part.

In a way, it was like the Psych-docs were as manipulated and controlled as she and the other mutants. They seemed to be almost hypnotically induced once they sat in their own chair, and their initial rush of emotion was quickly pulled in and down like shutters against the glare of a high noon sun. Their voices would change and all of them would speak in a similar tone, a deep, soft, mellifluous drawl as if dark chocolate were pouring from their mouths instead of pre-rehearsed questions. Their personalities, temperaments and their uniqueness were quelled and subdued to the point where each Psych-doc, male - or female - blended one into the other. It was deliberate, strategic and very, very costly. A good Psych-doc on a program such as this, earned Leverage Credit very much above that of the ordinary citizen, sometimes in excess of ten times more!

Ari always felt a little bit sorry for the Psych-docs despite hating what they made her say and do in these sessions. They were considered Normal Human Beings, whilst she and her fellow mutants were considered mere crops to be analysed, studied, genetically modified and controlled. She was not a Normal Human Being. The irony to this was that she at least could behave uniquely, different insofar as possible from her own genetic group. Uniqueness was encouraged among the different varieties of Ariadne. She was a special case in point as she was only the second mutation to display such strong empathic powers. Her predecessors’ genes had been a freak of nature, the cells of which had been quickly grafted into the next crop. Ariadne was the only one of this next crop to show any evidence that this particular genetic accident might be reproducible. Being empathic, as well as her extraordinary art, had kept this Ariadne strain from being re-integrated a lot longer than most.

The argument still raged in scientific papers as to whether this Ariadne should be sacrificed to scientific progress again or kept for further developmental studies. Her additional attributes, empath and artistic genius, in addition to her designed inability to shed tears meant that, so far, the camp for keeping her alive, were winning the debate.

The Psych-doc sitting in the chair was looking at her silently. Up until now, his focus had been entirely on himself, going within to quiet his own capacity to throw emotional information Ari’s way. Now, that he felt contained, he was studying Ari intently. Waiting for her to reply to his initial question, he looked down at the small table between their two chairs facing opposite each other. On the table were two glasses and a pitcher of water and a little packet. The packet was transparent and vacuum-sealed. Ari noticed it was a new bottle of eye drops.

“They’re different” she commented, avoiding his original question.

“Yes Ariadne. They are,” answered the Psych-doc matter-of-factly.

“What will they do?” she asked again

“We will find out.”

“Oh” replied Ari disconsolately. Some of the eye drops they’d given to her in the past had made her eyes very sore and they had burned constantly. Some had made her vision particularly blurry and the shapes of things had been difficult to make out in low lighting. Other eye drops had had the effect of blinding her temporarily in the eyes. She’d learned to not drop the other eye if this happened, so she could still see enough to draw her spirals, at the very least. Sometimes, they would refuse her the basic saline tears she kept at hand all the time. However, the dryness in her eyes would eventually cause her to pound at the Perspex and scream for it to wet her eyes in relief. She hoped that these eye drops would not have too many side effects.

“I need more saline,” she said, placing her own bottle, almost empty, on the table.

“It will be arranged,” said the Psych-doc simply. He never said when.

He repeated his question, more slowly and deliberately, his voice a study in the deep rich tones of conciliatory calm. “Tell me, Ariadne, about your request.”

To be continued…(I hope)

it's hard not to comment on the MJ thing.

So...

This past couple of weeks, the world "lost" a couple of iconic personalities that have graced our screens and magazine editorials for many years.

Farrah Fawcett died as a result of her long-running battle with cancer. To all intents and purposes, she appeared to have displayed great courage and fortitude and a clear desire to help others going through a similar battle to her own.

She was known in the 70's for her hair and her amazing smile. There was a fresh-faced "All-American-Girl" style to her that typified the perceived beauty standard of her day. It made her famous. She also did some strong and gutsy performances in 80's and 90's tele-drama's about domestic violence. She never really made it "big" in the movies though but despite that, she did attain a kind of iconic status for simply being her unique self as a talented and privileged woman.

Micheal Jackson is iconic too but more infamously so. His mysterious persona and outrageously anti-establishment approach to his life, career and life-style since a young and very talented child in The Jackson Five, polarised the world into two distinct camps - those who loved him and those who loved to loath him. We know little about him really, the real MJ.

For all the media reports of his strange habits, desires, needs, wants, diseases, attire, and family history, Micheal Jackson is and will probably remain something of a mystery.

His music legacy will certainly live on - there is no question that he gave the world some catchy tunes that will probably be on Karoke playlists for some years to come but I am rather bemused by the fact that so many people are now embracing a man they disparaged barely three weeks ago.

Human beings are so bloody fickle! We denigrate weird people, but if they are particularly famous - and if they pass way suddenly - we flock to the shrine of their memory as if we had always lived there, happily bathing in the luxurious fantasies of having connection to their fame and persona. We celebrate the carnival of their famous life and we can't get enough of the intense chimera of their persona in death.

I wonder if we might have treated Micheal Jackson with more respect if he had had cancer and had died quietly after a courageous battle, extending good will and good humour to others in the process? The fact that he died "unexpectedly" is I suppose, the match that has lit this flame of hysteria and hype.


Micheal Jackon's memorabilia from his many years as a pop icon was dropping rapidly in "value" in recent years because of the accusations against him about pedophilia and his public mistakes regarding the safety of his children. He was too weird; too strange; too mysterious and other-worldly and was the butt of many ribald jokes. Disrespect for MJ - the man - was pretty much evident in most casual conversations. For some, his music was a cute passing wave at the 80's and his trade-mark dance move, the Moon-Walk was a gesture of silly fun, re-enacted when remembering the decade of excess.

Now that he has died at THIS time, people are clamouring to purchase pieces of that same fading memorabilia and the prices are sky-rocketing. It apparently pays to die famous...but only if you go suddenly while you're still more or less famous (or infamous)... and young it seems!

I think there has been more respect paid in death to Farrah than there ever will be paid to MJ. Farrah died as a courageous woman - or so it seems. There is no question of her integrity or her character. She fought a very human battle and lost it and we have respected that I think.

However, even I have bagged MJ out and taken pot-shots at his strangeness, post death! It seems he has become something other than mere human, maybe a sort of cute, grotesque monster perhaps. Certainly, we have not respected him as we have other famous people who have died. He has been fair-game in a mystery story, in life and now especially in death.

MJ isn't so much a man or a person but seems to have become, over the years, something of a reflection of the uncomfortable weirdness we sense in ourselves but cannot define. MJ has become a Thing, an un-person and that's kind of sad really.

The brouhaha of Micheal Jackson will die down eventually I guess. It took approximately 20 years before people began ignoring the anniversaries of the unexpected death of Elvis. I suppose it will be similar for MJ.

I could write some platitudes here about him "resting in peace", or that he was a "great talent that the world will always miss" and so on, but I can't really. I can't feel anything remotely warm for the man that he was because I simply didn't know him as a man in that sense. He's always been a circus to me. Fantastic, surreal, other-worldly, weird, grotesque, NQR and so on. The hype surrounding his death is like a thriller movie already. There is melodrama and edge-of-the-seat wonder about what will happen next.

It's bizarre and it tells us more about how weird WE are ...how weird *I* am... than it does about who the real Micheal Jackon is.

A wave just took on a new meaning

I've just spent a very pleasant and informative hour watching a YouTube of the "preview" for "Google Wave" at a web development conference.

The little YouTube vid might be one giant ad for a new product but because the product is going to be Open Source (more or less), it means that it has the potential to become one of the most revolutionary communication tools to hit our desktops and mobile devices since the advent of email!

I watched the entire presentation! That's saying something for me! I usually lose interest pretty quickly on this under the hood techy stuff. I don't fully comprehend the inner workings of the www but I like what it produces. This video presentation however, is not that dull really and there wasn't much in it I didn't understand either. I am no developer and I can't read code other than a smattering of HTML. On this video, which explains what is intended with Google Wave when it launches, I could understand the implications of - and the amazing potential - to transform live, real time 'over-the-net-at-a-distance' conversations and collaborations, with people all over the world.

Dave Pollard pinpoints the potential of Google Wave nicely in a recent post of his and I'm grateful he's shown me the link! I'm quite blown away by the potential especially for community building.

