Murphy’s Bye-Laws

I wouldn’t classify myself as a morning person, one of those who bursts out of bed when they sense the sun just below the horizon; who actually slow down to have coffee instead of the other way around. No, I am not that person. I can see the draw of being up in the early morning, though. There is something about that time of day that is peaceful and refreshing, assuming your eyes are open enough to notice.

I’ve mentioned before, I think, that I am a person of great inertia. I am a walking (or more likely sitting, laying, sleeping) embodiment of Newton’s First Law of Motion; to wit: A PintofStout at rest tends to stay at rest and a PintofStout in motion tends to stay in motion. Get me going working in the yard or some other task and I will keep on going until forced to stop by other obligations, exhaustion of actual work, or exhaustion. The tricky part is getting me going (Newton’s Second Law of Motion). So in the morning when I’m sleeping, it takes quite a lot of forceful motivation to get me up and started into the day.

I’ve seen more sunrises and been started into my day before the sunrise more in the last 6 weeks than probably all of last year, and while I’m not a natural morning person, I have genuinely enjoyed the early starts. Besides the peace that comes from most of the rest of civilization being asleep, it feels like I’m out ahead of the day and controlling the pace and direction the day will take on. Not getting the early start often leads to a feeling – if not a reality – of chasing the day and trying to catch up. This is a terrible feeling because it is exhausting and because the lack of feelings of control can be stressful and depressing.

I’m not sure if a night owl can transform themselves into an early bird or if old age just does it for them naturally, but I may try to continue consciously starting my day earlier. If I start early enough – earlier than this morning – there may be time for a quick walk and some writing in the morning before running off to work. Maybe it can change my outlook and attitude in a small way without going the Peter Gibbons route and trying to be hypnotized so I don’t realize I’m actually at work. It is worth a shot and, besides, the light is so beautiful in the early morning.

The last couple of days I’ve been plagued on and off by an underlying energy and anxiousness which my thoughtful cousin described to me as my muse.  I had described a general creative energy and the need to write, but no specific subjects or pieces I wanted to work on.  Her advice was to write down even the smallest snippet for possible use later.  For a second the wheels in my head spun and I thought there was nothing, then as if the mental tread had found it’s friction I took out my composition book and promptly filled three pages in just 30 minutes – while breaking to retrieve maps from the plotter.

I wrote a few paragraphs about an idea I’ve been seeking out it seems since my soul post and only recently coagulated in my brain.  This is not and perhaps may never be fodder for my public ego stroke (that would be this blog, by the way).  I finished this quick jot and put the composition pad down.  I turned back to work only to feel this rising energy, as my muse fed off the small release apparently, distracting me from my next task.  I ran through my usual roster of blogs and website looking for updates, found none, and was sorely disappointed.  I was really hoping for another great email like the one that just pointed out my muse.  Lo and behold, I snapped up my composition book again and wrote furiously (you could tell if you could see the scribble of my handwriting).

This time I wrote a nearly complete thought.  The weird thing was it all came in real time; the closest I have to come to a stream of consciousness as I figure it to be.  Even now – after a few hours – it continues as I debate whether to tack the scribbles onto the end of this post (which is actually why I started this post).  After completing the scribbles, I again put the composition pad down and marveled at the feeling of having just spilled my brain into a notebook.

The marveling didn’t last long as I again grabbed the notebook.  This time I reflected briefly on the muse itself before being interrupted by an annoying and unattended cell phone at an adjacent desk.  One more brief observation about myself and the desperate need to feed the muse had ebbed enough to return to concentrating on work.  Wow, what a rush!

And after some thought and a read through, I will open my stream for fishing:

Connections

Sitting like a caged animal.  Lonely.  I reach futilely toward the virtual outside.  The internet soon loses all freshness, though I’m still unfulfilled.  Any hope and spiritual nourishment I had gleaned from the tiny sprouts are soon gone, the taste of their sweetness making the emptiness that much more stark.

Other living souls are just on the other side of my cubicle walls, though I’m cowed by the ever-present and imaginary eyes scrutinizing my production.  I risk the hand of the master even to write this.  My ears are perked, my pulse is elevated, and I think of the repercussions of posting this publically and semi-anonymously (the poison is in the “semi”).  It is easier to withdraw than to reach out, for it is fairly specific connections that I seek.  Connections that aren’t polite for small talk.  I’m too impatient to invest in the small talk needed for the potential – not guaranteed – continuation into connection.  Only by rebelling can I overcome the seemingly purposeful isolation.

There are phrases like “the working poor” floating around. This refers to the people who are actually employed, sometimes in more than one job, who still can’t afford housing, food, and other tenets of the American dream. Perhaps this state of affairs is due to the cost of actually going to work.

