Working myself out of tight spaces

I spend a lot of time wishing. Creating with my imagination scenarios where I can see myself from the outside, looking like a million bucks, and beaming comfortably in my element. I make up fortunes on the spot; if the dog pees twice in one of the next three woodchip piles, I will meet my husband this year; if the elevator goes up without stopping, I will have a great day; if, if. I'm childlike enough to be excited when the elevator goes up without stopping but pragmatic enough to forget it happened or didn't happen as the day unfolds. I know that magic will seem possible for anyone if it ever happens for me and I do believe that something unknowable and intangible makes Britney Spears a star and that handsome and ridiculously talented guitar player I listened to in a 40-seat venue, known only in the smallest circles. A line from the David Foster Wallace book of essays comes to mind; "...people tend to be extremely similar in their vulgar and prurient and dumb interests and wildly different in their refined and aesthetic and noble interests."

I missed yoga this week because my tummy made me nervous and I was just wiped. I missed it not only as an opportunity to capitalize on the weight loss an intestinal virus will bring but as a opportunity to hear positive messages and reminders about dwelling in the present. It is physically impossible to be anywhere else yet my mind pulls me back and forth and that creates a figurative hour glass in my life, all processes hung up and stalled trying to reconcile the incompatible programs that are running. A shutdown is almost always the only way to get going again. It's so disruptive to keep shutting down just to get started again. I was thinking about and dreading work, thinking about all the other things I'd rather be doing and I realized, if I didn't have to leave the house at all, I probably wouldn't. Work isn't keeping me from having some fabulous life, it just doesn't add much to what is already a poorly developed life. I don't like having plans, I don't like having demands on my time. I like to wake up and decide what I'm going to do that day and wait to want to do something before doing it. The problem is that 90% of adult life falls outside of these parameters. What I'm essentially looking for is childhood.

When I'm not bending space and time, thinking on what I wish I'd done and what I should do tomorrow, I have been dwelling in this piece. I haven't found all the words I have for this but I think about this concept of love as a punch clock, love as doing time, the relationship between love, passion, and guilt both in how it relates to my relationships with others and in how it relates with my relationship to myself. I look at what I know of the love between some people I know and it is so perplexing to me, I think it either is not real or that I might be from another planet. I understand that it is not for me to understand or aspire to anyway, it is theirs and theirs alone. I know I shouldn't use their relationships, the innards of which are unknown to me, as a measure or goal for mine. I'm most fascinated though, with how they love themselves. How they punch the clock for themselves, taking care, but not out of vanity or selfishness. Maybe it doesn't run that deep, perhaps I'm stretching the analogy too far but there are some of us who are never doing enough, working hard to deserve something we can never earn, and there are those who seem to understand grace and love intrinsically, know they don't deserve it, that they can never earn it, and simply dwell in it. BS should be helping me with this, I think but I'm not sure our relationship will extend past this Friday's planned session. It is not his work to do anyway. It is mine.