Describing Google Wave is quite possibly going to be the hardest aspect of the whole thing I think. Many of the people I associate with outside of the www - in so-called "real life" - barely seem to grasp anything other than the usual suspects of online communications such as email and Instant Messaging. Web tools such as Facebook and Twitter are slowly becoming more common amongst friends and relatives but these are also reasonably linear and static in functionality. Google Wave appears to be a zillion times more interactive than ANY social media could conceive to be, (except maybe for Second Life - which is viewed by many in my immediate circles as totall NQR as in Not-Quite-Right. I'm apparently, more than a little "weird" for being a Second Lifer in these parts).

Google Wave is going to be tough to describe to friends, co-workers and family. It will be like trying to describe a spiral staircase - without using your hands - to demonstrate that concept to someone who has never seen one before.

So what IS Google Wave? Well....... let's see if I can encapsulate it, although I think Dave's story in his blog does this better really.

It's email; it's IM; it's a wiki; it's capable of supporting many innovative applications; it can interface with multiple kinds of social media, such as Twitter and Blogger.com; it's as private as you need it to be and as public as you want it to be. You can have multiple threads across several different waves and cohere them into one wave if necessary or you can take the threads of one wave and dissect it into multiple offspring conversations that can evolve into their own waves. It even has live real-time translation of other languages built in so that conversing in someone from France or Germany, Japan or Holland will eventually become as seamless as conversing with others in English. It uses the language protocols of the web to intuitively surmise your spelling AND context as you go. You can embed photo's, blog posts, tweets, vidcasts, podcasts, documents, and whatever else the current tech allows us to do online within a wave for others to manipulate or utilise or comment on. Google Wave will make Facebook look like a chalk board I think in time. Community is now officially "Global".

I can see so much potential for this type of online interactive tool. Thing is, here in my corner of the physical, real life experience, many people don't seem to fully grasp the possibilities of tools like this. We're so used to the linear versions of snail mail, email and telephone that applications like Google Wave might remain largely under utilised for some time here, except by those in the world who are highly invested in web based technology anyway. They would most likely include corporate business privateers, web developers, online marketers and a few hobbyist bloggers like myself. For the masses who are only just now tapping into the wonders of Facebook and Twitter - Google Wave is going to have to be a real snap for people to grasp....and explain to their friends!

The beauty is that Google Wave doesn't NEED to be on every computer in order for it to work! Just like with email and IM, it won't matter which service provider you have an account with, if you have the interface....ANY kind of wave interface.... you can access whatever wave of information comes your way, even if the other users in your wave have a different interface than you! That's the really cool thing about this new tool, it's open and adaptable to the market. The sheer flexibility of that will make the product probably work very seamlessly and I guess most people will just catch on regardless if they understand it or not.

What I'm really excited about is the possibility for a collaborative learning system for isolated rural communities. If we can bring high speed broadband into the regional areas of populated Australia, applications like Google Wave will revolutionise these tiny communities to strengthen relationships not just online but also within their own real world settings.

For example, communities can communicate with elected members of Parliament, educators and health advisors more efficiently. Kids won't need to leave their communities to go to Uni unless they really want to. Small business can have markets that don't rely on local populations to sustain them. And, I think there'd be a whole raft of conversations between linked rural hubs where meetings, networks, and grass-roots social exchanges would take place.

For example, someone says on a Wave, "Let's go down to the local hall and play 500 next week to raise money for the childcare centre"... from that one question, local members of the community can plan, iterate, select, argue, debate, execute all the required planning needed for the project to happen all within the Wave itself, where everyone can participate either in real time or when they log on later. Google Wave has the ability to allow people to "play-back" the threads of conversations they have come in on half way through. That way they can catch up with the conversation and they'll know exactly how it has played out so far. No more having to attend meetings physically to arrange community meetings! Wow!

This will not only save small communities a lot of time, it will revolutionise the way we plan and conduct meetings. We will still meet! But the getting to meeting will be handled more effectively via tools like Google Wave. It's not about replacing face-to-face, it's about having access and more importantly, input, into the process of conversation that will make the difference. The success of actual face-to-face will be that much greater as people will still effectively have been included in the process and the conversations for making that event happen.

If you have enough bandwidth to view the presentation, I heartily recommend you do. Google Wave is set to launch late 2009.

freaky mind things - a slightly whingy post about nothing much

The vicissitudes of life have caught up with me this past couple of months. Since starting in my job full time a few weeks ago, I seem to have relegated a few of my favourite things to the backburner.

1) Being organised at home: This is a nightmare really. I love having a tidy home and things in their proper places but currently, my in-tray is overflowing and the kitchen floor looks like it needs scrubbing with a diamond cutting device! The bathroom is in dire need of sterilisation and the second lounge room - where son and band regularly congregate for jam sessions - looks like the remains of a hobo's abandoned campsite. You'd THINK I could manage all this and I always have in the past, but for some unknown reason (other than sheer "don't want to know" on my part after work each day), it's all falling apart at the seams.

2) Going for regular walks: Well... there is really no actual excuses for this one because I've rather been too fond of chatting to friends online after work than going for a long walk in the dark and the freezing cold! Enough said! I'm hiring a treadmill (as soon as I can dig my way into the second lounge room to find floor space for it).

3) Writing in my blog and continuing to write my story about "The Girl who couldn't cry". I write tonnes nearly every day now. It's a bit like glutting oneself on too many chocolates; after awhile, you become a bit "meh" about the idea as a fun thing to do after work. I promise I'll get motivated very soon and write like Dickins to get that wee story rounded up! (I hope ;)).

So! there you go. Whinge complete for today. At the very least I have written "something" here in my little blog I love so much. That's a good start yeah?

I haven't mentioned that a part of the "problem" is my own propensity to want to shut the world off and enter into Second Life as a way of chilling out. I admit it now. I have been using sl as my device to turn off from reality and it's showing. I'm not entirely sure I'm ready to make definitive promises to "better" this arrangement for now. I work... I come home...and I have every intention of playing as well. Sl is my play ground - my sandpit - my "pub" where I go have a yarn with me mates after work. That work above will get done in its own good time - when soul, body, mind and emotion are ready and willing.

You know though... I've been thinking! It occurs to me that in regards to this blog writing I do have one interesting conundrum. My muse is currently, wandering the cyberworlds on new missions and due to time zones and other constraints the stuff that normally gets generated in my mind from the hubhub of our conversations, has been missing of late. He's presently a bit more low key than usual and not as available for sounding off about stuff with.

I started this blog before I really knew him but I do admit that his input into my process of blogging has been pretty high over this past three years. How interesting!

Could it be that I write only when inspired by external creative inputs from others? I hope not! I had thought this was all "my own work" - but maybe I have relied on my muse - and others - to fill in the thought bubbles a bit, imbibing the essences of their unique character recipies and added spices.

I wonder if other writers also absorb their writing from the external experience of relationships to things and people more than creating the experiences from pure ideas alone?

Honestly... I'm really too tired to philosophish about this one in too much of my usual wordy detail today... have to go make something for my family to eat.

I'll be back.

vogue's version of a wedding

Vogue Australia had a rather creepy fashion concept in the past edition June 2009. Sadly I can't find the pics I want to show you on their website so you'll have to go fishing for a copy at your local dentist waiting room now I suppose.

I happened to pick up a copy to read at a local cafe while having lunch last week. A couple of articles were read...yeah ..they were okay.

But then I turned the page to reveal the Vogue Bride section.

Well.....haute couture aside, the poor model acting as resident clothes rack for the day had an appalling dose of the droopies!

I've never seen an unhappier bride in all my born days. The surreal backdrop of a wedding day complete with gorgeous gown and glowing accessories were utterly undone by the repose of the model herself. It was as if the photographers (all males I might add), were trying to tell the oggling masses out there reading, that marriage is a sucky business of vastly over-rated proportions! Which may well be true for some...but hardly a pretty addition to an over-priced fashion magazine! The idea is to make girls want to have all that - to sell clothes I thought!

Perhaps they were borrowing from the thriller novels of the era portrayed - the theme was very Victorian era in many ways - I recall "The Woman in White" in this instance. But even this was creepier and gloomier and about 10x more confusing really!

The model's shoulders were drooped down in the most cringe-worthy slump of depressive malaise ever seen on anyone! Let alone a bride! Her hair was mussed and frizzy, unkempt and disorderly. Her face was pale and devoid of colour. She could have perhaps looked a little bit like the love child of Tilda Swinton and our own dear Cate Blanchette really - but sadly I think those two fine actresses would be mortified to have birthed such a maudlin child as this...and showing up as much on her wedding day too no less?

