Long and tedious, and no picture.
Tonight I got home from work and discovered that Jeepies had stolen a new mala off the table, chewed through the string, eaten eight of the beautiful hand-carved rose beads, and scattered the rest of them all over the hall.
Sometimes I think it's good that I have enough self-awareness to at least try to look at these situations as an opportunity to practice compassion, patience, non-attachment, and all those other virtues I supposedly value. Tonight, I just wanted to scream and rant and beat him savagely. Savagely, I tell you! I still kind of do. I'd been looking for just the perfect beads for this particular mala for years – more than six years, actually. Last weekend I finally found them. I wasn't even through finishing the piece yet. And they weren't cheap, either. They were so un-cheap, in fact, that I seriously considered not getting them at all. But in the end they were so exactly what I had been envisioning that I decided to go ahead and spend the money.
Why, oh why does he have to do things like this? Why? Why? Why is it so hard to let it go when he does?
Is it because the beads are made out of bone, and dogs love bones? Could it really be as simple as that? But it's not like there's big chunks of meat still attached to them! And they're smaller than peas. It's hard to believe that he would even recognize them as bones. More likely, he was just bored.
I hate how angry I feel right now. It's interesting, though, to notice how I actually do feel. What I would like to do is yell and perpetrate some kind of physical violence against something. Kick the wall or something. But I'm not doing it. Why not? I'm the only person here. I can do whatever I want!
Partly it's because I don't want to scare Tater. But mainly it's because (and this is what I think is interesting) I know that it won't mean anything to Jeepies. I don't think he's capable of connecting his actions earlier today to my yelling tonight. Yelling would not communicate anything useful.
So does this mean I think the only acceptable reason to act out of anger is to communicate? Do I think that? What about plain old self-expression for its own sake? What would happen if I just let it fly once in awhile, without first pondering whether it's going to be useful or not?
[later] He's in his bed next to the fireplace now and the way he's looking at me, I can tell he's wondering if I'm still mad at him. I'm not. But sometimes I just feel like I don't like him very much. I feel insulted by the fact that he only cares about me because I feed him his dinner. It's so obvious! He's pushy and stubborn and makes these horrible clopping sounds when he licks his stomach. He hogs the bed and grumbles irritably at me when I try to make him move over. And the other day he growled and snapped at my foot when I tried to stick in between his paws and an empty jar of caramel sauce he'd gotten ahold of (because by now I know better than to reach for it with my hand).
On the other hand, he's lived here longer than anyone else in the house and at his age I suppose he's entitled to a little respect, even if he doesn't respect me back. Like, at all. In my better moments I'm actually grateful it's just an elderly grumpy dog we're kowtowing to, and not an elderly grumpy human relative. At least when a dog gets on your last nerve you can put him out and close the dog door for awhile. Not that I would ever be so cruel.
Anyway. Now that the heat of passion has cooled what bothers me most about the whole thing is the thought of those beautiful beads lying there inside his stomach right now, this very minute – mere inches away yet utterly out of reach – and the knowledge that tomorrow they will be lying somewhere in the yard hidden inside a big pile of dog poop. Don't worry though – I've forbidden myself to even consider going out to search for them. I'm just going to let it go. Just let it go.
In other news, things at work have been starting to look up a bit. For some reason I've been chosen to sort of spearhead a redesign of the entertainment section, and to create designs for a couple more new projects that are the precious brainchildren of my boss's boss. My comps were unveiled to the rest of the company this morning to wild applause and several people came up to me at my desk throughout the day to congratulate me and rave over my work.
I'm actually pretty happy with it, myself. For some reason though it still always shocks me when other people like it, too. The fact that I've never had any formal design training makes me wonder when someone's going to rip the mouse out of my hand and denounce me as a fraud. Then again, I've been doing print work since the early 80s (since the early 70s, if you count school projects) and web stuff for ten years, so maybe it's okay to stop worrying that I'm not a "real" designer.
Funny about that. I work as a graphic designer, but I don't think of myself as one. I still consider myself primarily a writer, even though right now I'm not selling anything and don't really want to. The writing I do here is just for me; it's easy, lazy, undisciplined, unedited, unsellable. The other day I was clearing out a box of marketing collateral and web content I wrote six or seven years ago and could hardly believe I had actually written it. One series, in particular, a nationally distributed column I ghostwrote for a year or so ... I probably should've taken it more seriously, tried to document somehow that I actually wrote it.
But why? I don't want to live by freelancing. I'm not up to that kind of stress these days. It's not a coincidence that my anxiety attacks stopped and I was finally able to wean myself from anti-anxiety meds around the same time I decided to just let it all go and concentrate on keeping things simple, simple, simple.
I am starting to get curious, though, about whether it might be possible to live very simply and make better money. When I started down this path I believed that the kind of life I wanted was incompatible with any kind of work that pays well. My experience had always been that the highest-paying jobs were also the most stressful, and I was willing – really, by my illness I was compelled – to sacrifice the money for the peace of mind I hoped would come once I shucked off everyone else's expectations and started living only for what was truly necessary ... or something like that.
But having less money is also stressful at times (though I've still never gone without anything I really wanted), and now that I'm feeling much more well and emotionally supported and secure, I'm also starting to feel just a little more adventurous as well. What could I do if I decided to really invest in my own work? What would I like to do?
Hmm. I have The Unbearable Lightness of Being going in the background, and I just glanced up at the screen and saw a tiny baby pink piglet wearing a black necktie, standing on a red oriental carpet. I will take this surreal sight as a sign it's time to dream some dreams of my own. Good night.
