As a kid, I might have seen a traveling carnival in passing, its lone ferris wheel towering over the frenetically flashing lights and screaming children, and I might wonder if it was as romantic as it seemed. I’d never been to a mini carnival before and as such my only frames of reference were the movies or stories of the world’s fair from quaint-er days.

Now I am grown and I live in a place where the waterfront has a carnival every other weekend in the summer. Last week, we had forgotten it was parade season and went down to walk down along the water, which runs along the backside of the carnival. The eight foot tall hookers were out, waiting for the sailors to dock. We saw seventeen year old uniformed ride operators, sitting glumly chin-in-hand behind the chain link, waiting for shifts to end. I noticed that the rides all rest on rebar jacks placed seemingly precariously on stacks of wooden planks, much like the wads of napkin we shove under table legs to steady them. We saw four year olds sitting in the painfully slow moving plastic canoes looking perplexed as parents made high pitched cooing noises from behind camera lenses. We saw all the things you would expect to see. We even saw the albino kid regaling his fellow carny workers with stories on a smoke break.

What I saw that I hadn’t expected was the seedy underbelly of the carny world. The darker side of traveling carnival life. It seems the carnival workers have a taste for blood. And they’re not very good at hiding the bodies.

i.

From a very young age, my tummy reigned over every aspect of my being. I am an anxious breed. When my (oft unreasonable) parameters for acceptable events and behaviors are breached, my traitorous subconscious sends a signal to my stomach, which promptly ties itself into an ornery knot.

It just so happens that one such immovable parameter is the approval of others and compliance with expectation. Très boring, I know. More than that, such a drive for blind social acceptance is dangerous and a predilection which must be monitored closely (to avoid, oh, I don’t know, joining the Nazi party and other such oopsies).

It is partially due to this that I decided to move away from where I am from and find out who I might become and what tools I might employ without the push and pull of lifelong ties to mould and impress on my personality.

ii.

When people first came to be, as it is with other animals still, there was no work and play, there was only survive. For a lion, to hunt is not to go to work and to lie in the sun is not to play; rather to hunt and to lie are both to live and survive. So it was at first with man. To hunt or to till the land was to do what had to be done to continue living.

I recently read a book which stated convincingly (though admittedly with no supporting research) that the number of hours we require ourselves to be at work is a new concept and a fabrication of the Industrial era, namely a need for bodies to enslave themselves to the timeclock of vast commodity-bearing machines so that these machines could create Stuff so that our Economy could be Ever Expanding. Similarly, this book pointed out that the marriage of “purpose” and “occupation” is newer still than even our workdays. Defining our selves and our worth by our Job is entirely unnatural and, most often, quite detrimental to our content.

iii.

From a very young age, I had ideas about what I would like to Do. From three to present I have had at least fleeting dreams of being a butcher (odd for a future vegetarian, yes), chemist, marine biologist, architect, writer, teacher, actor, stage manager, editor, research scientist, blogger, housewife, engineer, auto mechanic, electrician, foley artist, sound engineer, and inventor.

But what I was really saying was that I wanted to feed people, or mix concoctions, or swim with dolphins, or gain recognition, or feel, or write, or stay in my pjs all day, or build, or draw, or change the world, or create things, or make music, or experiment, or philosophize, or hunt down information, or save the world, or some combination thereof.

iv.

And so I moved. I moved to a place where I was unknown. And I secured a ho-hum eight-to-five day job, doing none of the aforementioned things, just to prove to myself that I could stand it. And nearly three years later, through a quitting spell and a subsequent call to return after sabbatical, I am still here. And the truth is that staying terrifies me, even more so than leaving (this from a stomach knot who hates change). Because if I am what I Do, then I am nothing.

But despite my Job, the move has allowed me mould myself and to think. And in doing so, after twenty-five years of yearning for Balance and Content, it seems I have found what might create it.

It seems I might be quite happy with a simple life: with a clean house and a garden and a dog and a boy and a kid and hobbies and lots of good books and stimulating conversation with friends over potluck dinner parties. And, understanding the need to find a place that is intersected by our current society and the extent of my desire to remain a part of it, also some Job cobbled together out of several flexible-hour-ed, self-employed gigs. This is the very picture of my Contented life. Of my Balanced life.

But not of a successful life.

What is success? Who defines it and to what end? What would my successful life be, and would it come at the expense of balance and content?

v.

Because the fact remains that I am ashamed to show my face near my old life. That my pace now seems sluggish and lazy compared to what I was before.

The fact remains that this weekend when we took the boy’s mother to see a show, as with every time I see a professional production, the sound of the orchestra tuning and the sheer sight of such a large theater made some part of me yearn to be a part of something so big. The manic ups and downs of the kind of hyper-reality one must live to immerse herself in such toiling called to me like a siren, pulling me toward the romance of such a hectic life.