So anyway... if the blokes that put this spread together were being cheeky and having a dig, then fine but the tone was too downbeat to show the cloth in my laypersons opinion (I be no fashionista afterall and haven't a clue what is trendy or otherwise - don't sue me!).

I am already sceptical of marriage enough without having a set of pictures feeding me a concept of it that implies it's actually more a funeral than a love commitment made public!

Nice one Vogue Oz? Ha! No! It was stupid and a wasted display of some lovely fabric.

choosing to go with the flow

I've chosen a hard option.

To celebrate that which I do not have.

I have it but I don't.

I have generally railed and ranted and complained and whined and moaned about my propensity to choose that which is - in my perception that is - the unavailable and out of reach.

This time I choose to say "well yes...in this context its unavailable but in that context there it is very much available"

This time I choose to say "I'm totally able to accept and embrace this choice I have made despite the angst is causes me outside of the present moment".

My heart wants to do this.

it's crazy.

wrong.

stupid.

unavailable.

NQR. (not quite right).

It makes beautiful, wonderful, amazing sense exactly where it is.

I'm celebrating the ubiquitous ambiguity of unavailable love.

..................................and the theme song for the week is

Franky Goes to Hollywood's "Relax"

"Relax"

Oh oh
Wee-ell-Now!

Relax don't do it
When you want to go to it
Relax don't do it
When you want to come
Relax don't do it
When you want to come
When you want to come

Relax don't do it
When you want to to go to it
Relax don't do it
When you want to come
Relax don't do it
When you want to suck to it
Relax don't do it
When you want to come
Come-oh oh oh

But shoot it in the right direction
Make making it your intention-ooh yeah
Live those dreams
Scheme those schemes
Got to hit me
Hit me
Hit me with those laser beams

I'm coming
I'm coming-yeah

Relax don't do it
When you want to go to it
Relax don't do it
When you want to come

Relax don't do it
When you want to suck to it
Relax don't do it (love)
When you want to come
When you want to come
When you want to come
Come-huh

Get it up
The scene of love
Oh feel it

Relax
Higher higher

Hey-
Pray

heresy or insight...the dilemma is Now

NOTE: For those of my readers who are opposed to, or find any kinds of ramblings about the christian faith somewhat annoying, please stop reading now. I don't profess to be a complete fundamentalist when it comes to christianity but every now and again, I have to muse on stuff that butts up against my faith in significant ways. This blog post is one of "those".

Some online friends and I are currently discussing a book called "The Mandala of Being" by Richard Moss.

The book is definitively a "New Age" self improvement book and to all intents and purposes would be immediately considered "Heresy" by most scholars and lay persons of the Christian faith.

Why would I do this? Read this book? Given that my faith is a stubborn attribute of my nature and I refuse, point blank, to renounce the divinity of Christ or subjugate him to the realm of "mystic teacher", I am probably playing with "The Devil Incarnate" from a traditionalist christian perspective.

That is sad! You see... most westerners, who have little time or understanding - or even knowledge - of the Triune God, will immediately renounce Christianity on the basis that we preach "Freedom" but in fact jump on followers for exploring "a new age book" (or any kind of "new age" book); one that aims to help people be better and whole, enveloped in Love, no less.

Christianity is supposed to be about Love...such love that defies logic! Impossible Love. Love of infinite and immeasurable proportions. Mostly, we limit this love by our feeble attempts at describing obedience and our brandishment of our dogma. So much of my faith wallows in the halls of fear and guilt - when we are supposed to be consistently within that joyous space of contentment that Moss describes as the Now but for which for "us" as christians, is buried in the nature of Christ Himself.

Richard Moss is somewhat scathing of the traditional expressions of the christian faith. It is as it as always been for christians... we're "nut cases"; "stupid creatures" who have no wisdom or logic to be believing in such a capricious and over-bearing god who demands we obey and has the audacity to call it 'freedom'.

The book attempts to describe a way of centering the Self into a place of timeless joy, presence and wholeness that has no bearing on time, place, imagination, history, story, emotional response or reaction. It is a place of Being and a sense of the Now, that precludes all judgments and imaginations. It is a no_Thing place of centered calm and illuminating Peace.

I have expressed myself, vociferously, in my small group (and I congratulate them on being so gentle and tolerant of my emphatic statements. It is after all, a "story" I am telling that I refuse to negate) - that for Christians, this material in the Mandala of Being, expressed so rapturously by Richard Moss is a GIVEN when we centre ourselves IN CHRIST.

Christ is the NOW.

Well! He is supposed to be! When christians are asked by God in Scripture to bury ourselves "in Christ" we are in effect, being asked to come back to the 'Centre of our Being', that place in the Now, unattached to the past, the present, the future, others and even our selves.

"There is no condemnation for those who are in Christ" (Rms 8:1)

It is language that lets all of us down. This incredibly difficult material that I am reading and working through with my friends, both intrigues and frustrates me. Moss does his best to bring clarity to the material but it is so elusive. His yogic practise of centering the attention on ones breathing just doesn't do it for me (probably just as well), nor do I find many of his other exercises engaging and centering for me personally. His mandala concept is kinda cool, all I can see is a cross of course and you know where that will lead if I bang on about that stuff just too much ;)

However, I will say that I have had many, many occasions of being utterly lost inside prayer. When my focus is on God or elevated within some sort of spiritual process of discovery which is directed at the Divine as I understand that to be, that is my experience of the kind of elusive centeredness Moss tries to describe. I don't find any "no-Thingness" about this experience for me though, rather - the place I experience is FULL. There is a full-blown sense of being in the company of someone else, other than myself, who is much, much larger than the sum of all time's parts. There is a sense of being complete, of being safe, centered definitely - but not as Moss describes it - alone and yet merged into everything at once etc!

If ONLY it was easy for others to see what I see! But that is a value judgment of others that I am asked by the world, to not make. I am to keep quiet about God because God is an overwhelming responsibility that makes little logical sense to anyone who refuses to or cannot know him. My shockingly perverse attempts to find language that will have meaning to those who don't understand are too fraught with overtones of fundamentalist christian dogma.

Love cannot be seen if your art forms for describing it are too cryptic.

Still. For me there is the fundamental flaw of Self-Aggrandizement in this book. Mankind, since the days of Babel, has aspired to establish the divinity of Mankind. Richard Moss compounds this aspect of mankind's craving to be godlike by reiterating the ancient pagan and new age belief in our superiority and ability to be Masters of our own Making. We all, supposedly, have the power to find our own peace and our own joy and our own sense of centerdness. I disagree!

Be that as it may, if I place myself outside of my faith system for a moment and try to view this from the perspective of one who cannot or does not know God, I can see how wonderful this promise of Moss' can be. To lose fear and to love - in spite of ourselves - is not only challenging it is elusive. We're all caught up in spectral disorders of fear, hope, nostalgia, me, you, competitiveness and self aggrandizement. Richard Moss is offering non-christians a kind of new "wonder-drug" of zen calm; a place of perfect non-anything where there is sympatico contentment with the Self. The Self becomes the spring-board for Superior-to-everything-else equanmity. It's very cool. Very edifying for the ego to be in that kind of space. There is supposed to be humility here - it is a "no-Thing" place we recall! My cynic slip is showing now! ;)

Maybe its impossible for me to imagine this material outside of the lens of my faith system? Christians will rail against such philosophies of course. There is not much that can be done about it except understand that we as the church have really let God down in the way we communicate Christ as the Now of our being.

more fool us I suppose.

Note 2: Those who are Christians and read my blog please note - that I may muse more on the Mandala of Being as I plough through it (it's really heavy going), and that I may, in fact, find useful pieces of information within it that I will want to talk about here - not necessarily from within the context of my faith system. So ...no feeling smug about this piece of preachiness here, please, dear brother or sister in the faith! *smirk* thanks.

it's been awhile dear blog hasn't it?

I've become a little slack at a number of things of late not the least of which is writing in my favourite corner of the WWW; that being this little amusing blog of mine.

I don't know why I have these long periods of "whatever" about writing in here! After a week, this blog calls to me like a Siren from across a vast ocean of responsibilities and tasks. I long for it but the thought of tapping out "something" in here that is witty or profound enough can still my answer to her insistent call. It's like I get cement shoes on for a bit and dig in and won't budge! I fear responsibility so much and even a blog won't boss me around!

That being said...writing does win out eventually! Here I am after all :).