Sometimes I think it's good that I have enough self-awareness to at least try to look at these situations as an opportunity to practice compassion, patience, non-attachment, and all those other virtues I supposedly value. Tonight, I just wanted to scream and rant and beat him savagely. Savagely, I tell you! I still kind of do. I'd been looking for just the perfect beads for this particular mala for years – more than six years, actually. Last weekend I finally found them. I wasn't even through finishing the piece yet. And they weren't cheap, either. They were so un-cheap, in fact, that I seriously considered not getting them at all. But in the end they were so exactly what I had been envisioning that I decided to go ahead and spend the money.
Why, oh why does he have to do things like this? Why? Why? Why is it so hard to let it go when he does?
Is it because the beads are made out of bone, and dogs love bones? Could it really be as simple as that? But it's not like there's big chunks of meat still attached to them! And they're smaller than peas. It's hard to believe that he would even recognize them as bones. More likely, he was just bored.
I hate how angry I feel right now. It's interesting, though, to notice how I actually do feel. What I would like to do is yell and perpetrate some kind of physical violence against something. Kick the wall or something. But I'm not doing it. Why not? I'm the only person here. I can do whatever I want!
Partly it's because I don't want to scare Tater. But mainly it's because (and this is what I think is interesting) I know that it won't mean anything to Jeepies. I don't think he's capable of connecting his actions earlier today to my yelling tonight. Yelling would not communicate anything useful.
So does this mean I think the only acceptable reason to act out of anger is to communicate? Do I think that? What about plain old self-expression for its own sake? What would happen if I just let it fly once in awhile, without first pondering whether it's going to be useful or not?
[later] He's in his bed next to the fireplace now and the way he's looking at me, I can tell he's wondering if I'm still mad at him. I'm not. But sometimes I just feel like I don't like him very much. I feel insulted by the fact that he only cares about me because I feed him his dinner. It's so obvious! He's pushy and stubborn and makes these horrible clopping sounds when he licks his stomach. He hogs the bed and grumbles irritably at me when I try to make him move over. And the other day he growled and snapped at my foot when I tried to stick in between his paws and an empty jar of caramel sauce he'd gotten ahold of (because by now I know better than to reach for it with my hand).
On the other hand, he's lived here longer than anyone else in the house and at his age I suppose he's entitled to a little respect, even if he doesn't respect me back. Like, at all. In my better moments I'm actually grateful it's just an elderly grumpy dog we're kowtowing to, and not an elderly grumpy human relative. At least when a dog gets on your last nerve you can put him out and close the dog door for awhile. Not that I would ever be so cruel.
Anyway. Now that the heat of passion has cooled what bothers me most about the whole thing is the thought of those beautiful beads lying there inside his stomach right now, this very minute – mere inches away yet utterly out of reach – and the knowledge that tomorrow they will be lying somewhere in the yard hidden inside a big pile of dog poop. Don't worry though – I've forbidden myself to even consider going out to search for them. I'm just going to let it go. Just let it go.
In other news, things at work have been starting to look up a bit. For some reason I've been chosen to sort of spearhead a redesign of the entertainment section, and to create designs for a couple more new projects that are the precious brainchildren of my boss's boss. My comps were unveiled to the rest of the company this morning to wild applause and several people came up to me at my desk throughout the day to congratulate me and rave over my work.
I'm actually pretty happy with it, myself. For some reason though it still always shocks me when other people like it, too. The fact that I've never had any formal design training makes me wonder when someone's going to rip the mouse out of my hand and denounce me as a fraud. Then again, I've been doing print work since the early 80s (since the early 70s, if you count school projects) and web stuff for ten years, so maybe it's okay to stop worrying that I'm not a "real" designer.
Funny about that. I work as a graphic designer, but I don't think of myself as one. I still consider myself primarily a writer, even though right now I'm not selling anything and don't really want to. The writing I do here is just for me; it's easy, lazy, undisciplined, unedited, unsellable. The other day I was clearing out a box of marketing collateral and web content I wrote six or seven years ago and could hardly believe I had actually written it. One series, in particular, a nationally distributed column I ghostwrote for a year or so ... I probably should've taken it more seriously, tried to document somehow that I actually wrote it.
But why? I don't want to live by freelancing. I'm not up to that kind of stress these days. It's not a coincidence that my anxiety attacks stopped and I was finally able to wean myself from anti-anxiety meds around the same time I decided to just let it all go and concentrate on keeping things simple, simple, simple.
I am starting to get curious, though, about whether it might be possible to live very simply and make better money. When I started down this path I believed that the kind of life I wanted was incompatible with any kind of work that pays well. My experience had always been that the highest-paying jobs were also the most stressful, and I was willing – really, by my illness I was compelled – to sacrifice the money for the peace of mind I hoped would come once I shucked off everyone else's expectations and started living only for what was truly necessary ... or something like that.
But having less money is also stressful at times (though I've still never gone without anything I really wanted), and now that I'm feeling much more well and emotionally supported and secure, I'm also starting to feel just a little more adventurous as well. What could I do if I decided to really invest in my own work? What would I like to do?
Hmm. I have The Unbearable Lightness of Being going in the background, and I just glanced up at the screen and saw a tiny baby pink piglet wearing a black necktie, standing on a red oriental carpet. I will take this surreal sight as a sign it's time to dream some dreams of my own. Good night.
1 Comments:
that's crazy talk Tina. you're one of the most creative people I've ever known and can draw - or paint - circles around most of those clowns in art school. don't sell yourself short!!
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