Intrepid Absurdist

Today I went with my parents to Lake Geneva Wisconsin to look at these giant snow sculptures before they melt.  The craftsmanship on these sculptures is just so amazing.  The level of detail put into something that by its very nature will not last is truly amazing. 

I find impermanent art to be so very fascinating.  I think it is because at some level all art, all everything, is impermanent.  Those who make art that is meant to melt away are only accepting the inevitability of all things. 

There is a special beauty for things that do not last.  Nature is like this.  The most beautiful seasons (according to my subjective opinion) are spring and fall.  They are beautiful because for a short time the trees are filled with such lovely colors.  The pastels of summer blossoms on one hand, and the deep warm tones of fall foliage, cannot be preserved beyond their brief time of the year.  They must be appreciated in their time, not ours.

Museums are great and wonderful places.  The preservation of art and culture in settings that can be accessed by all people is incredibly important.  But there is something missing when you see a work of art or an artifact in a museum.  It has been scrubbed of its context, of any relationship to its surroundings.  This is particularly true when it comes to works of cultural or historical significance. 

Take, for instance, furniture.  Important pieces are kept in museums just like any other work of art.  But furniture is made to be kept in a setting where it would be used, where the owner would match that piece with other pieces of furniture.  A table or chair would be part of a larger picture that says something about the owner.  An exchange is made when something is put into a museum.  The life of an object is sacrificed for the sake of its preservation. 

Please note that I am not against museums, not at all, I just think there is also beauty in art that is allowed to change, even die.

We hear a lot about ‘first impressions’ or ‘gut feelings’.  And we seem to put a lot of stock into the first thoughts we have on something.  So often we seem to think that our first thoughts are most likely the correct thoughts or the most genuine of thoughts.  I find this notion rather troubling.  It is often not until I have considered something for a while, even a few seconds that I am able to give my real opinion on something new.  More than that though, my first thoughts are often knee jerk reactions, sometimes unkind or not reflective of my ethical code. 

I think generally our first thoughts on things don’t actually say who we are.  It is what we think next that is the true indicator of our moral framework.  Our second thought is who we have chosen to be, despite our systemic biases or baser instincts.  Because that is what our first reactions and thoughts are, base instincts.  Maybe it is just me, but I often feel like my first reactions come from my id and my second thoughts come from ego or superego. 

Hate, revenge, greed, jealousy – these are all baser feelings that we many if not all of us feel at some point or another, and likely more often than we like to admit.  But reconciliation, generosity, kindness – so often these things require work.  They are a choice.  We choose to be anti-racist, to be an ally, to work for restorative justice.  These things are not instinctual, they are our better selves making an active choice to rise above our animal fears. 

Our instincts have a place, they help keep us alive when we are threatened.  But they also can tell us we are threatened when we experience anything that is new or different.  Human society has evolved past the need to fear ‘the other’ a long time ago, and it has been a struggle to catch up. 

We need to stop telling ourselves that the first and often worst reaction is the true one.  Some people seem to have just accepted that as both true and right.  But ethics and moral codes tell us who we are despite any instinctual reactions we may have. A person may be against the death penalty but also think ‘that person deserves to die’ when they hear about violent crime.  It is the choice to be against the death penalty, and the decision to stand by that choice, regardless of any thoughts of vengeance. 

I think it may be inevitable that our id gets the first word, but we get to choose what truly defines us.

Today was the annual meeting for the parish where I work.  Annual Meetings are where the parish comes together to vote on the budget for coming year and other important business.  It is one of those meetings that requires most of the parish to be present, but it is also something that no one really wants to do. 

Aside from a contentious vote about the time of the service and our relationship with another group that meets at the church the meeting went fine. 

One of the odder things that happened was the attendance by a person had moved away to a different church two years ago and was no longer considered a member in good standing.  For some reason he decided that it would be a great idea to come to this meeting in which he had no vote.  This person used to love to physically hover over me and talk down to me both literally and figuratively.  I always take it with pretty much a smile on my face and say things like ‘hmm, what a good idea! Thanks for the feedback’.  I thought I was done with these demeaning ‘conversations’ when this guy left, but he came back for an encore, I guess.  I get mad thinking about it not just because he would never talk to a man the way he talks to me, but because I let him talk down to me.

Anyway, this was just a part of the stressors that made today an anxiety fueled circus.  I realized today (not for the first time) that my laid-back attitude undercuts my authority.  I learned that I am stuck in the expectations still pressed on women to behave in a way that is accommodating even if it means letting yourself get stepped on.

