Sunday, May 18, 2008

• We try, we fail, yet our true failure is giving up.

  I’m faced with daunting tasks every day. How to make my business profitable without going completely crazy. How to balance a 70 hour workweek against cherished friendships, a supportive but needing boyfriend, and a passion for words and music that has no ready outlet, these days. How to find peace and space and time, while accomplishing the gigantic tasks I’ve set for myself. These are the nudging, varied and seemingly incompatible pieces of my life, that keep me awake and turning in my bed at night.

   

   

  I guess it could be worse. When I was a kid, the idea of eternity frightened me into many a sleepless stint. Now, I’m faced with more pressing presents, and have left eternity to its own devices.

   

   

  The newest task added to the list? Well, the lovely Norimoto (well, lovely for a cartoon character, which as far as I know she is) has set up another (yes! Another!) contest for the love, adoration, and eprops of the xanga hordes (I think, if we loosed our inner id alligators, we could swarm over Tokyo or New York in minutes). And, because I’m semi-secretly competitive, and obviously a glutton for punishment, I threw my metaphorical hat in the virtual ring.

   

   

  Now, I must prove my worth to him, him, him, her, him, and her. Go thus, my loving subscribers and subscribees, to those Xangaroos who hold the Golden Tickets in this challenge, and tell them truly how my awesomeness shines upon this wee corner of the internet. Then, I will go about attempting to prove my worthiness, if not my dedication, to this small piece of cyberspace I have carved out for myself.

   

   

  See, that wasn’t even what I was preparing for you tonight. But, I have been working on something that might even suffice as an explanation of my methods and means here on xanga. While I’m certainly not the sharpest knife in the drawer (though I do have the diamond grit of ever-more-complicated experience honing my perception), I do try to wrap my meager mind ‘round the issues of the day.

   

   

   

   

  The tenuous, delicate threads that tie the world together. I’d like to write down my thoughts on the interconnectedness of all things, but it’s a daunting task, not just because life is so freakin’ complicated and diverse, but because there is no real starting point for a discussion like this, no loose thread we can pull on to lead us through the forest of what is.

   

  

   

  I am constantly making these little diagrams, trying to come up with an organization for my thoughts on the world, the problems in the world, the possible solutions therein, and how things are tied together. It’s easy, for example, to talk about Climate Change these days, as an idea, as a capital-c Cause, as something Macrocosmic. But I think often the discussion becomes too vague, too vaunted, too intellectual, and thus, we can detach ourselves from the very real issues that are starting to affect us, every day.

   

   

  So we can talk about Climate Change as the scientists do – endless roundabout discussions of how complicated meteorology is, the “big picture” stuff – or we can try to break it down into ideas that are not only easy to understand, but more importantly, easier to act on. We can also make pragmatic links between issues – for example, the line drawn from Climate Change to pollution to the effects of industrialization to the lives of people in developing nations – that can bring home these ideas, make them more real, and thus, more pressing.

   

   

  To give another example, one that fits nicely into current events and a recently featured xanga blog – the issue of (drumroll of impending thunderous doom) Gay Marriage. The Big Picture is one of “fundamentalist” religious belief versus a more “hedonistic” culture. But this topic is also tied into aspects of semantics/linguistics (how is “marriage” defined?), concerns of economics and taxation, the historical origins of taboo, the present clash of two very different subcultures, and questions of human rights versus religious hegemony, segregation, and cultural precedents.

   

   

  Because the biggest challenge facing us, as humans, in my opinion, is our inertia, and our aversion to rocking the boat. We resist change, all of us. We have our place in this web, and fear the loss of the familiar, the comfort of the known. And so, we look the other way when confronted with ideas that insist we change, or we find ways to deny those ideas (“Global warming is a myth!”) or downplay them. That way, we can go on with life as it is, without worrying about life as it will be, or might be.

   

   

  So, this is one of the ideas that both confounds and fascinates me: this web that ties up the differing and different pieces of our lives. So, I often write about these ties, and investigate them in my own life.

   

   

   

  Next time: I can’t turn away from a good argument.

   

  • 12:26 AM
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