Strawberry ice cream

There was a blood donation truck outside my college last Friday, and I was struck with a thought:

Blood donation truck = The ice cream man for vampires.






In other news: do you ever just feel bad without even knowing why sometimes? I guess that's a silly question. We're all human, we all do, every now and them. I guess I'm used to feeling good or neutral so much of the time that when I do feel genuinely bad, it startles me. Far cry from how it used to be, where the ratios were basically reversed.

I'd call this feeling right now...anxiety. It's the general feeling that I don't have enough time to do everything well, so I'm going to do a poor job on it all. I'm going to be unprepared, forget something, go to school without my pants, that kind of nightmare.

My first thought was: well, the anxiety and pain associated with procrastination generally goes away when we finally start doing something on the item we're procrastination on, so I'll do that. It worked a bit. But then I finished with one thing and it's back. maybe I've stopped working on the items I'm worried about. I'll get back to it after I finish this. (Which is perhaps more procrastination?)

But some of the items are kind of...risky to me. So it's hard to just sit down and do them. Not in an actually risky way. I live a rather boring life, from a novelist's perspective. Just that some of these things that I feel need doing are difficult. Either they involve conversations that are uncomfortable, or they involve doing things I have little experience with, and thus little confidence with.

I just remembered though, that this is exactly where I want to be, to learn my latest life lesson: comfort being uncomfortable. Trust. I do get excited when I notice an area that gets me all tied up in knots. It means there's some juicy learning to be done. Some part of me that's still fearful, that's still believing ghost stories I've told myself, like, "if I fail, I won't get another chance. (and/or people will hate me, or desert me.)"

These are silly when said so plainly, of course, but they don't go away until some situation triggers them, and they are real and in your face, not on a thought level, but on a gut, feeling level. Then you get the chance to see through them, to keep moving, to trust in spite of the fear. To hold the feelings with kindness and awareness and let them melt in the presence of truth, daylight. As the snow is melting all around me today.

This is challenging work, but it is made at least possible by the realization that it is work to be done. That there is something for me to do about it. Even if that something is as subtle as just holding the feelings in awareness rather than being swallowed by them.

I have my tools. Feeling the body. Passionate conversation with trees. Asking, "who is it that's feeling x?" Remembering that "this too shall pass." Numerous others. So I'll keep alternating between doing the work, and, when that's not working, doing awareness stuff. And, in a sense, the battle is already won. As soon as I became aware that this feeling is an opportunity to learn, it stopped being a problem and started being an opportunity. A challenge. With xp and treasure after I've succesfully overcome it.

That's all for this week. My solo teaching week is swift approaching. I suppose I'm glad it's so early in the semester. It will be a load off, once it's done, and I won't be doing it anywhere near the insanity of end of semester, when all my projects will be coming due.

I hope you are all well.
Peace, love, truth,
-Isaac

Jello

My brain is so liquefied right now. It's like a big ol' tub of bland orange colored jello. Classes at Tracker School always leave me exhausted, if inspired. Add to that a normally exhausting routine, plus six hours of driving, much of which is through moderate traffic and serious city, and I'm just about ready to pass out for a few days.

Which I can't do. I ended up staying for the whole class, which ended up seeming like something I really should do, given my vision and commitments, but it's made my life harder. The small "break" I was going to get, to catch up and organize my life, is now just barely going to be enough to catch up on the classes I've missed and hang on by my fingernails.

I emphatically regret nothing. I'm doing what is important to me and living an exceptional life. Or the beginnings of one. I just have to keep reminding myself that, though I should treat all with respect and appropriate kindness, the only opinion that really matters is God's. I can't be trying to please everyone. Just being true to my own sense of what is right is difficult enough.

That said, I'm going to be running on overtime to meet all my commitments. I'll have to be relying on something bigger than myself for the energy and focus. Good.

On deck for tomorrow: Prepare and teach an online class. Plan for next week's school class. Catch up on the online class from two weeks ago so I'm ready for that night's new teaching. Several hours of processing my tasks and todo's so I'm somewhat current and can prioritize and plan appropriately (that's going to take probably another 4-6 hours so I'll be doing it throughout the first half of the week.) Meet up with a friend and get recordings of the classes I missed and start listening to them and take pictures of her notes to use for further reference.

On deck for tonight: apologize and begin rescheduling the things I missed because of the last minute schedule change. (I got a lot of them, but there were a lot + some more, and I did not get them all.) Make sure the super awesome friend with the recordings is available and around tomorrow for me to meet up with, and figure out time. Put away clean laundry so I've got a place to sleep. Have more crazy dreams. (last night I had a dream that I was a semi-omnipotent being, having a dream, deciding to give some immortal fable creatures temporary semi-omnipotence, just to see what they did with it. But then I had to explain to them why these powers came with the caveat that they not kill people. And I had to explain to these immortal beings why it was a bad thing to kill, through experiences, so they really understood it viscerally.