I love writing so much, I can't help but do it every day in one form or another. One of the best gifts I ever paid myself was when I was in year 10 at College back in '76. I decided in about term 2 of that year that I probably "should" do typing in year 11 the following year. This meant I had to catch up seeing as I hadn't taken typing as a subject from the pre-requisite year 9 level. It was night classes or nothing!

For two terms, I slugged it out for two and a half hours a week with Miss Obst, a skinny woman about my fathers age who's eyes seem to glint like flint steel whenever she said my name or looked at me! She had it in for me and subsequently my sister after me. Nothing we did could please her. Needless to say, even after all these years, if someone stands over my shoulder while I type...I have a spaz attack and can't type a single legible word for crackers and salt! Honestly? She done fair put the wind up my holes - that woman - when it came to typo's!

Typing was a duty in those days. A skill that was still a left-over '60's pre-requisite for all young ladies to master. Only of course that it made them somewhat more employable before the inevitable marriage and babies gig, society had rigged for our lot. I slogged away at typing hating every minute of each and every second! It was drill work, boring, inconsolably so. That height of modern 70's whiz bang technology, the electric type-writer became like a Mephistopheles to me; a laughing demon of exacting and proficient letter positioning.

I made so many typo's!

I sucked at typing!

I could barely get 50 words per minute with half again the accuracy! But I stolidly plodded onwards, determined as I was to be "employable" eventually.

Secretly, I just hoped some man would come along and marry me forthwith...even at the ripe old age of 16 years and 10 months and I would retire to being the farm girl I'd always been, with romantic kisses for real instead of in girlish fantasies instead!

Life never matches ones fantasies! Of course!

I learned to type.

In about 1995...thereabouts... we (being my ex husband) got our first computer. My kids were young and I was suitably impressed that my husband was trying so hard to keep "up with the times". I'd done some word processing courses as an Adult learner in long periods of unemployment...in order to make me more "employable" (story of my life really..a blog for another day this employability quotient aspect to the back story of my life)!

It didn't have the internet at the time! But I slowly picked up the skill of typing again. It's apparently one of those things that once you learn, your fingers never forget! Given of course that some idiot doesn't decide to change the traditional QWERTY keyboard of course! If that happens I'm in a big big shitty hole! *gasp*

THEN a year or so later, we got dial up internet and my life changed inexorably! Now I had a window to a world of words I could have never dreamed possible. My innate sense of story was unleashed and I WROTE like I'd never written before! My typing flew off the scale in terms of speed and accuracy. I still make mistakes, but whereas Liquid Paper had previously been my best friend in the past, the computer made typo's a relatively non-onerous event! I could edit on the fly and no one be the wiser! :)

What joy! What a pleasure to be able to write like the wind as fast as my brain could fathom the words!

The key to this process was a little mums world forum on a chat website I came across. I learned so much that year from other women around Australia about the intricacies of web talking! Talking in text, in words in pixilated print!

Never have I felt more at home than in this environment. On the screen, inside of it, the ideas in text burgeoning forth like the spraying mist of a Niagrian Brain.

Words! I love them. I always have. I wrote poetry as a teen and stories. I read books voraciously in holidays and I have always enjoyed the art of the great story-tellers like Henry Rider Haggard and Jean M. Auel and M. M. Kaye and so on! I even read James Joyce Ulysses (though I didn't understand it really)!! And Homer's Illiad and Odyessy! I was and am the classic lit snob. I collected ancient books with musty mildewed pages and read the stylistic syntax of Victorian prose and poetry with all the snobbish sweaty palmed drooling capriciousness of a budding scribe herself. Only, I had NO IDEA I was meant to be or wanted to be or love being a "scribe"!

Not until the internet gave me the gift of being able to write and I pressed that old skill of typing into its proper ethical and purposeful use...did I know that I was and am and will be some kind of writer.

It will be here, maybe just this blog or elsewhere on the World Wide Web that my writing will be of any significance. I aspire to a book or a number of novels but in all seriousness, I highly doubt my skill enough to warrant such a claim. I seem to be suited to the transient freedom of eclectic writing in an introspective blog.

Alternatively, it is in the 1000's of conversations I have with people from all walks of life from across this small green planet where my writing is in its highest expression. It's in text - in Instant Messages and in chat screens on my computer. That is where my writing develops a context and a meaning far beyond any Rider Haggard aspirations in literature could take me. It is in the development of relationships via chatting in text that my writing takes flight and my typing speed spikes! I love it!

Go figure!

So what does all this mean?

It means I've been busy! I've been chatting to people from across the globe and typing my little heart out in conversations and emails and creative works. I've also been hard at it at work, writing text for inclusion in brochures, in letters, in flyers, in reports...I have been TYPING and WRITING...daily...and my life is replete with a satisfaction for the journey I can scarcely describe!

My joy in this is insurmountable even while the evidence for it may not be at all.

I so suck at voice though :)

hahahaha

Where have I been?

I've been writing!

If I knew how to write I'd...

write enough "Love Actually" scripts to sink the Titanic.

I'd write a "Gone with the Wind" or "The Fountainhead" classic every year.

I'd write love poems, tragedy, comedy and I'd be as prolific as Ben Elton with even more of an edge.

I'd write for the New Yorker. I'd write for Time. I'd write for The Boston Review.

I'd write the lyrics of songs that would be sung in a hundred years time.

I'd write essays of thoughts so philosophically profound, people would wonder if Emerson or Thoreau had reincarnated themselves via me.

I'd write children's books that J.K. Rowling would write the preface's for.

I'd write travel tales every bit as extraordinarily touching as those of Elizabeth Gilbert (and I'd be every bit as gorgeous too!).

I'd write stage plays so astonishingly insightful into the human condition, even George Bernard Shaw would rise from the dead to tip his hat.

If only I knew how to write!

If only I knew how to make clear the prose that resides in the mind of my Muse but which for me, resides as mere hints of shadows in phrase and syllable: just broken fragments, pieces of ideas and thoughts, juicy hints of poetic genius, swooshing about, unable to be grasped or seen clearly enough to snatch onto the page or remain there.

There is a marked anxiousness in the Spirit's desire to write frantically all the potential of the universe onto the page under my hand. Alas, but my hand hovers frozen in stasis, and my mind which is controlling this ''twixt heaven and hell' state of play, is grinding gears, frustratingly obfuscated to the very things Spirit knows to be truly there for the writing.

Muse plays and cavorts with my moods. I feel her knocking at my spirit door seeking entrance but if I fling open the door, I can hear her sparkling, cynical laughter as she floats down the passages of my thought processes while I chase after her, silently screaming for that which she was hinting to tell while the door was 'ere closed.

If only I knew how to write!

To feel the unhindered quality of text pouring forth in casual, easy rhythm; the words moving on the page like living entities all collectively related to each other by the blood ties of an effortless syntax so strong they form a genealogy of prosaic providence...always imaginative... that has a reach throughout all time.

If I only knew how to write and write WELL; so freakishly, so insanely, so unequivocally well.

My blog would reach millions and not just a few. Even Seth Godin and Tony Robbins would want to read me. I'd be able to teach the world through the musings that would arise from the very core of my soul and my "Genius" would be engaged with my Ultimate Purpose all combining into a synergy of limitless potential for change and growth, a constructive coherence...for the better...for everyone...

If I only knew how to write... Oprah would mark my words.

If only I knew how to write.

who do you think you are?

well?

Who do you THINK you are?

What we see of our Selves as we go about our lives, is a screwy combination of a lot of assumptions about things that have happened to us, or are going to happen to us, or are happening to us.

We perceive ourselves through a rather faulty lens most of the time. It's really hard for most people to be completely honest about who they think they really are inside.

We generally fall into one of the following categories:

a) We believe we are so utterly beneath most people, we consistently believe and sell ourselves short of our talents, gifts, value and purpose.

b) We believe ourselves so utterly above most other people, we consistently alienate others and yet blame them for "disappointing" us all the time.

c) We waver between these two poles and consistently over-compensate when engaged in either a) or b) swinging wildly between them and losing all sense of security in our identity at all.

Much of the time we can blame our upbringing, our genetics, our environment for all the cumulative "failures" we believe we endure. Thing is, we sometimes forget that what we THINK in any given moment - whether as a reaction to our emotions or as an impetus to emotion - will trigger a slew of things we can never quite believe or accept or understand or aspire to or we underestimate them or overestimate them and so on.

Thoughts beget new thoughts and our emotional re-activeness can lead to thinking that is at best, mildly wise and at worse, a completely irrational and gross over-assumption of the real.