Thankfully I have friends that were able to distract me amid the bouts of painful anxiety.

There are a several things I could do to make my life easier.  Things I could organize or keep clean or use regularly that would probably noticeably improve my productivity.  That’s not even to mention the myriad of tasks that I have been putting off doing that are only getting larger and more unmanageable the longer I put them off. 

The question I ask myself is, ‘why?’

Why, if I can see what needs to be done, do I let things get so out of control?  It is almost comical, or it would be if it was happening to someone else, someone I don’t like very much, perhaps.  Instead, I go to sleep every night thinking ‘I will take care of these things tomorrow’.  I will fill in the planner, and I will clean the room.  I will make sure a space is dedicated solely to writing and I won’t fill it up with craft projects or overflowing papers.  I will go online and pay those medical bills, even though I think it is ridiculous that they can’t figure out a way to let me know how much I owe when I am standing there in the doctor’s office (but this is not the time for me to rant about the health/insurance systems in this country).  I tell myself that tomorrow I will focus and get these things done and life will be better for it.  But the next day passes and somehow I don’t even come close to dealing with the ever growing pile of stuff I have to deal with. 

I know I am not alone in this experience, right? 

Again though, what I wonder is why?  Or more specifically, what is it about humans that make some of us so distractable?  What primal drive does this issue stem from?  Does my disorganization come from something that could have helped my ancestors survive against saber-tooth tigers, or is this a later anomaly that I only survived because of modern invention? Or is it a product of modernity, and if I was put in a situation where survival was a real issue would I become more focused and driven?  Maybe the space cadet in me is meant to solve problems in high intensity situations, but since I don’t really live in a society where those things come up very often, I just end up wasting my time until I have short bursts of focus.  The rest of the time its just procrastination nation.

I was thinking of using a writing prompt for today.  I just couldn’t figure out what to write about.  I did not have a great day.  This is annoying because it seems like just another in a long line of not great days.  Do you ever have the feeling that you are forgetting something, but you just can’t figure out what it is, and you have this anxious feeling in your chest that is screaming at you to remember, but remember what? 

It’s a bit like being in a dream where things do make a sort of sense but everything is a bit fuzzy around the edges.

Do you ever wonder if you are in a dream?  I know that is some high school grade ‘deep thought’.  But even so, it occurs to me all the time.  I used to live near someone who would let their alarm clock ring constantly.  Every time I walked by their house I got this strange feeling that I was the one who needed to wake up, like any second I would snap awake and realize that the alarm was my own. 

I get that feeling any time I hear one of those standard beeping alarm clocks. 

I suppose this is not unlike those people who believe we are living in a simulation.  It’s one of those ideas that is pretty pointless, because I feel like it just reinforces for certain people the desire to ignore the real suffering of other people.

But it is also not a new idea.  The idea that there is something obfuscated or unreal about our existence is a pretty old idea.  Plato’s allegory of the cave comes to mind.  Our understanding of our existence is mere shadow puppetry.  We sit bound in the dark as shadows dance on the wall and we call that reality.

I doubt other animals worry that their existence is an illusion.  I wonder what the evolutionary drive behind this feeling is.  This feeling that I could reach out and pull back the curtain that is obscuring my sight, but its just out reach.  

Today really got away from me.  I look back on today and I cannot figure out what I did, before I knew it it was 11pm and I haven’t checked anything off of my to do list.  I did some work, made phone calls, sent some emails and worked on the website.  I then found out that the boiler in the church where I work has stopped working – again.  I have stressed about that damn boiler more than just about anything lately.  So I am calling around asking people to step into the church to check on things, wondering if the pipes are going to freeze and burst before any measures can be taken and wondering if I should drive the hour out there to do, something.  I work part-time, and on Wednesday I worked from home because the weather was kind of bad.  I had that scare a couple of weeks ago and now I genuinely worry about driving in bad conditions.  I never used to worry about it like this.  But of course, the Wednesday I don’t go in is the week that the boiler conks out.  It may have been working on Wednesday, but we can’t know that.  Anyway, nothing makes my stress go through the roof than trying to delegate responsibilities to volunteers who really don’t want to do them.  I don’t blame them, the weather is bad, dropping into the church to turn on the faucets is hardly glamours or fun. 

I really do carry around a lot of guilt when it comes to my job.  There is this not-so-tiny voice that is always telling me I should be doing more, that things would be better if I was more charismatic, or extroverted, or conventional.  It is idiotic of course, but it is a battle I am constantly fighting against myself. 

