Damn Orcs

You know when you’re grappling with stuff that’s coming at you like a phalanx of orcs – incoming email, making dinner, taking out the compost, more incoming email; things that demand to be dealt with right now – but you have this lurking suspicion that there’s something big and dangerous in the shadows which you really should be dealing with, if only you could get a break from these damn orcs?

That’s how I’m feeling today.

(Except the stuff I have to do isn’t actually as scary as orcs, so yay for that.)

What’s On Your Mind? A Spew.

Yesterday evening we came to talking about what’s on my mind lately. I warned Blake that the little hamster wheels in my head have been spinning hard lately and it wasn’t pretty, but he wanted to hear it. This is the what those little hamsters are spinning:

People-aholic

I had a miserable week last week. Well, not miserable, let’s reserve “miserable” for when expensive household infrastructure breaks or aquaintances get cancer. But it was kind of cruddy. I had a bunch of things to do, but I couldn’t focus; as soon as I got started with something I’d just “quickly” check Twitter, read some articles, look stuff up… I got a few things done, but not half as much as I should have (which in turn made me feel crappier still).

I spent the whole week feeling twitchy and dissatisfied; the messing about didn’t help, napping didn’t help, even chocolate didn’t help. It was Thursday before I finally figured out what I needed: people. That’s why I kept checking Twitter (and Google+ and Facebook), because I wanted to connect with people, communicate, do… people things. With people. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Twitter and blogs and articles wasn’t doing it for me, which was why the dissatisfaction persisted. I need to actually be in a room with other people, working on something together.

During the school year I get my people fix by volunteering at the school (a lot) but since I got back from Japan Blake’s been away, the girls have been at camp and I’ve been lonely.

So score 1 for self-awareness, but I’m not sure what, if anything, I will do with this knowledge. I had book club yesterday, and Blake is home now so I have him to jabber at and do things with, so maybe next week I will be more calm and focused. But if I continue to find myself in need of human contact I might think harder about finding a job or volunteer commitment wherein I see, and do things with, other people.

WTF, another new blog? Seriously?

Yes, WordPress has kind of made me high on creating new blogs. It used to be that I was okay with expressing my whole self in one place: this is me, take it or leave it. But life is more complicated now. I play so many roles, wear so many hats, and they don’t all sit well cheek-by-jowl. And in these days of single-focus blogs it feels anachronistic, to say nothing of naïve, to have a single “personal blog”.

So I created Connect The Dots to separate my pretentious pseudo-intellectual ideas from my interminable, pointless narratives about my bourgeois life and boring kids, which reside at Blog-o! (Blog-o! is also Blake’s mostly-work blog; I leave the problem of reconciling that disparity to him.) But I realized I need a home for a third category of blog posts, posts which haven’t had a home for a while. I need a therapy blog. Somewhere to complain, work out problems and generally expose myself for the insecure neurotic I am. (Hm, maybe I should make this a private blog.)

So voilà! Welcome to my therapy blog.