 Dusty:Starlight:Culture
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suspending the crankies
2008-01-07 1:01 p.m. oooooooooooooooooooo it's 59 degrees outside today. I opened all the windows in the house and danced around, frightening the cats. But they need a good scare thrown into em once in a while, lest they become fat and lazy housecats who never get a spine-fur mohawk, never run around, and have no fight-or-flight instincts because of their easy lives. Once upon a time I'd said I'd want to be a cat in my next life - and in particular, a house cat - but I'm changing my tune. I think house cats have a sort of boring and mundane existence. During an REM concert I saw sometime last decade, before the band became...boring and mundane, Michael Stipe was talking about this very subject and said he'd want to reincarnate as a koala bear, because not only do they get to sleep in trees, but they eat so much eucalyptus that they're high all the time and their pee smells great. His logic, not mine. Someone yelled for him to “shut up and sing stuff” after that, which I remarked to the woman next to me was rude, but secretly I agreed with the heckler. Rock stars are so enabled, and the audience paid to hear Radio Free Europe, not about koala pee. At least I did (and they did not play that song). I might skip the koala life too – though not to spite Michael Stipe. Certainly there's more to the life of a wild koala than a house cat, but the two still seem a bit slothful for the speed I enjoy operating at. I will file this under musings for another time. Speaking of not being slothful, I’m thinking it’s probably bad that I just can’t sit still for a minute lately. I think the frenetic pace of the last semester, where I was working on an article for the grant, writing and researching a paper for my grad class, teaching two courses and trying project the scope of my grad program conditioned me to multitask so much that it’s not possible for me to stop. Really – do I have to fold clothes, go through mail, organize my planner and answer email all at once? Can I eat lunch and just eat lunch? I have to fight to not look around for stuff to do when I have a day where there’s no (work/school) stuff to do. I used to be really critical of people like me. I used to say we use terrible metaphors for things like school and homeownership (ie “You are enslaved by your home once you own one, constantly working/spending on it…”) and convincing or conditioning ourselves to feel busy all the time with house-work and work-work even though there really is nothing propelling that but imagination. It’s probably self-aggrandizement, a sort of thinking that says X or Y is so important that global relations will be altered unless I get it done as soon as possible. But really, if the deck doesn’t get cleaned and stained, if the email doesn’t all go out today, if the article isn’t as comprehensive as you’d initially wanted it to be, will continents explode? Governments fail? Will your life be altered? Will you simultaneously be fired, kicked out of school, divorced and homeless? Ok, so that’s dramatic. But can’t it feel that way, from time to time? And isn’t that just ridiculous? Some days, I’m just no fun. Some days, I have become an Operation Ivy song: Healthy body sick mind I used to love Operation Ivy, and I used wear combat boots. I’ve been known to put them on once and a while when I’m feeling 20. I think I always reel it in before the lyric can be completed: It's just a matter of time …but maybe just barely. I’m painting a lot lately because that’s not really a multitasking activity, and hey, I just realized, neither is running.* I think multitasking – and credit cards – have much to do with our cultural toxicity. I really don’ t want to get swept up in it, but I like my job(s) and sometimes, when in Rome… Man, what a fight. This is something I painted last month, when I thought my head was going to explode because it was so full from absorbing other people's stresses.
I am fully aware that my paintings are bad, so there’s no need to write and tell me so. *Ironically, or perhaps even more appropriately, “Healthy Body, Sick Mind” ultimately critiques pseudo-athlete yuppies, likely of the southern-california, mid 1980s variety, who are stuck in the work-gym-work-gym cycle. Ahem. But I do like to fancy myself a bit less uptight and a bit less unaware than the subject of Armstrong’s lyrics… Healthy Body Sick Mind
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