 So anyway, the new thing I did today was pretty silly, and I didn’t even finish it.  I painted seashells.  That is, I painted on seashells.  It counts, right?  I always wanted to paint on them, it seemed like it would be fun.  It was fun, I guess.

One side effect of trying to do something new every single day, is keeping track not only of my extreme laziness, but also my mood.  I can always recognize when my mental well-being takes a down turn, but I have never really kept track of it.  But I feel like this project is forcing me to notice my energy levels more than I would.

For anyone who doesn’t know, when I (and other people probably) talk about things like ‘mood’ or ‘mental well-being’ or ‘energy levels’ they are all just polite euphemisms for the effects of depression.  Anyway, I’m going to bed.

When it comes to trying something new I often risk failure because I am immediately drawn to the most complicated projects.  For some reason it is so hard to convince my own brain that it cannot just skip the basics and go right to the advanced techniques.  This often leads to frustration and projects never really making it off the ground.  Today I dealt with one of those instances.  When I was in high school I was very into making things with seed beads.  I could use a bead loom just fine, but what I really wanted to do was bead weaving by hand.  I got one of those ‘Darice’ booklets (if you were a crafter in the 90s you know what I am talking about) on bead weaving and dove right in.  I became so frustrated with the whole thing that I gave up and never tried bead weaving again.  So when I decided to try again to learn a simple brick stitch, I actually got anxious because I have convinced myself that I am just completely incapable of this technique. 

This time, instead of going for the smallest seed beads I could find and trying to weave in multiple beads in some extreme design, I found in my stash these crappy size 6 seed beads and while following a tutorial on YouTube I made a wonky diamond shape (its wonky because cheap seed beads tend to be non-uniform).  It’s not outstanding or particularly interesting, but for me its kind of huge because I conquered something that I just assumed I was incapable of doing.

I am going to keep my wonky little beaded diamond as a reminder that I need to allow myself to crawl before I can walk (much less fly).  I guess this means I have to give knitting another chance to. 

I made it a month.  I said when I started that the first month or so would be mostly about just meeting the challenge.  Even if all the new things I do are inconsequential and uninspired, if I can just get them done, then that will be a win.  And I did it.  By the skin of my teeth, but I did it.  This is pretty important to me, because pursuing something like this and doing it every day is difficult for someone like me.  I know my weaknesses and I am a procrastinator who loves to plan to do things but I have a great difficulty getting those plans off the ground much less finished.

In the grand scheme of this challenge, one month is not a lot, but I will take the small victories as they come.  Some of the new things will take time, and the next challenge (within the greater challenge) is to work towards those goals.  To be able to complete the full 1001 days I really will need to be more proactive about planning what I will do and when.  There are only so many last minute new things a person can do. 

But here is what I did in the first 32 days (including today):

1 Brush Dog’s Teeth –

2 Use a Selfie Stick

3 Cork Chair for Contest

4 Steel Wool Fire

5 Elmhurst History Museum

6 Frozen Bubbles

7 Bath Bombs

8 Paqui Ghost Pepper chips

9 UV Resin

10 Dutch Baby Pancake

11 Makit and Bakit

12 Horchata

13 Homopolar Motor

14 Wordle

15 Chocolate Chip Banana Bread

16 Taco Bell

17 Batik Dye

18 Needle Felting

19 Origami Fidget Toy

20 ‘Not Another Crap Kit’ (a craft kit sold by a YouTuber I follow)

21 Walking Dog Backwards

22 Polymer Clay Cane

23 Completely lost control of Car on icy highway, regained control without dying.

24 ‘Painting’ with Polymer Clay

25 Liquid Sculpey

26 Learn the Days in the Month

27 Mix App

28 Darn a Sock

29 Groupon

30 Screen Record on my Phone

31 Gouache Painting

32 Make Seed Crackers

While some of these new things were not great – the mix app was unimpressive, but somehow it wound up on my list – this was a pretty full month.  I am looking forward to doing a lot more!

*As a side note, while my goal is to post these every day, I have been posting after midnight.  But because I am such a night owl, a day in the context of this blog is the time between I wake up and go to sleep.

I tried to paint with Gouache today, and it sucked.  I don’t know if the paint was just bad quality or if I lack the technique to make Gouache work, but it did not flow very well for me.  It was sticky.  Now I could just blame the paint and let that be that, but I also know that I am not a great painter.  I do not have the skill and for some reason my patience runs out far too easily while I paint. 

