Day: December 15, 2016

Lately I find myself wandering deeper into anger. A good deal of it is anger at self. I’m not writing, I’m terribly behind and inefficient in regards to grading, I have not been observant of my physical condition at all. Basically I have allowed myself to wither in the face of the gathering storm of work that is the end of the semester.

 

It got so bad at one point that when the website crashed I just said, meh, and let it be that way until I could stand it no more. Three posts worth of buildup and finally we are back. I believe there is a message in all of it. I think this indicates that I’ve hit a wall of sorts. See, I have been trying to decide how to move forward on a number of fronts. The universe, kind as it is, continues to offer me moments of realization that I am basically hanging on. 5000 emails in the backlog, more time watching TV than reading and, well, thinking, and a list of positives about writing that come down to this: It doesn’t always suck.

 

I need more. I need passion rejuvenated. I need to strike out and not be stagnant with the words and emotions and fire out and do something more with my mind. This life on the corner of a beat up couch is not for me.

Well, I broke the Talisblog. I took a night off of uploading, allowing the writing to be done by hand again and when I came back to all things normal tonight I discovered that there was an update to be done. The update did not go well. Facebook killed the code. Facebook always kills the code. It is the result of some unfortunate coding on their end and the lie of 100% compatibility. So here we are, just me and a once blank MS Word page and less than ten minutes left on the clock.

 

I’ve been swirling around a lot of big ideas and unable to lock down a single one. Perhaps it is the endless din of barking dogs that surrounds my backyard (seriously, shut your dog up. It is nearly midnight!) or it could be the heaviness of wanting to write a novel that is an instant best seller without having what I would refer to as a best-selling idea in mind.

 

Lately I’m all about ideas, though not entirely about writing. I’m about parenting and teaching and games and building and a dozen other areas of my life that don’t necessarily find me home alone in a dimly lit office. I think the previous paragraph holds the key: I need to do low stakes for a while. I need to just write stories and not get caught up in creating something award winning. It is a task far easier said than done.

 

I don’t know that I cold be happy in life without someone being attracted to me. Perhaps it is a flaw I picked up in my younger days when I hung out with guys infinitely more attractive than me in the eyes of every woman we crossed paths with. I remained the less attractive friend in a small clique of men who drew a great deal of attention. This continued on through college where prestige colored attraction as one does a coloring book. Outside the lines wealth merged with station to shove me violently down the wrung of beauty only to meet women who bartered more in substance than the other measure.

In time I came to appreciate my looks and my relative position and common sense won out. I would rather have a woman love my mind than my abs. Though I always appreciated when a lady realized I was not the forgotten spawn of Frankenstein’s monster.

I am not ugly. I’m not that confident in my physical form either, but I am constantly surrounding myself with those who are confident and have ample cause to be so. The men and women who I associated with tended to look as though they were taking a break from posing for magazine covers and during these breaks they’d cling, clan-like, to each other and I would hang on for dear life.

This ties in to my over sexualization of women. In a way, the more attractive a woman is, the more her opinion of my sexuality carries weight. This can be a boost or a terrible boon. I lauded beautiful women and their opinions for this very reason. For this self same reason I am extremely grateful that the one woman who actually matters–the most meaningful woman in the multiverse–loves me for both looks and mind.

Beauty is relative.

What one thinks of another’s physical (and even mental) form is based on upbringing, ideas of success, and a half dozen other less quantifiable categories. My love happens to be beauty incarnate, and therefore the most beautiful woman thinks I’m not half bad. Imagine the weight that carries. So, life is good because someone does find me attractive.

And that one is all that matters.