I’ve been on a bit of a vacation for the last, oh, four weeks or so. I spent most of February out of the country and then a week on my ass recovering from those two weeks. There’s something almost sinister about the jetlag that sets in when one returns from Australia. You’re crossing about 19 trillion time zones along with the International Dateline itself, and it stands to reason that one good quality 14 hour sleep would go a long way to resetting your clock.
Oh no, not the clock for this carcass. I came home on a Monday and it wasn’t until a good nine days later that I felt like my body was realigned with the time zone in which I reside. It was entertaining for about two days to sleep until two or three in the afternoon – then it got annoying and old and I wanted to have my shit back in its place so I could resemble a functioning human again.
This little anecdote is really apropos of nothing, except to maybe say there’s a good reason why I haven’t taken metaphorical pen to metaphorical paper and rattled off some bloggings; or, more to the point, I am dreadfully fucking lazy and after a year or so of dedicated blogging regarding Fat Acceptance have a hard time writing a blog unless I have something I consider “important” enough to say.
That’s the bitch of writing on one particular subject only for so long – the ability to fluff it up and get relaxed and ridiculous tends to go away. I have a LiveJournal – well, “had” is more accurate a way to put it. I haven’t updated it in over a year and let it drift into unpaid status. But man, I used to take rather large pride in the kind of silly-ass dross and babbling I could chuck into the LiJo (I just totally made that up.) I’d happily yammer about Orlando Bloom and music and whatever other pop culture hoo-hah that was delighting me at any given time, and then I made the mistake of, like, reading shit. And paying closer attention to the world in general. And suddenly realizing how much stuff is fucking wrong and evil and hurtful. So basically, my “fun” writing took a big turn for the buzzkill.
Not that I feel anything resembling regret about spending as much time as I did writing exclusively about FA, oh heavens no. Frankly, I think I wrote some good shit. But writing in a fashion approaching, like, grown-uppish caused my “fun muscle”, let’s call it until we all start giggling inappropriately, to atrophy in a fierce fashion. I pay far less attention to pop culture and whatnot than I used to, mostly because so much of it winds up offending me or bothering me in some way and I really am not hot on feeling like shit while watching a movie or a TV show or whatever. But I’ve found that it’s hard to shut off that part of my brain that wants to analyze the holy hell out of everything and explain why such-and-such moment on “How I Met Your Mother” was problematic for me and yammer for 20 minutes about what a fucking load of shit whatever tearful weight loss “success story” commercial was and create a feltboard presentation about how I would save the world or whatever.
I don’t know that this entry will wind up being fluffy as a fucking cotton candy cloud because I’ve been pondering some things lately about my life versus other people’s lives versus other people’s perspectives about their lives and my life and I swear, I can be super-fun at parties and I can have conversations that aren’t deep or meaningful in any way. I use Twitter, dammit, I USE THE TWITTER. I suppose I’ve got a constant, severe case of compassion fatigue. I fully admit I’m very conditional in my compassion. I don’t hug nor do I pozzie those who rant incessantly about issues that one refuses to fix in one’s life. I used to be that person, railing and complaining about things that no one but me could handle and repair, doing the “Look at me in my despair and how unfair the world is and it’s all because of other people and has nothing whatsoever to do with me” dance. Then I realized what a fucking bore I had become and decided to spend the time I used to yap in a boring fashion about my boring ass to fix my boring-ass life so I wasn’t a walking black hole. It’s hard work and it sucks and it takes a tremendous amount of strength to not go begging on the internet or in real life for people to file once again through Jane’s Bad News Buffet stocked with bummed-out baked chicken, frowny french green beans, and pouty pudding. It expends a lot of mental energy to keep my head out of my ass and not make absolutely every single frigging thing in the known and unknown universe ABOUT ME. I have my days of utter assholatry, but I can identify the behavior and stop it before it devolves into a FML-Fest.
And that’s not to say that everyone is allowed to have days of wallowing. Wallowing needs to be done. But it also needs to end. Just like this entry does because Christ, it’s reaching “Under the Dome” proportions. So, in summary:
I was on the prison planet of Australia for two weeks and recovering from jetlag for another week and boy, are my arms tired
I am incapable of enjoying anything anymore because my brain is annoying
Get your shit together
There’s your Cliff’s Notes. I’m off to flex my fun muscle.