Teaching even in my sleep. ;-)

Good night all. I hope your days are as meaningful but not quite as full as mine.
Love

Short James Bond Break.

I'm about to head off outside internet range and outside of free-time range to a Tom Brown class. I'll be there until Thursday morning, at which point I'll get up at 5 or 6 and drive for 5 or 6 hours to get to class on time at Antioch, at which point I'll have classes until 6:30 (and then homework for the next day of classes until I sleep.) People keep saying "have a nice break" or "have a nice vacation." and I can't be bothered to explain to them the truth. So I'm just explaining it once, here: It's a crazier week than average.

Thus, this is all the blog post you get. I've got more in the works, but they're not ready for prime-time and I have no further opportunities for editing, so this will genuinely be a short post.

I fill like I should have something of substance to give you, though.

My teacher told me to be more direct and less questioning or wishy-washy with my instructions to kids who are off track, and it's working quite well, since I've got the warmth thing down quite well. It makes me feel like a James Bond supervillain monologuing about how people crave subjugation and being told what to do.

Prosthetic Remote Controlled Tele-Hugger.

Let's see if this is actually a short post. That is the intent. Because I'm ready to sleep now, and get up early, and go back to work. I've been working straight through, on one important thing or another, since I woke up this morning at 5:30 am. (I know, later than usual: I let myself sleep in since it was a weekend ;-)

The main task I've set before myself: Get my life organized, streamlined, efficient. I'm using a methodology called "Getting Things Done" and I won't recommend it just yet since I haven't implemented it. But it seems promising. It's clean and simple and both intuitive and surprising. Good signs. But I'm still a little sore at my stint with Marie Kondo's "The Magic of Tidying Up" or whatever the title was. Though I still want to implement that fully as well, having only halfway done it. But I think she was a bit too strong on the throwing things out spectrum. I'm my alacrity to be zen-like in my simplicity, I ended up donating a set of non-fiction children's books that I now really wish I had.

I didn't realize I was going to be a teacher when I was doing this, and I also didn't realize that teachers are apparently required to be pack-rats, scrounging any supplies they can, from yogurt containers to yard sale books to cardboard boxes to used office supplies (got any manila folders you want to get rid of?)

Ah well. Really, of all the stuff I threw out, it is only the children's books that I'm wishing I hadn't. That's not so bad, considering how much other stuff I got rid of.

In any case. I'm trying to implement a productivity workflow that will let me capture all the things that need doing, so I can see them at a glance and do the most important one's first, and the non-important one's only when I have extra time. And not forget important things. And do it all in a relatively relaxed and stress-free and even fun way.

Also I have to do some of next weeks work this week since I won't have much time for it next week, as I'll be at a Tom Brown Jr. Class. Which I'll have to leave early, getting up around 5 am Thursday and driving 5-6 hours to get to class at 1 pm, and stay there until 6:30 pm. That's going to be a tiring week, so I need to get stuff done ahead of time.

Unfortunately, this new fancy-pants system is not set up yet, so I'm still kind of crushed under the weight of mysterious and unknown tasks that I intuitively know are massive but haven't had the breathing room to sit down and clarify and collect into one place. Not to mention the planning for the upcoming week of school. I'll be doing my first solo-substituting Tuesday morning, which means I'm getting paid for it (woohoo!) and also means it's just me and the para. We'll see how it goes!

Yup, pretty long. Wouldn't be so bad if I didn't have to edit it. Perhaps I won't. All you get is a spell check this time. I hope it's comprehensible. I miss you, my friends. Being busy like this is lonely work, though it's exciting and fun. This is one of the reasons I love sharing a house with good friends: it's very time efficient. I get my social primate hit just by walking outside my door and chatting in the common area. Ideal.

Well, perhaps I'll just have to skype some of you. It's not as good, but it's way better than nothing. Skype still can't do hugs though. Well, maybe it can. I bet there's a prosthetic remote controlled hugger being sold somewhere in Japan. Where the person on the other end can controle the duration and pressure of the hug. Seems like something they'd do.

[after only about two minutes of searching]
Yup. Here you go. Robotic hugging phone prosthetic. Courtisty of Japan. I did not know this existed before. But I assumed.


It's kind of creepy, so here's something a little more settling:




Good night all. Much love.
-I0