Many of the self-help gurus' would lead us to believe that thinking positive thoughts and having a much more optimistic 'glass-half-full' bravado, will generally lead us to a better life because we'll begin to "manifest" a better life as a result of thinking better.

I still think this is pretty much BS for the most part. It's hard to argue against it though. If we THINK something is bad then it can't be anything BUT bad because that's what we think and assume it to be! It's hard to think of having a brain tumour as something positive isn't it? It's hard to think that missing your flight for a very important job interview is going to lead to new amazing opportunities isn't it? We're led to believe that we either brought these things on ourselves through our thought processes and that we actually wanted them or that somehow, there is a positive outcome that an arbitrary universe bestows on individuals further along the time-line just because of our predicament in the here and now! It's a cruel thing to believe. I'm not saying it's not entirely untrue even so.

I have no idea! For the most part, I'm still very much of the opinion that despite man's insistence on bending truth to suit, there is such a thing as Absolute Truth that cannot be bent by either Science, religion or man's equivocal and super quixotic tendencies to try. There is "something" that exists in the world, in nature and inherent within Life itself that is exactly what it is and can be nothing else. We keep looking for it and we probably ignore it for the most part because we assume that something like that is probably really hard to find but just as likely, it's probably easy as all hec to see - we just consistently expect it to be other than what it actually is!

If our thoughts do indeed create the world and our environment in which we react so vociferously and willfully, then seeing ourselves for what we actually are is mind-blowingly difficult. At least it probably is for many people not the least of which is me! It's like we live with this spectre of intense Self love and even more intense Self loathing, battling inside our deeper psyche, warring it out over which one will get the upper hand; our 'Terrified-I-don't-fit-in' little selves or our 'Super-ego-inflated-over-the-top-of-everyone-else' big selves.

Finding the spot where we're exactly who we are and KNOW that to be True - Absolutely True - is a massive test of character, wisdom, humility, patience, acceptance, Love and of pure objective compassion.

Strange isn't it? That we can probably only see what we truly are when when we are at once brutally honest and utterly, completely and unsentimentally compassionate with ourselves at the same time. Nothing in our past, our future, even around us in our present world is the mirror into which we can look with any accuracy as to our Absolute Truth of the Self. Our eyes are like a carnival hall of mirrors that distort and refract what is presented to them and from those weird and grotesque deformations, we construct a view of our Selves and how we fit into this world that is most likely largely inaccurate and silly.

Neither abject self debasement, nor total self aggrandizement, of our person hood, in this life, will help us see ourselves clearly as we truly are.

The truest form that Nakedness takes is to stand utterly stripped of the mirrors that are our eyes and the thoughts we contrive from the evidence of our eyes, our ears, our nostrils, our tongue and our fingers and without thought, allow our Self to feel this moment.

No scanning, no judging, no assuming, no forecasting, no musing, no alluding, no naming, no wondering, no acknowledgment, no hindering, no moralising, no debasement, no aggrandizement, no fretting, no pride, no smug assuredness, and nothing else that causes or reacts to human thought: just THIS moment and - without naming it or giving it labels to rationalise it away - what you feel within and without is exactly who you are. It's never what you think.

Celebrate that.

Musing on my relationship with food

(NB: This is pretty much a stream of consciousness ramble. I'm thinking aloud sorta in words. It is probably too long and boring for most to read but for me it's my way of figuring out something baffling. You're welcome to read it and hopefully you will have an insight that can help yourself or someone else - including me - along the way).

I am an eater.

Nothing new about that per se. Most living creatures eat - even single celled organisms almost invisible to the naked eye eat - sort of.

Eating is at the crux of the sustainability of Life. Nourishment from an external compound creates a looped system of Birth - Life - Death complexity that can boggle the mind if you let it.

Food, in order to make that Life part between Birth and Death has to have just enough of the right chemical compounds to bring the right kind of sustaining nutrients required by the various cells in the body to continue to function even while they are in decline and decay. The aim of food is to delay the decay process of Life towards death for as long as possible so that the propagation of those cells can be as successful as possible in new generations. Life is incredibly selfish that way!

That's the simplistic side to the food story. The base understanding that food is necessary for my very survival and fitness to live for as long as possible, is pretty much a foregone conclusion.

Thing is - food - and I - have a complex relationship superimposed onto the mere survival one that is so in your face, its spinning obviousness is akin to a Catherine Wheel! It's somewhat dangerous and even a little bit incendiary. Food is both my saviour and my nemesis; my god and my daemon.

Love and Hate for this substance that gives me life or could just as easily kill me before my body has had a chance to live out its natural and slow decay process to a peaceful death, gives me both chills and thrills: and sometimes the order of those are mix and match to the order of the others. What gives me a thrill is likely as not to be incredibly dangerous if consumed in too great a quantity over a sustained period. What gives me chills is likely as not to be the very thing my body craves to nurture it to continued life. And vice versa.

Three years ago, I weighed in excess of 105 kilograms. For those not yet familiar with Metric measurement that equates to approximately 230 pounds (16.5 stone for the UK people out there).

Right now, I am not game to stand on the scales to see for sure what I currently weigh. About 6 months ago it was somewhere in the vicinity of 75kgs (165lbs or 11.5 stone). I suspect I may have gained in under two months, approximately 10kg (22lbs or 1.5 stone approx.).

The question I ask now is "Why?"

I am eating again! That's why.

But wasn't I always eating? Even when having lost so much weight?

Yes! I had been eating. I had been eating in a disciplined, controlled, self-denying kind of way. To lose in excess of 30kgs over the course of two and a half years, I went into a kind of mindset that essentially said "Do not eat THIS or THAT no matter how much you want to!". I eliminated a lot of the carbodhydrates from my diet. Actually I eliminated or at the very least, severely reduced the following:

Caffiene
Sugar
Wheat
Potatoes (except sweet potatoes)
dairy
yeast

I lived on rice grain products such as rice milk, and rice floured breads, meat and most vegetables. I cheated a bit on the dairy as I'm a big fan of cheese and cheese became my main "treat".

Including those restrictions, I began walking - a lot. I was going through some massive internal changes as well. My marriage was slowly disintegrating; I was seeking love in other places; I was spiritually changing some of my perspectives; I was also craving new challenges and new experiences. Essentially, the weight loss was an expression of a vast 'iceberg' effect of internal change being evidenced by a smaller external surface change - aka weight loss.

Three years on and my life is in a new place. I'm single again and I am living under very different conditions to the past life I had. I have different wants now and a very different set of priorities. I don't walk nearly as much as I did. I work in an office now which is a lot more sedentary than I've been this past three years. And - the main culprit? I eat what I want when I want even if it's not necessary or good to do so.

I'm eating not out of the need to survive but because there is no emotional set of circumstances strong enough within me to govern my sense of having to control my world.

Is my world under control now? I do feel more "content" within myself. Yes! I am a bit lonely on the romance front but that is to be expected and quite frankly - I'm getting rather used to my nice unfettered independence. The only thing I am out of control with is food.

Again I have to ask "Why?".

I do wonder if it's boredom sometimes. I wonder if it's to do with instant gratification. It may also be do to with sensual pleasure. I have always enjoyed the sensory pleasure of food. Eating is very much an "In the Moment" kind of thing. Its very present, as in "right now", is eating. It's right here, right now: a canopy of sensual experience across the spectrum of the senses. Touch, taste, sight, smell, sound. Food answers the sensual need to FEEL the physical world as real.

I live in such an intellectualised state of being most of the time - that I wonder if perhaps, I am over-eating because there is within me, a subconscious need to strike more balance between my physical reality and the intellectual/fantasy thought life I tend to adore too well. My body is literally pleading with me to balance the realm of thoughts and ideas I frequent with sensual, physical sensory experiences. My body is trying to tell me I need to breathe and ground myself into more Earth rather than continually focus on the Air of Ideas.

It's a novel thought really and one I hadn't considered until writing it just now. My body is conditioned to use food as a device for connecting to earth; for finding sensory experiences springing from the subconscious and conscious thinking I do so much.

Then there is Emotion! Watery, fluid, morphing, moving emotion. I have always said I'm an "Emotional Eater". I do eat when stressed, tired, bored, anxious, happy, content, placid, busy. The few times I don't eat are when the stress reaches a critical mass and I am physically incapable of eating too much, which was exactly the case not long after I left my marriage of 18 years in May last year. For nearly three months, I found it difficult to eat a lot at all and spent most of my time attempting to find work, crying and walking to meditate and pray about my lot in life.