And when I opened the program to see an acquaintance of mine playing the lead role, I felt threefold more foolish. I considered all the people I know of whom the mere passing thought makes me feel small. Those who Do big things. Those who get up onstage in front of thousands upon thousands of people. Or create a nonprofit in a third world country. Or are piloting new alternative energy devices. Or work in the capitol building of this vast country. Or are in labs testing drugs to battle disease. Or just finished their novel to acclaim, or are preparing for the red carpet opening of their latest film, or have just penned the last note of their opus.

I am both blessed and cursed to be in the company of such talent.

I tell you, I have no desire in the world to keep up with Mrs. Jones’ wardrobe or credit limit, but I would tackle her to the ground for a chance to get my hands on that CV. It is so painted with drama and intrigue and heaps of stories worth telling which never, ever fall short of expectation. And no story worth telling ever began, “She was content and balanced. And so she remained.”

And I just don’t know how to quash the part of me that believes to the core that you’re nothing if you aren’t struggling against something. And it is not enough to fight the silent battles people fight every day. Battles like not shaking the baby at four a.m. while running on less sleep than ever before, or working well into your seventies to help your family survive. These are the silent battles (and truth be told, some of the biggest), and I wish I could say that it would be Enough to fight the silent battles that my own Content life would bring. I wish. But some part of me dismisses the mundane struggles and insists that I must fight something loud and something epic. I don’t even know how to WANT to kill this value that’s been so ingrained as a virtue. I don’t know how to be content with Content.

And no matter how many times I sit myself down sternly and explain to myself that a constant drive for MORE recognition and MORE excitement and MORE knowledge FASTER is no different than the insatiable hunger for MORE STUFF that has so robbed us of our time and joy and undermined our values, family, and environment, my thick, daft stomach just can’t accept it and every time I ruminate on a simple life, the knots return.

vi.

Last night I watched The Third Man in which Orson Welles’ character states jovially:

In Italy for thirty years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love; they had five hundred years of democracy and peace and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.

It’s the same principle, applied to individual life in the stead of a full fledged society, and the question still stands…which would you choose?

When I sat down to write, I had no idea what to say. I’ve erased and rewritten the beginnings of this numerous times. If computer screens were like paper, this portion would be worn thin and ready to sew together into some kind of garment. Do you remember making binder paper into “cloth” in grade school? If you crumple it up and rub it together long enough, the fibers turn soft and drape like fabric.

::Shrug::

Through the contorted lens of a three-day migraine, I’ve decided to take a break from my journey from Point A to Point B. I generally live my life with Productivity in mind, whether real or imagined. Point B constantly moves around, making it harder to pick a route to get there, and sometimes it gets lost in the fog and I just continue blindly, hoping I am still pushing forward in a straight line when in reality I am probably circling back on myself.

::Shrug::

I’ve recently had the piss taken out of me on two occasions for books that I was delving into during my lunch hour at work. One on studies of diet and its effects on diseases of affluence. The second on investing. Apparently, according to the rest of the world, my leisure reading is mind-numbingly boring. What can I say? I generally prefer non-fiction to fiction, filing away the articles I’ve read on canning and building your own computer and gardening and caring for a dog and buying a house and programming languages and outdoor survival in the Time Spent Being Productive category, when the truth is that most of what I’ve learned I’ve already forgotten by now. And of that which I haven’t forgotten, only a small percentage will ever actually be put to use.

::Shrug::

The ironic beauty of the migraine plight is that when it goes on for long enough, it exhausts me up against a wall upon which I can no longer worry about the build-up of little things. The errands I didn’t run, the phone calls I didn’t return, the budget I didn’t fill out, the reservations I didn’t make, the emails piling up in my inbox, the homework for sound class, the blog post for the website, finding that new plugin to stop all the damn spam comments, starting the other site…

::Shrug::

So, for this microscopic moment I have given up on all of that.

I just went to see Charlie Kaufman’s new film. I adore him, but his new film paints one of the most unrelentingly downcast moods I’ve seen on film in a long time. It is not desperately sad, but rather quite comfortable in its depressed mood. That being said, the story is in true Kaufman style, folding back on itself infinite times and meta-referencing its own constructs like a hall of mirrors.

For this microscopic moment, I have picked up Cat’s Cradle which has been sitting on a shelf waiting to be read for quite some time. I also adore Vonnegut. And the truths it is trying to convey are whispering to me by way of echoing the Kaufman film. A common line is drawing itself between the two, and implying a desire to be drawn everywhere else as well.

::Shrug::

Reading Cat’s Cradle naturally reminds me that Slaughterhouse Five is probably my favorite book. It is probably my favorite book for a lot of reasons, but the main reason is that, with three simple words, Vonnegut managed to set forth a life philosophy that I strive to embody (but mostly fall flat in reaching). So it goes. And in saying this he writes off everything he can’t control, lets go, and moves on. So it goes.

