Adware Creators, You Are Not Fit To Wipe A Telemarketer's Ass

I just want to take a moment to state the obvious: there is a special room in hell, no make that an entire greasy, burning blood-drenched screaming miasmic underworldly layer, reserved entirely for the makers of adware. Harsh? Maybe. But keep in mind, I am one of those people who truly believes that everything in the world has an important role, however subtle. I even doggedly researched the mosquito's place in the ecosystem (which was very hard to find) because I knew there must be some reason not to blast them into chemical oblivion (turns out they are more prolific pollenators than bees). But I can find no place in the universe for the adware writer. The world would, in fact, buzz quite happily around the sun without them, perhaps even moreso, with increased speed and unencumbered browsing capability. I spent half my day picking through my registry, removing about a dozen different adwares from my PC which were simultaneously and unceremoniously installed when I googled into the wrong website. Fuckers. May flesh eating gnats gnaw off your eyelids and force you to watch helplessly as 40,000 popups prevent you from reading emails from your loved ones or finding the meaning of life or a sweet deal on ebay or the address of god, for all eternity.

There. I feel better now.

(And yes, I know - Mac. Unix. Anything but Windows. Fat lotta good that does me when I'm trying to surf at work, though...)

Burn, Baby, Burn

Did I actually forget, as all the giddy syrupy romantic bliss and ongoing domestic drama of my past mistakes collide in the filter of my current growth, to tell you that I am going to Burning Man?!

Then let me do it now. Close your eyes. Imagine me leaping around like a 10 year old girl hopped up on pixie stix and Coca Cola and Justin Timberlake. Hear my voice, shrill and chirpy and nauseatingly ebullient: I'mgoingtoBurningManI'mgoingtoBurning ManI'mgoingtoBurning Man!!!! Woohoo!!!!

I am shopping for hot pink fishnets and knee boots and sun hats and blinky lights. Me & the S.O. are writing fortunes to put in fortune cookies we're making to hand out (I'm taking suggestions by email. My favorite thusfar: "life is an anatomically correct lollipop: lick with intent"). I'm bracing myself for the oven-like temperatures of August in the desert, and alkaline playa dust that sucks every last drop of moisture from your being, effectively embalming you on the spot and coating every last crevice of your posessions in a filmy white grit that will remain for decades to remind me of my first foray into the altered state of forty thousand crazy artists wielding fire on inhospitable terrain.

There will be a full report. There will be photos. There will be random excited gushing leading up to and following the event. There will be a cataclysmic mushroom cloud of perception expansion and paradigm shift and awe and joy and appreciation of indoor plumbing. Stay tuned.

Slinging Hash At The Karma Cafe

Ah, growth. That gorgeous, confusing, hyper-aware time in which your theories on life, so casually slung about like eggs on some greasy spoon griddle wind up with their yolks unceremoniously broken on the sticky spatula of experience. When everything you ever thought you knew, that looked so good on paper, doesn't hold up to real life. Simultaneously exhilarating and humiliating, you swell past the self-imposed limits of your own smallness, the neat buttons that once held your id so carefully in check popping off like candy. For that brief time, everything falls away and you stand there naked, bewildered, looking around like you've never seen the place before. Because in a way, you haven't. Not from this perspective, at least. It's what you live for, even as you flinch and scream as you watch it hurtle toward you in slow-motion light speed.

The transformation junkie that I am, it's probably no surprise that I'm at it again.

Perhaps even less of a surprise, it's a man. Sort of. I mean, he is a man, definitely, but he's only part of the picture, existing within a larger landscape instead of the subject of a portrait. There has been much change in me this year, and in a way I see this latest development as a product of that, a graduation into new territory...I hope...and not just another chance to go around the same loop and wind up at the beginning of the roller coaster all over again.

The most palpable change, the one that paradoxically rips the rug of certainty right out from under my feet, is that I know what I want.

See, I always thought that was a bad thing. That the less you wanted, the more you'd be happy with whatever you got. And I figured most of what I wanted wasn't realistic anyway, so why bother. As always, the universe is nothing if not efficient. Don't care what you get, and you spend all your time coping with what you get; bending and contorting and struggling to fit into whatever ill-sized outfit was thrown your way. The universe rewards the articulate. Ask for what you want, you just might get it. Sure you have to be careful & all that, but where along the way did that translate into "don't ask for what you want, because you don't really want it"?