Right now, I suspect my base emotional reason for over-eating all the foods that "do me no good", is the fact that I am frustrated and bored.

I have a great job! I love my job really and am enjoying the learning curve involved very much. My job is however, very Air oriented. It's almost pure intellectual thought and idea and both the absorption of idea and the dissemination of idea - hopefully as creatively and as inspiring as possible. What my job is not is very Earth. The office - meaning the people in that office - seem to subconsciously try to correct this through the use of food as a means to provide balance to our very cerebral kind of work. Interesting!

I don't need a lot of massive control in my life right now either. My house needs attention in the housework department of course but it's okay - I don't feel unduly pressing need to organise straight lines and the stuff as much as I had done in my previous home. The energy is "different" here - but that's probably a musing for another day.

Where my base frustrations are springing from and triggering my instinctive impulses to overeat certain "not-good-for-me" foodstuffs is most likely in the realm of sex and romance. It seems that I might be the kind of woman who literally needs a certain level of physical sensuality and gratification of the kind usually presented in the bedroom between lovers. That's about as delicately as I can put it without sounding too crass or TMI about it *blush*. Not just ANY kind of physical sensuality mind you - I did get very fat within a perfectly "normal" marriage after all!

No! What I mean is that I currently desire something I am simply not getting. Intimacy of the physical, emotional, intellectual and spiritual kind. I am not "in love" and nor do I love anyone with enough limerence to create the endorphins my brain says are satisfying enough that I can do without the need to eat!

Part of this is the pure fantasy of romantic Hollywood style "perfected" love of course. My Knight in Shining Armour coming to whisk me away from my mundane life to one of sensual pleasure, delight and utter adoration of ME! etc etc etc T'would be nice I suppose if I wasn't also looking for someone with a good brain as well! ;)

I'm eating because I'm frustrated emotionally and romantically. Food is my drug, soothing and smoothing the edges to this frustration. It's my crutch and comforting friend when no other actually exists in my physical reality. I'm not choosing foods I CAN eat without needing to worry about gaining weight. I want to eat those foods for which the conditioned pleasure of eating them outweighs the emotional and physical sense of loss and discomfort.

I eat a lot of bread! Bread and high carbohydrate foods tend to become a looping system of addiction for me. I eat bread, I crave more bread. A little like giving up smoking, giving up bread is fraught with cravings so strong as to be almost impossible to do - at least for me. Cheese in all its varieties is another of my chosen comforters. Giving up cheese equates to a feeling of such utter depredation as to border on criminal punishment. Sugar is my final nail. Sugar is the fuel that adds the exhaustive flame to the bread and cheese debacle that is my current diet. My body is actually exhausted by the combination of these three main fuels. The more exhausted I feel, the more frustrated I am, the more likely it is I return to them seeking relief from the very thing they're creating within me.

So? How should I solve this dilemma so that I can sustain a gradual weight loss to a healthy weight zone again?

One would think that I need to eliminate the culprits from my diet! I did that. See the above "DO NOT EAT" list? I did that for not quite 12 months - that sparse and highly disciplined diet. It's not going to work for me over the long term. That kind of focus and self-denial thing isn't sustainable or wise. I can't yo-yo my weight up and down 10kgs on a constant treadmill of weight-gain then guilt then self-denial then collapsed motivation then weight-gain over the years. That would be even more unhealthy!

What I do need to do is address two things in my life.

a) I need to get more balance between sensual in-the-now physical reality and my propensity to live inside my head without resorting immediately to the foods I love to address that balance. The possible alternative may be to spend some time walking again out in nature everyday and touching the earth - literally touching it. Bark, leaves, dirt, flowers, grass. Smelling, sensing, breathing in, hearing and seeing the earth. Taking note of it and feeling it IN my body.

b) I need to examine my basic desires for romance and intimacy and how they form within me. Why do I assume subconsciously, that I am not a whole person if I do not have a partner/lover? Why do I not see the potential within me to be a whole, complete and independent woman even without a man beside me? Possible alternative is to begin telling myself deliberately that I AM worthy of love and that I AM very okay right now as I am within my own skin. I also need to come to a deep acceptance of my current circumstances and trust that whatever happens in my future, I will be very okay anyway. I may feel lonely from time to time and I may certainly need a lot more physical affection than I'd previously thought (perhaps; it may be just coz I don't have it right now that I want it and when I DO get it - I'll perversely think I don't need it anymore! *sigh* Women!) - be that as it may, my romantic frustrations can be acknowledged and identified and that latent energy put towards self-actualising goals that don't need to involve bread and sugar!

Food is such a dichotomy of both desire and subsequent repulsion for what it can do to my body, it could be something I'd talk about for quite some time. One more thing - I am currently addicted to my computer screen for the "company" of others. Strange that idea huh? That I should choose the computer, to seek intimacy and human connection. This is probably also, another blog post for another day, but I do know sort of why I use the computer in such a way. I get both the freedom of controlling my own world without having to put up with the In-your-face realities of person to person contact and I can control how I present myself (I feel more confident and constructive in text than I do in voice) and I also get quite different feedback from the intimacy of chat than I do face to face with people. Part of it is illusion and Story, the other part is being able to control the conversation to tell that Story. This environment taps into a part of my psyche that fundamentally fits with how I think and feel and perceive the world...ergo, I sit here too much seeking that feedback loop and not moving my body through space enough to burn up the bread I just ate for my tea.

:)

The girl who couldn't cry: Chapter 8

Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7

Ariadne did not feel like eating but it was against the few rules mutants had to skip meals. She went to the servery and seated herself in her usual place. A meal was placed before her, the gravy spilling a little over the edge of her pannikin. In her mind, she was sculpting a dead tree, every nuance of the carving taking up her imagination. The throbbing inside her head had lessened significantly since she had started the dream. She was suddenly thrust back to reality by the sensation of emotions pulling in beside and across from her.

She looked at the mutant faces of the people she shared her life with. She did not love them or hate them. They were merely people who lived with pain like her.

"I'm going to sculpt a spiral from a dead tree,” she announced to the group at her supper table. "It will be my fountain of tears and with it I will mourn a river."

The group looked at her balefully and sceptically. She felt their questions and their disbelief. "I'm going to." and she began eating as if to end the matter there and then. The others looked at her for a few more moments, and then one by one they bent over their meal and ate in silence too.

Ariadne pulled her imagination forward so that all she could see were its pictures in her mind, reminiscent of, and built upon her dream - that of turning the giant dead wood thing in the imaginary lathe around and around, carving the grooves that would become the spiral of her tears.

As the pannikins emptied and the diners were satisfied, they stopped and in silence sat and bored their eyes into Ari trying to fathom if she had gone mad or if this was yet another mere moan regarding her plight. Ari could feel the rising heat of enquiry poking her in the spot behind her eyes like laser swords.

“What’s wrong with paper and charcoal?” Said the round shaped young woman at the end of the table. It was a pertinent question. The charcoal alone, being black market and extremely valuable a commodity, was enough to warrant jealousy of Ari’s abilities to use it. No one else in their Section could draw like this Ariadne modification could so many denied themselves such extravagances as charcoal by virtue of not being able to do such a commodity justice. Paper on the other hand, was still a common device. Available to everyone in every section of the laboratory, it carried no special merit save that it was made not from wood anymore, but from papyrus.

The civilised world had turned full circle in many ways and the ancient plant, once used by the Egyptians thousands of years ago was now used again, only with much faster and more efficient harvesting and processing techniques. Of course it was genetically modified to endure conditions its ancient predecessor could not. It was whiter, thinner, hardier and far more resilient to moisture and mould. Normal Humans paid a premium price for this paper; it was considered a luxury outside the Perspex cages of the laboratory. Mutants used it as people had historically used – and abused – paper in the century preceding them, with no compunctions about wasting it.

“Nothing is wrong with paper and charcoal, Carol,” Ari replied, looking up at the speaker and feeling the jealousy and envy pour from every cell in Carol’s rotund frame. “I simply want to carve the tears I cannot shed into a spiral on a dead tree.”

“But, Why?” Asked the James Modification, the gills at the sides of his neck flapping as he spoke.

“Because I want to!” Ariadne could feel her anger beginning to rise. She needed to escape these people. They couldn’t - and wouldn’t - listen to her and she could feel their frustration and distrust of her as a firebrand on her mind. Because…I…want…to!” She reiterated the words slowly and deliberately to try and make it clear.

