Sailbourne

Today you get a hat-trick … I have been posting these in the order in which they appear in my quotation collection page, part of my personal homepages. But the three which appear today are all appropriate to the feeling of the day for me, because …

Afterhell Volume 2 is done!
The disc is being duplicated now and copies go out starting tomorrow!

“All’s well that ends with a good meal.”
– Arnold Lobel

“It’s all malarky; even the wonderful part is malarky.”
– Robert Stack (1919-2003) on Hollywood

“Fall seven times, stand up eight.”
– Japanese proverb

“I will be myself as a grown-up. I wouldn’t be anything else.”
–Taiga Endo, age 5, answering the question “what do you want to be when you grow up?”

I want to be a knitter. I want to play the taiko drums. I want to paint miniatures. I want to be a sumo wrestler. I want to breed and show cats. I want to read some of the books that have sat untouched on the shelf for years – there must be at least a hundred of them by now – not to mention my list of requests at the library, all on hold indefinitely. I want to play Roller Derby. I want to make and sell bead jewelry. I want to be a writer.

And that’s just for starters.

I so want to be and do anything other than what I am doing now, which is struggling painfully at a job which up until now, I have loved. There is too much to do and learn and apply, nowhere near enough time to do and learn and apply it all. The harder I work, the further I fall behind. The darker side of myself, the critical voice in my head which tries its damndest to sabotage all that I do, for the sheer pleasure of saying, “See? I knew you were a failure. I told you so,” is running absolute riot. Sometimes I feel like I’m holding on to my sanity by a thread which is fraying even as I watch.

Today it seems like the best I can do is roll with the punches and tell myself the same thing I do when the political situation gets me down (been telling myself this a lot, since November of 2000):

“The wheel will turn. It always does.”

So here I am, myself as a grown-up. And that’s all that I am.

I guess it could be worse, eh?

Two stories in the news today have caught my attention in a very downer sort of way.

The first seems to confirm what I’ve sadly come to believe over the past few years, that the government doesn’t give a damn about the citizens:

Government to Scale Back Mad Cow Testing

The second is something I find even more disturbing. I knew that there was a goodly sized portion of the population who have no humanity, decency or compassion any more … but I had no idea how far some of us have fallen:

Gang members charged in rape allegedly watched by mother of one

It’s fast becoming one of those days when, like George Carlin a few years ago, I find myself cheering for the comet. Or the asteroid.

Additional: Just after posting this, I saw that it had been exactly a month since I posted last. Part of the reason for the long hiatus had to do with the entry a month ago, which definitely fell into the “government doesn’t give a damn about the citizens” category. That entry appeared to provoke some angry reaction from at least one person who read it. (Not one of those who commented here, I should add.) I very nearly got myself wrapped up in what would likely have been a full blown flame war over it all … but managed at the last minute to hold back, and hold my peace. But I wasn’t particularly inclined to open myself up for more of the same by posting again.

Until now. The mood I’m in now is pretty much the same as it was then, for essentially the same reasons.