I think the coolest thing about learning what I want (I originally wrote "knowing", as though I knew all there was to know about it and I could just close the book and move onto the next thing), is that every face I see is no longer potentially what I maybe might need. I don't have to try everything looking for that elusive something, a flavor my psyche can't quite identify. I know it when I see it now, from twenty paces. Or to be more honest, I know when I don't see it. Which does everyone a great big favor. Nobody's wasting anyone's time (“as though that were really possible,” the little wise voice in the back of my head clucks). I wonder how much I led people on by not knowing. I wonder if I'm the last person in the world to figure this out.

But hell, who cares? What is more important is that there is energy freed up in my life for other things. And it’s fascinating what all has popped up for examination these past few weeks.

Most pressing is the need for boundaries. I think I’ve said before, I’ve always viewed a need boundaries as a sign that I wasn’t “evolved” enough, that I was strapped into some sort of ego trip, that the illusion was taking me for a ride. You know, kind of along the same lines as knowing what you want. I didn’t have any significant limits as a kid, so I guess it’s not great surprise that I’ve always viewed them as a bad thing. But maybe (she said, choking on her Saturn return) limits are a good thing, helpful, especially in moving me toward those ideals of mine – that is, all those things I want in life. And of course we remember from above that wanting is a bad thing, so really it’s no wonder I’ve been so frozen stuck for so long. To move in any direction would have meant to devalue my own quest for growth. Or worse, admit that I’m not perfect. I guess part of my journey right now is accepting that I am allowed to take up space in the world, and that my preferences do sometimes matter, and that maybe it’s just that they make a better servant than master. And that maybe, just maybe, the world is as non-absolute as I always ramble about it being.

And here’s this sweet man in my life reminding me to let myself off the hook, to give myself time to think and decide what actually works for me, what respects me and serves me and isn’t horribly awfully disfiguringly codependent, and I’m just so damned grateful with every single breath to have someone in my life who actually knows what to say to me when I get all wrapped up in trying to be all ethereal and uber-enlightened. Someone to lovingly spank me with the practicality stick and encourage me to move beyond the self-imposed prison of my untested beliefs. Thank goodness for not so small miracles.

People: Easy To Collect, No Pesky Storage Issues

Nothing like a bunch of new people in your life to shake your psyche up like a little snow globe. Trouble is, the way the flakes fall look awfully familiar. But I guess sometimes you have to get out of your customary context in order to see that clearly. Most of the time our unconscious stuff just fades into the background of experience, a slow muzak that hums quietly just below perception. Hence the name unconscious...yes, brilliant Maya. And for my next trick, I'll stand here blinking.

So I met all these new people at PDF, sort of entered into a new world in a way, one more palpable and meaningful than the one I was living before in subtle but vital ways. It’s strange to think of all these people as my community, but it feels like an inevitability I might as well just go along with. And so suddenly I have too many people in my life to give proper energy to anyone. Okay, I probably did before, too, but now we've reached critical mass. And I have to cop to the fact that I’m sort of an emotional packrat, and all that that label implies.

I meet people, I connect with them, and then enter into some sort of unspoken emotional contract with them, in which we will talk and/or get together at regular security-enhancing intervals so that everyone feels liked and accepted and all that happy stuff, and before you know it, I’m 29 years old with over 10 years of time/energy/emotional obligations to everyone I was ever close to for any period of time, because God knows, if you don’t maintain all those relationships it means that you’re a bad person, or at least as shallow as Paris Hilton in a wading pool. And nobody wants to be that. Except maybe Paris. But probably not her either.

I feel spread thin, unable to really nurture any of the relationships I have, so much as make lots of belated calls apologizing for not calling back sooner. Juggling, neglecting my alone time, hounded by guilt. I used to think that maintaining relationships with people who I hardly connect with anymore made me diverse, made me accepting and loving of people no matter what. And that’s true to an extent, and I have certainly been enriched by the diverse experiences, but at what cost?

When I was a kid I would start out with one stuffed animal in my bed at bedtime. But I would lay there in the dark and think guiltily about my other favorite stuffed animals and how left out they must feel, so I would get up and bring them into bed with me. Then I would lay there and think about all my not-favorite stuffed animals, the ones who were once my favorites but had been replaced by newer, cuter, softer ones, and feel terribly guilty again and bring them into bed too, until every last one of my hundred stuffed animals was in bed with me and I had about two square inches in which to sleep, all contorted and crunched but at last not guilty because none of my beloved stuffed animals felt left out. I guess when I grew up I just transferred that complex from stuffed toys to people.

But it doesn’t really serve anyone, does it? I mean, I can see what an impact people have in my life, and maybe the life cycle of that relationship is a day, or a week, or a month, or a lifetime. But prolonging that in order to spare someone’s feelings simply prevents both of us from being enriched by more meaningful connections that are pertinent to the place we are at right now. And maybe a time comes when we resonate again, and we want to commit a little more time again, but living a lie for the sake of guilt is oppressive.