The bell sounded to announce the end of their meal and they each rose from their places, taking their pannikins and cutlery and dumping them with a cacophony of metallic thuds into the dish bins as they exited the mess hall. No one spoke or commented to Ari as they left, but she could feel them. She could feel their questions; their mistrust, their envy and she determined once more, to carve her tears so they’d finally know what it meant to not be able to cry.

... To be continued. (I hope)

The mystery of emotional attachment to animals

Sevvie is our 6 month old moggy. A cat of no fixed pedigree who came into our lives on a whim one fine November day in 2008.

I had originally called him "4711", that being the date we got him, all wobbly back legs and tiny thing of fluff and innocence. Four legs arriving on the 7th of the 11th. Seven being shortened version of said weird name for a cat and "Sevvie" being the normalised version of "seven" which is apparently only cool for StarTrek beauties so far as names go!

So, anyway... he's been re-named "Severus" by my teenage daughter who deems fantasy stories about wizards far more normal than names derived from logical naming tools such as file date numbering systems! We can still call him "Sevvie" as a result in this twist in the furry tale (sic).

Sevvie is ostensibly an "indoors" cat. I had every passionate intention of keeping Sevvie an indoors cat permanently.

Sadly, young Severus is as dodgy in character as the person in said fantasy literature, and increasingly attempted absconding outdoors as often as practicably possible.

Finally, I relented! I let him outside to "go play", after a long and active session of "Bug the Mama, while she sleeps" session in the early hours of this morning.

I'm currently so tired now on my Saturday off, I've hardly done much at all. I was awoken by naughty kitten at 0430 with screen climbing, curtain hopping, Mama pouncing, computer rampaging, and general episodic attempts to chase naughty kitten from bedroom. Then came three hours of scratching at my bedroom door.

Squirting with the water pistol has had limited success. It basically sucks because I STILL have to get up to sevvie to do the actual squirting for scratching at the door of our rented house! Most annoying at 0530 I can tell you!

So, I let Sevvie outside to a world beyond his control and experience. He enjoys himself and meets another cat who surveils Sevvie with all the caution of an older cat patronising an impertinent young upstart!

Suddenly, an hour slipped by and lo and behold, Sevvie is missing. My mood, already beaten into a pulp by lack of restful sleep and abject general "blue'ness" dived! I felt awful.

I sobbed even!

I had wanted to kill this kitten only two hours previous and now that it was missing I was mortified. Not only did I count the cost in dollars recently spent on surgical bills for Sevvie, I hadn't taken into account the impact such a critter makes in one's life thus far.

Sevvie has literally become a member of my immediate family. It seems like "overnight" and yet it's 6 months. It is literally like having a baby in many ways. I felt so responsible for this animal! So heart-sick guilty for the rashness of my responses to its behaviours.

Thankfully, Sevvie was found. He'd gotten lost in the neighbours back yard and had no idea how to find his way home! Such is the way of kids. They get distracted and take no notice of land marks to find their way home again, they're always lost in the eternal moment of new discoveries and new friends to chase.

Sevvie must have realised not long after finding himself in the wrong backyard that he really wasn't as ready for big outside adventures as he'd assumed. No doubt he'll forget all of this learning curve tomorrow and want to go outside again!

The Mama in the mean time has to figure out how to stay one step ahead of early-rising felines if only to prevent the early morning angst that threatens dire consequences on furry black hides.

cloud cuckoo's pine for the fjiords too

I live in the future a lot. I plot and plan, design and idealise phantasms of perfection in my work habits, my romantic aspirations and my personal development.

I want to be perfectly formed physically, glowingly attractive both within and without - whilst still enjoying cold pizza for breakfast on lazy Saturday mornings.

I want to be with 'The Perfect Partner', who "gets" my every mood. You know? A man who can read my mind to know what my mood is at any given moment - and know how to accommodate it ;)

I want to be highly organised and efficient in the daily running of my duties and responsibilities, so much so that people will clamour for my organisational expertise, paying deliciously large sums of money for the privilege, while I pay for a gardener and a house-cleaner to tidy up after my perfectly anonymous quiet life at home.

I want to have a new super green, hydrogen fuel cell car, parked in the garage of a big, beautiful low-energy use house so I can join couchsurfing.com and invite strangers from around the globe to share their travel tales with my children and me in homely and world-changing civility and cross-cultural understanding.

I want a "firm" pocket spring mattress and base set bed for my nice lean and well exercised back after I've been out walking for 10kms every day.

I want the perfect tattoo, designed by my own hand from my own innovative concept in the perfect centre of my lower back where it will be discreet and only viewable by the very, very, privileged few.

I want an inner city serviced apartment in the CBD of Melbourne overlooking Southbank with large east facing windows and a balcony overlooking the river.

I want to write the 21st century version of a "Gone with the Wind" epic so timeless and classic, it will outlive my Great Grand Children. And every day I shall struggle and labour to write the words for this blog, beautifully, coherently; inspiring others through my experiential musings.

Oh yes! I have a lot of fantasies.

Now, many in the professional development industry might say that if these were genuine desires, nothing should be able to stop me from intending and creating them as a part of my reality. It's a nice theory. It apparently works for some too so I won't quibble too much.

Obviously, I haven't properly mastered that little bit of fluff between intention and realisation yet. I'm a work in progress I guess.

So? What do I really want?

If everything in the above list was mine to have, what else would there be left to want? Family, friends and faith notwithstanding, what else in my Cloud-Cuckoo Land could I possibly want?

:)

High-quality stationery! That's what I want.

I decided it today. I decided that if I lived in a perfect world with the "right" man and the "right" house and had the "right" income as well as the "right" level of business acumen, I would want a beautiful, elegant, gorgeously designed concept stationery store where I could sell people the most astonishing array of quality paper ephemera.

Thing is...I wouldn't sell "just" paper...I'd be helping people! People who also had a love of fine stationery, like - glowing, gorgeous, sweet, elegant me, all beautiful and lean in a black pencil skirt, naturally tanned elongated looking legs in black patent leather Manolo Blahnik's, and a white button down pure linen blouse - me, with the stationery supplies they needed to create mastery of their own aspirations.

Beautiful paper notepads, filing supplies, pens and planners...

ahhhh...such heavenly bliss!

I'd help them own a Moleskine too :)

........................In a perfect world!

1000 buzzes

It's late and the sleepy, eyes-half-closed quality of horizontal avoidance threatens to lay me flat despite the insistence to remain up. I am resisting sleep and yet I must. A thousand thoughts burble and bumble their way across the canvas of Ideas. Things to do. To say. To be. To want. To buy. To sell. To think. To read. To muse. To blog.

Things too innumerable to be anything but transient, soft buzzes. Buzzes akin to an errant mosquito against the ear late at night when its dark. The sound burrs inside your brain large and insistent but reach out to SMACK it down.. and you will fail...everytime.

No such capture device exists to slam down these bursting-with-sound mosquitoes of thought. No notebook or digital device can lay its thick, solid permanence to transitory murmurings of eclectic, passing, tiny, large, insouciant, pressing, niggling, angling, careering, noisome thoughts.

If I wrote, I'd write for a hundred lifetimes. Lists. Lists so long they'd wind the sands of the Sahara into clouds of watery tears, begging me to stop with the lists, the words, the hapzard and non-sensical array of buzzing thoughts in my head.

Some would say to turn off this mind-trap of aMusement. But I won't. It is a vibe for the moment and nothing more. A creative bursting of mosquitoey bubbles of sound, flexing their syllabic muscles and capturing words into coherent messages for the future read.

One thousand buzzing ideas and ideas about ideas and thoughts about thoughts and then thinking thoughts about thoughts of ideas, all spinning like crazy string, electric taut and buzzing.... a mind without edges, print or byte expanding beyond the reaches of the known Mosquito Universe...

bzzzzzzzzz bzzzzzzzz bzzzzzzzz.....

getting things right with getting things done

I have more than a passing interest in organisational and productivity tools and concepts. Most of my life, I've made repeated attempts at finding the synergy between being productive, organised and creative and I've used many tools in the past to find the magical formula that works for me.

It's not always simple as I'm also easily bored with too much routine and tend to knock my life out of whack - usually unconsciously - just to shake things up and experience a new direction. This means that I will have a system down to a fine art and be ticking along with it really well and then voilá! A new life experience and pattern changes the "rules" for using the tool and I'm thrown for a loop and subsequently get myself into disorganised trouble once more!