Strangely this only makes me want to crack the code of painting.  I wish I was one of those people who could look at something they aren’t good at and go ‘oh well, that is not something I need to do, so I won’t worry about it’.  Instead, if I am not good at something it will annoy me every time I think about it.  Let’s take languages for an example.  I have a pretty good ear and can pick up accents rather easily, but I am terrible at memorizing vocabulary and I hate getting the grammar wrong so much so that I find it difficult to put the language into practice.  Combine these things and I wind up being not so great at languages.  This bothers the heck out of me. 

The problem is that I can also be incredibly lazy and unwilling to put the extra work into things that don’t come easily to me.  Instead I just wind up being mediocre and annoyed all the time.  I envy those people who find that one thing that they are passionate about and devote their life to that thing.  The musician who only plays their instrument, or the computer programmer who devotes her life to coding.  The kid who knows she wants to be a doctor and pursues that goal with seemingly unwavering dedication. 

I was never like that.  I have always had far too many desires, too many interests.  I spent a lot of my life wandering from thing to thing trying to figure out what I really wanted to do.  Honestly I still don’t know, but now I am in my 40s and I have pretty much accepted that I will never have a singular goal.  I can only try and fill the time I have left trying out as many somethings as I can.  Maybe I can even convince myself to put a little effort into mastering, or at least gain competence in some of the things with which I struggle. 

Sundays are rough.  For some reason they just drain the heck out of me.  I usually have to come home and take a nap.  Even with limit human interaction on account of Covid, I still get exhausted. 

You see, I am an introvert.

I have taken many an MBTI, in seminary they gave us an extremely in-depth version of the test which broke down each section into other sections and put each attribute on a scale you could see just how much or how little you fill that particular type.

I am really not sold on personality tests like MBTI.  I think that even if the test is carefully administrated, it is still reductive.

That said, I agree with its assessment of me, especially in regard to my introversion.  I am an INTP (I used to score more INFP).  This means I am an ‘Introverted, iNtuitive, Thinking, Perceiving’ person.

If we looked at these traits as being on a spectrum with Introverted on one side and Extrovert on the other, I consistently test all the way to the introverted side.  All the other traits are much less extreme.

This is all to say that I get tired easily when I am ‘on’.  It doesn’t matter how much I like the people I am with, or how long I have known them, too much human interaction is exhausting for me. 

But we live in an Extroverts world.  If we are sitting in a room together, we are expected to make polite conversation rather than sit in silence. 

I don’t know what got me thinking about this, except that I am growing more exhausted as I sit here.

I am currently having a muscle spasm in my back which is impeding my ability to move.  I took a muscle relaxer and it is definitely making me sleepy. I’m not really sure how its effecting my back muscles, but I need to lay down before I fall down!

Today I learned how to screen record on my phone, an I played some ridiculous video games to show it working.

I almost didn’t do any New thing today.  I almost just let the challenge slide by.  I know that it wouldn’t be the end of the world if I missed a day, but I feel like if I miss one day, I will miss another and another.  Give entropy an inch and it will take a mile.

I know from experience how quickly I can lose steam on something.  Considering how lazy I can be, this is not an easy thing I have given myself to do.  Some of the items are easy on an individual level but taken as a whole this project has truly become a challenge.  It is only going to get harder as I whittle down my list of easy one day projects.

Today’s ‘new thing’ for instance entailed purchasing something on Groupon.  I know that seems kind of extremely simple – buy something on a website – is hardly groundbreaking.  But I have wanted to try Groupon out for a while, so it does count as new.  Maybe not terribly noteworthy, but this challenge is not really about being noteworthy.  It’s about doing all those things that I have thought about doing but never got around to.  It’s about putting a little bit of color into my day by trying something.  It’s about being present for life, if even for just a few moments in a day.  I have spent way too much time walking around in daydream, thinking about what could have been, or what might be.  I have let so many days pass me by without making or learning or trying.  It is so easy to get wrapped up in the perfunctory nonsense of modern living – laundry and dishes and tv and Facebook and staring off into space wondering where the day went.  I feel like I have done more in this last month than I have done in previous 6 months combined.  All it takes is a darned sock here, and a craft project there. 

It is exhausting though.

Already I find myself with nothing to say.  I know I think about things, at least I think I think about things.  Perhaps I should keep a note pad on me so I can write them down as the day goes by, because I get to the evening and I think I must have spent the whole day with an echo in my skull. 