Unfortunately that means I have to make some hard choices and risk not being liked by everyone. And despite all the lessons in that area that the past 2 years have brought me, it’s still a little scary.

I'm So Happy! (sorry)

The time since I returned home from PDF has been a rapid, rapid shifting of my reality. Sorry to be so quiet here, but it's durned hard to relate all this movement into so few dimensions. To even list them all seems so inadequate, and really so irritatingly airy-fairy that it only serves to trivialize the depth of my recent experiences. I guess I should just pick a detail and wax on (wax off) about it...trouble is, they are all so damned interconnected that I'm not sure how to gush about one without heading off onto a tangent about something else, etc, ad nauseam. And so it goes with the web of existence...

You know what it is, I keep feeling like I should downplay this big upswing in my life. Bitching we can all relate to, and we all seek out a little miserable company when we're down. But being up just seems like such...bullshit sometimes, like denial or something. Like somehow it is easier for me to acknowledge that life isn't perfect when things are going good than it is to acknowledge that it doesn't totally suck when it isn't. And I feel very self-conscious about feeling good. I guess really I feel guilty about it. What the hell good is that?! For now, I'm up. And frankly, a good portion of this year has been a giant suckfest, so maybe I'm due. And maybe they won't revoke my Existentialist Club membership card for it either.

Seems like this fascination with/acceptance of life as misery is a sad side effect of the post-industrial era that went cartoonishly out of control, like Arnold Schwarzenegger becoming Governor of California. But with that mindset, we get things like global toxicity, the rapid depletion of fresh water and human dignity, and the incestuous marriage of corporate and political greed, among many, many others. If we actually owned our right to happiness and pursued it, would the world be in the state it's in? Rhetorical questions worth pondering....

I'm off to go wander in the sunshine and marvel at random things. Because who knows when the tiny hedgehogs of despair will find their way underfoot again...

Reality Nibbles Your Juicy Soul Like A Ripe Strawberry

Sometimes you just have to get away from the ordinary. Preferably far away. Where not a single McDonald’s wrapper flaps mockingly from the grass, where the fastest speed you can travel is the one your legs move you at, and since you have nowhere to be, that’s not very fast. A place where you get up early because you can’t wait to see what sort of wild orgiastic feast of human experience awaits you, not because some small box of endlessly forward-marching red numbers coerces you out of bed with tiny whiny whips of digital soul death. Somewhere you can say exactly what’s on your mind, no matter how perverted or strange or achingly beautiful, and it will be well received, or at least respected.

Fortunately there is such a place.

I spent my Memorial Day weekend with the folks at Playa Del Fuego, getting a desperately needed IV drip of reality. My id was in critical condition. You read it here – all angry and uptight and intolerant. I was only one tantrum away from going out and buying a Ford Expedition. It took me nearly half the weekend to unwind enough to have fun. But you can’t spend too long around free flowing laughter and homemade wine and men in dresses and women with beautifully painted breasts and giant trampolines and spinning fire and naked slip n slides and inflatable pools full of rose petals before your entire spirit just collapses in a fluff of wild expansion like some soft, gooey big bang.

And suddenly I feel free again. Relaxed. Able to remember that this whole life is a good cosmic joke, mere improvisational theater, and the funniest ones get the most applause. Once again I am a good mother of a wise and uncannily hysterical seven year old. Once again my cat is worthy of petting. My job and traffic and Bush and Iraq are things I cannot control and do not try to. I am centered in myself and not everyone else. And I swear on a stack of Tom Robbins paperbacks that I will never go that long without feeding my soul again.

When you’re not gripping it till your knuckles turn black, life has a funny way of moving. Reminds me of the Mississippi River, the way it used to shift across the plains from year to year, but now we’ve got it trapped by levees and locks and dams and it’s creating all sorts of problems. Anyway, so I came home and got offered a free apartment in Olympia, Washington for a full year. Which is sort of like being licked all over with tiny fairies that look sort of like Heath Ledger. Except that now I have to decide what I want instead of pining for what I can't have. Do I really want to move away from all these cool new friends? Do I want to drag my daughter 3,000 miles away from her dad? Do I want to do this just one semester before I finish school? What kind of hysterical irony gives you what you want on a silver platter at the exact moment you really can’t take it?

I’m not going to pretend for a pop-culture second that this is a decision I can make. This is one of those times in life that I know well enough to just sit back and let life unfold and trust that whatever happens is exactly what should, and that any attempt to exert my will over this outcome will simply tarnish my freshly-polished id and send me running screaming back to PDF for another dose of reality.