In the past I’ve written about the chicken-or-egg nature of earning and spending; the first time I talked about some of the factors affecting the work environment that make us desire escape so frantically; the second time I elaborated on how we spend our treasure in pursuit of an escape from the depressing world of employment, in turn resulting in the need to work in order to pay off the escape. Somewhere else, though I can’t find where, I thought I also mentioned that my spending habits go contrary to reason and become less frugal the more pinched I feel and yet more stingy when I feel like I’m getting ahead. And just this past week I noticed an expansion, or perhaps a corollary, to this phenomenon. The busier and more frantic my employment environment becomes, the more my feeling of pinched finances grows in parallel. This also seems to contradict logic. When working hard for long hours, one is apt to collect overtime, which means actually getting paid more. So why does it seem like I’m with less money when working so much? Is it just an illusion brought about by stress and the apparent contraction of time ([time flies when keeping busy (less time)] x [time = money] = less money)? Read the rest of this entry »

I experienced major disillusion yesterday.  Part of the illusion I was holding was borne of supreme confidence and hopeful expectation (and probably logic not encountered in the structured corporate environment).  How foolish of me!  The hope of a great leap ahead in compensation and professional expansion was just too much to not latch on to, I guess.  The position laid out, and the process of actually creating the position, was so compartmentalized that one would need to already hold the same job to fit, like a good cog in a machine.  Of course carried to an absurd conclusion, those cogs in the corporate mechanism have no ability to expand or evolve, but only to fit in their rightful place as they were manufactured to.

After viewing the situation from a new distance, am I disappointed that I don’t get the opportunity to be a cog?  Surprisingly, yes.  There were many benefits to occupying the cog slot.  Read the rest of this entry »

Who am I kidding?  The endless summer mentioned in the title came to a screeching halt…well, I can’t say when, so maybe it wasn’t screeching after all.  I did push on through and finished a bunch of landscaping right before work has monopolized much of my free time, so there’s that sense of accomplishment.  And it isn’t even like I am not still riding a wave.  I’m just too busy to notice.

It rained a lot in June.  It even rained a lot in July.  August is off to a fine start as well.  Our garden is threatening to take over the yard and we’re barricading ourselves in the house (Feed me, Seymour!).  Some of what we intended – the little stick in the plant said so – to be yellow squash turned out to be acorn squash, which is not a nice stationary plant like the intended residents.  A tangled, viney squash orgy broke out in the back of the garden, and if the several viney plants didn’t croak from something (I’ll assume exhaustion), I may have wheelbarrows full of acorn squash right now.  As it is we managed about a dozen (that I could find yet).  Our tomatoes, too, had grown to be about six-foot tall with all the rain.  They have since been weighed down with burgeoning fruit which have yet to make it out of the garden before being devoured.  Yeah, everything is coming along nicely.

If there were still stuff to do – and there is; there always is – it would be going unfinished.  Between the waning daylight and the the waxing workload, I feel lucky to see the overgrown garden by sunlight by the time I return home.  Perhaps it is times like these that are the troughs I referred to in the previous post.  I have not plunged into the muddy bottom, but merely see less horizon now.  My time constraints and my mood have also hindered my writing output, as anyone still bothering to look has known.  I thought I could keep up with volume while dropping some quality, but I either have high standards or was just too busy to even write total crap (this post should clear this question up nicely).  I thought I could reproduce a similar mindset as mild depression and a paranoid scepticism by simply staying awake late.  Except you actually have to stay awake.  Rather than write, I have been reading.  I’ve been reading into some thoughts on the soul and picking up some more Abbey ( why haven’t you read any of him yet?).  And why haven’t you posted some thoughts about the soul in the “My Soul is a Black Hole” comments?  Oh, I see.  I’m the only one who feels guilty for not showing up for over a month, while you have no responsibility at all?  Well, I’d continue to rave like a lunatic, but I must sleep now.  Enjoy the couch, Mr. and/or Mrs. Where-Have-You-Been?

I’m sure regular readers have noticed the absence of any new substance here at the Bye-Laws in recent weeks – or maybe not, since it isn’t all that unusual. This particular absence stemmed from two things: I was busier than a one-armed paper hanger with work and school and then I was decompressing from such busyness by taking a week to do much work around the house. It hardly seems like decompression to go from sitting at a desk (and in my car) for 10-15 hours a day to the back-breaking labor of removing landscaping, but it was surprisingly refreshing. Read the rest of this entry »

This morning I skated across my deck, gingerly tread the stairs down to the car, and found my car encased in ice like a prehistoric beast churned up by an ancient glacier.  If I were sane, I would have turned around, braved the icy deck, and stayed home at least for a few hours.  But our culture finds that unacceptable.  We wouldn’t want the economy to collapse, now would we?

Sure, I could have stayed home anyway, but there is some invisible bayonet pushing us into our cars and down the highway.  That invisible bayonet is debt.  So we continue to walk a plank and put ourselves at unnecessary risk in order to appease the master.  I don’t mean to imply that we should hole up anytime a little weather rolls in; after all, there is risk in everything.  Instead, there should be some flexibility in our work habits that will never be present until the debt trap is broken.  Sigh.  Now to drive back.