I watched CSI today while I worked with polymer clay and did laundry. CSI is a good show to have on in the background.  Interesting enough to be entertaining, but doesn’t require so much attention that I have to look at the screen the whole time.  It also helps that I have watched the show before. I have, at times, thought it would be cool to work in a forensics lab.  I imagine it would not be very much like the show.  I wouldn’t mind going back to school and exploring a science degree of some kind.  I find biology to be exceedingly interesting.  I remember in Junior High we were given drops of pond water to look at through a microscope.  I can still recall my amazement at seeing those tiny little creatures.  I then remember my teacher being mad at me for asking about the creatures rather than making drawings of them like he had instructed.  I was not very good at following instructions.  That got me in trouble quite a bit as a kid. 

Anyway, my dog is groaning at me right now.  I guess she needs to go out.  I will have to cut this short as I take her out so she can take care of her own biology.

I guess I should write a little bit about why I have set myself such a large challenge. 

The challenge being to do 1001 new things in 1001 days. 

This is something I first thought of a year ago.  I had just heard about the book ‘I Dare Me’ by Lu Ann Cahn.  In the book she goes over her year of trying new things.  She challenged herself to do something new every day for a year. 

I love having new experiences.  Some of my happiest moments have been doing something surprising and new.  I went to Cuernavaca several years ago and the two best moments were learning to make tortillas and dancing with the Chinelo Dancers (If you don’t know what Chinelos are, look them up, they are strange and wonderful).  Anyway, I feel most alive when I am experiencing something new, or creating something. 

The problem is that I am also an extreme procrastinator.  I do things in burst with long stretches where I don’t get anything done but thinking.  This is likely due to dysthymia (chronic depression) that makes planning, initiating and completing goal-directed activities difficult.  So this means I will make a large goal and don’t even get it started. 

So while I am only 27 days into this challenge, I am also amazed that I got 27 days in.  And it doesn’t matter that some of my ‘new things’ are incredibly silly or inconsequential.  As long as it is new, it counts.  This takes a load off, while still making it a challenge. 

This does not mean that I won’t be doing some more substantial things; I am going to Italy later this year and California, and possibly North Carolina as well.  All those places will offer many opportunities for grand new adventures.  But I also know that we live in uncertain times in addition to my mood being unpredictable.  So there will be a lot of really simple seemingly mundane new things.

And even if these new things are mundane, the very fact that they are new make them special.  Like today’s ‘Mix’ app.  The app was hyped up like some new way to explore the internet, but really its just a curated mix of animal videos, swimsuit models, and travel pics.  Not really Earth shattering.  But I suppose I would not have known that had I not tried it. 

So why am I doing this?  I don’t really have something specific in mind that I want out of this.  I just had an idea and I am seeing how far I can follow it.  Maybe I will have some grand revelation along the way, or even a couple little epiphanies.  We’ll see.

The challenge is to write for 20 minutes every single day for 30 days.  This may seem simple enough, but for whatever reason I have found keeping up with such a task to be rather difficult.  I hope that making it a part of this larger challenge that I am doing will encourage me to follow through on this challenge.

The larger challenge is about doing something new every single day.  This can be something large like going on a trip somewhere I have never been before (I plan to go to Italy this year, for instance) or as small as brushing my dog’s teeth.  I have made a record of all my things so far except for one that happened this last Sunday January 23.  I did do something new that day, but it was incredibly unexpected. 

Sunday mornings I have to drive to work rather early in the morning.  I tend to leave around 6:30a.m. to get to work by 7:30a.m. It had snowed Saturday night and when I got on the road Sunday morning it was clear that the snow plows had not been out yet, not even on the highway.  It was dangerous enough getting to the highway, I had trouble stopping a couple of times.  But I thought that once I got on I90 I would be fine.  Unfortunately the roads were truly awful.  At one point I lost control of my car and slid across three lanes of traffic and then back again before I was able to regain control of my car.  I was able to keep myself from spinning out or sliding into the median, and I was very lucky that there was no one on the road beside or in front of me.  It was truly terrifying.  Eventually I steadied the wheel and took my foot off the break to gain control.  Needless to say, I had never had an experience quite like that, nor had I ever had to regain control of my car after so completely losing control.  So this was a first, and I hope to God it will be the last.

Needless to say I was pretty rattled when I got to work.  It took an hour and a half to reach the church, and my adrenaline was pumping the whole time. 

That’s the thing about firsts, sometimes they just happen to you. 

I have been doing a lot of crafty things for my firsts lately, and there will be so many more, but I will also be going to more places as the weather warms up (it is currently 14 degrees Fahrenheit) I want to visit all the museums in my area, and I have several larger and longer term goals that I will need to begin work on as well. 

Today I decided it was time to figure out a way to remember how many days go into each month.  Are there any small things that you never got around to learning with any proficiency? Like calculating a percentage for a tip, or tying a tie?