For someone (myself) who has spent so much of her life in the arts and who wholeheartedly believes in its importance, it is funny how often I forget that sometimes the best way to get to B is on the sideways, seemingly meandering artsy path. And funnier still that sometimes it takes a horrible headache to exhaust the left side of my brain enough to remember.

::Shrug:: So it goes.

Yeah, I know I’ve been a very bad blogger.  And yeah, I know I have a lot of nerve to just walk back in here and…say stuff.  But here I am.  And I’ve started this post 642 different times in my head, and at least five times on paper.  I’ve literally a stack of phrases and quotes and half-thoughts that I’ve memorialized in scribbles over the past month.  But I just couldn’t finish any one thought.  And no doubt this post will read as a patchwork of these aborted ideas, but at this point, it’s all backing up in my brain and exploding in the same manner a very urgently typewritten message might: jammed.

It’s been a rough month, what can I say.

And now I’ve missed all the predictably important events of which there have been copious coverage, like the new year* and the new administration**.

So let’s just go back to where I left off and see where that gets us, shall we?

If you’ll recall, back at the end of ‘08 there was quite a bit of snow (for us) happening here, and everything was thrown a bit out of whack.  Who can blog when the excitement of unheard amounts of snow is just outside your front door?  And then, who can blog when that snow is still falling and you’re trudging to the bus stop to get to work in borrowed boots five sizes too big for your feet and all you can hear is the ka-LUMP ka-LUMP of your footsteps as you bemoan never having acquired the appropriate attire for said weather?

And then came the holidays, in which everyone’s schedules and plans ran amuck.  And around this time, I landed in a low.  Normally I would attribute it to the lack of light.  But the snow meant less rain, which meant more sun, so I really couldn’t tell you.  Heaps upon heaps of little worries that I’d been shoving to the back of my mind had collected to the point where the back of my mind was now the front of my mind, and my predisposition towards ANXIOUS! got the best of me.  I don’t have any dramatic stories to tell.  I didn’t stab a postal worker or jump off a bridge.  But I wasn’t me.  And maintaining during these times is exhausting.  This is where my fractured mindset began, where my mind became a jumble. It’s like this word I ran across at work: esophagogastroduodenoscopy.  And I’m thinking…ummm…pass?  Which is not unlike a stress overload – too much information.  But I know that if I break it down, it’s really not so bad: something about an esophagus, something about a stomach, something about a duodenum, and a scope. Ok. I can handle that. I get where you’re going with this…  Apply that process to my perspective on life, and you’ll be up to speed.

*Then came The New Year.  And can I just say that New Year’s Resolutions have such an odd effect on the flow of society?  Little, more or less inconsequential tweaks to masses of daily routines, all in the direction of our combined cultural goals meant that there were waves of oddities.  For a day, or a week, the gyms were at capacity and rush hours changed.  On my usual morning bus, we were packed like sardines.  No doubt more people were on time, or early, to work.  This has waned.  The personal blogs in my reader listed a new post daily. This has waned.  Personally, I think giving only one day a year to start afresh with a goal is foolish, because most of these goals inevitably fail.  We need to make little changes, and then more little changes to eventually get where we wish to be (see: esophagogastroduodenoscopy).  But what do I know?

Then I had a couple of wonderfully recouperative trips.  One with the boy:

and one to see my family, complete with photo expeditions:

And then another fabulous flu. I used to be someone who got several colds per season, but rarely got the flu. And for whatever reason, this is the season of repeated flu assaults for me. And can I tell you, it’s been just lovely. The fevers and the hurting bones and skin? Lovely. The fever dreams. I distinctly remember lying in bed, unable to get comfortable, having some delusion about the important choreography of my tossing and turning – how I had to move this way, and then that way. And for some reason it was of the utmost importance that I get it right. And I remember thinking, “Since when was sleeping so complicated!?”

And now, though the snow is still occasionally falling,

it is back to the daily grind.

Back to decoding emails from clients where listens, pasted, and fack really mean license, passed, and fake.  Back to the background drone of conference calls reminiscent of religious sermons set to to slam poetry beats, “Not to give expecting a return, but because it FEELS.  SO.  GOOD.  to give.”  Back to the hum drum.  And so now I am taking the time to figure out the esophaguses and stomachs, duodenums, and scopes of my life.  Once I break it down, I can build it back up…

Lest you worry, one of my non-new years resolutions is to post regularly and often.  So tune in next time for a (hopefully) more coherent and less meandering smattering of Moot.

**Yippee!

I finally got off my butt and entered all my previous posts into Wordpress so that the previous problems could be solved. I may not be entirely satisfied, both because I have not yet found a theme I like (suggestions, folks?), and because I am not a master programmer like I had hoped I’d become with this project. But now I am just a blogger. And that could be fun too.

New chapter begins today. Get on my case if I don’t stay active…