It's kinda fun for awhile...that chaotic roller-coaster ride...but really annoying if left like that for too long. The internal war for balance between chaos and order, forever rages in my dramatic heart.

From when I was a little girl, with a penchant for sticky-taping complex numbering systems onto the backs of my extensive collection of books; to early adult hood with various fetishes for tidy pantries, linen closets, Debden Day Runners and Palm devices; I've climbed back on - and fallen off - the "Organised & Productive" wagon many times. I envy people who can stick with it consistently over the long haul but for me its a lot more ad hoc and spontaneous. No one system ever stays with me ubiquitously and I'm always on a learning curve, or quest, to find one more that will match my current life choices. Oh - and I am a ridiculously slow learner too btw - so a 2 year stint of no cohesive organisational tool to speak of, when I already know the value of having one, is quite "normal" for me!

That being said, I swoon with delight in an office stationery store and you would most likely find me buried in the planners and organisers section (both digital and paper), perusing the wares with a kind of crazy, lustful glint in my eye. I love the look, the feel, the innumerable possibilities available to that Organisational, Control Freak part of me, with that kind of stuff!

Getting Things Done is one methodology that I love and that I often talk about in this blog. I have mentioned in recent weeks, that I have fallen off the GTD wagon these past two years. Essentially, one of those right-angled Life turns I made in recent years, subsequently changed how I used the system and because of that I lost "faith" in my original trusty Palm Tungsten E2 and when it died, its successor, the very plain bottom of the pile Palm Z22. Palm was my tool of choice for capturing and processing the stuff in my head, until I lost focus and wasn't as reliant on it as I had been due to my changed life-style patterns.

I still use my plain no-frills Palm! Don't get me wrong. I will still put an appointment into the calendar and I use the Memo function pretty much ALL the time because I can hide the private stuff. You know? Like personal medical information etc. I love the notepad too for quick jotting of phone numbers and the like. It is a brilliant device. I love all these aspects of this technology and will most likely continue to use an electronic organiser for that sort of thing for many moons to come.

Where I've fallen down is in managing my Tasks Lists on the Palm. I just don't look at it enough to keep my next actions in front of me. I "forget" to trust it as my external reminder system. There has been a breakdown for me in using the Palm everyday for the everyday stuff. I'm not entirely sure why because it is the most logical device in my mind for this sort of list making efficiency. However, there are a few issues with my little basic Palm that may be contributing factors. For one thing, The model I have chosen seems to be really clunky for directly putting in the information. I can't sync it at work as my PC there doesn't have the software installed and I have yet to find out if I can have permission to do that. The interface of the Palm software, on the computer, is a bit cumbersome too. It's just not fluid enough and a little bit unattractive so of course I don't use the context task list functionality on it like I used to with the old E2 back in the day.

Solving this dilemma has required a multi-pronged approach in figuring out exactly HOW I currently operate and finding a complimentary tool which will be a natural context task list capture tool without sacrificing what I already use the Palm for. It has to be quick to use, almost instant. It has to be mutable and easily up-dated. It has to be highly portable and light. It has to be as simple as possible. It has to be cheap. It has to be Stupidity Proof!

I spent a lovely afternoon yesterday cruising the web and reading up on lots of GTD ideas for capturing those ideas and next actions or project ideas. Notebooks are fine to a point but I refuse to get a crook shoulder, carrying around the lumpy Day Planner type diary or even a largish notebook. I did that years ago for a long time and my back and shoulders thanked me when I finally gave up the heavy paper and leather planners grafted to my side!

I had designed and used a small list styled notebook once before and had spent hours sectioning it off into list headings... but of course, there is always a certain amount of wastage of both space and paper with this idea. It didn't last very long! Too fussy not to mention really messy in the end! It did have a few pluses going for it - being the immediacy of its availability - always at hand - and easy to check up on etc.

Then I remembered Pocketmod from a couple of years ago and searched it out again. It's been quite cleverly updated so I played around with it for a bit and learned a lot in the process of printing and folding of the little "book" made from one sheet of paper. There was still a "problem" with that though. The pocketmod is designed for American Letter sized paper...which is slightly smaller than our standard A4 paper here in Australia, so my pocket mod needed trimming and for some reason, things never quite aligned like I wanted them to in the printing. It always came out messy and scrappy looking! The widget on screen for customising some of the pages also didn't appear to work on my computer/printer set up. That was frustrating!

About ready to give up, I ducked over to YouTube, while following some pocketmod links, and happened across this variation on the pocketmod theme. And then...an AHA! moment. I figured if I could put my various context task lists as headings, instead of the days of the week, it might actually prove to be a useful tool for me.

Experimenting in Word, I learned how to align the text in such a way that when the page was printed, and then subsequently folded, the wee headings for my task lists were neatly at the top of the little space created by the folds in the paper. When folded as per the "db pocket planner" method on YouTube, no trimming was required, it opens out for "at-a-glance" viewing of my different lists and it's really easy to quickly throw in a notation. I even printed the headings on the reverse side to recycle the page when the front gets too full or messy. I figure I may only need to print a fresh page off every other week or so. Its a simple matter of refolding the other way to use the reverse side of the paper! Very frugal! :)

Of course, I don't even really need to fuss around with printing out the headings on this tool. The simple fold and write method could work just as well. There is for me though, a innate need for a little bit of sophistication which has a sharper than average edge to it. The headings typed onto the sections look good. It has a less "scrap-paper" kind of feel to it by typing in the headings. That's just my personal choice though. For every day use...writing the tasks, quickly, by hand with a pencil is going to be the usual method of capturing things. The printed headings just gives it a bit of personal tool cred for me is all.

It looks great. It's so insanely simple and best of all...I felt really pleased and excited to have found potentially, the "right" tool to help me get back into GTD. Even if I don't use this system permanently and end up with another one down the line - I do have rather high hopes this basic little "book" will prove to be an invaluable aid and addition to using my über basic Palm. I'm hoping to upgrade both Palm and mobile phone to an iPhone in a couple of years so I want to ensure I have a workable strategy for capture and action reminders until then.

One of my biggest failings these past couple of years has been capturing the stuff I need to process and think about. To get it out of my head into a place I trust. Even something as simple as forgetting to put a blimmin' shower cap on the shopping list has been an irritant of growing proportions of late: I'd only remember I needed one when I went to grab the very old loose one in the bathroom! Ugh! So last night...on my "@shopping" section of my little capture list, I wrote "shower cap". For things like this, that vague feeling of "I've forgotten something" will hopefully disappear forthwith! :)

The list will live in my wallet so its guaranteed to be with me pretty much all the time and within easy reach. The idea is that it's a working document always in flux. At present I'm using pencil so that done tasks can be erased to leave room for new ones.

It may seem like it's fussy but I don't think it is, really. At least not yet! I "thought" my original notebook idea was going to be simple too but it also had some pretty strong limitations. The use of a pencil does help though. Like for instance - I just went and did some grocery shopping, I got what I needed from the list (including that bloody showercap! yay!) and when I got home just erased that part because items on other sections of the list are still pending.

I could probably fuss around by typing the lists into the main doc in Word and then deleting the done items off and reprinting and refolding, but that doesn't seem very 'Green' or all that efficient in my circumstances. That could change though too, as I ease into a rhythm with this new tool. Maybe anyway. Time will tell if this tool is workable for me over the long term. It's true that the size of this small booklet limits the number of things you can have listed at any given time. I'm not sure yet if the size will prove to be a major disadvantage and I am already suspecting it could.

This is, however, meant as a quick reference tool for the various contexts I'm most likely to be in, like going shopping, running errands, stuff to remember to take to work, things to do with and for the kids etc. It's a mutable, transient capture device to jog my memory. Anything more substantial than a discrete next action is likely going to need recording into a proper project planning tool. I'm looking into Ta-da Lists for that kind of thing at the moment. Baby steps etc.

The key should be that I instinctively trust this little pocket list as a sort of "external brain" so I don't actually have to contain any of this information inside my head. And when it boils down to it that is the crux of the GTD mantra! DON'T keep it in your head! Put it - the stuff you think about - somewhere outside of your head where you know you'll see it, and be free to decide (or do) later when the time is right.

So beta testing of my new 'pocketmod variant context task list capture tool' is off and running. I'm excited to try it and that's a good sign. If it doesn't work - it's back to the drawing board to figure out a new option! :) Edison Theory in Action!