life in mokievision

I have discovered a feeling more frustrating than having to interact when I'm feeling hermit-ish: being all out of social energy when all I want to do is be social.

The cold weather is mostly past, and I am itching to get out of the house and roam. Spring is ready to unleash some seasonal loveliness all over the place, and I am itching to photograph it. Things are happening around town, and I am itching to be there. There's a whole slew of local people whose company I enjoy, and I am itching to enjoy it.

And yet, I can't social. Half an hour of people-time and I'm out of social for the day. I don't explode in grumpiness, I just hit an exhausted but polite nodding stage.

Maybe my need to socialize is being trumped by my need to go outside and play...

Three days late for a new year post. Well, so much for that resolution...

Let's get right to business, shall we?



1. WORK MORE AND BETTER. I've been very fortunate in my current line of work, but I need to buckle down and more actively seek more of it. This means overcoming my oddly specific fear of work-related scheduling conflicts, a result of having to fight at three different retail jobs to make them respect my 'unavailable' days.

2. WORK BY A SCHEDULE. A new soap or related product every week! This year, I will keep the shop stocked.

3. Here's where I break from the Guthrie list, because the man has eight different hygiene-related resolutions, which is a little worrisome. So instead, I'll take one from a very cool project manager I know: PUT ON A BRA AND GO OUTSIDE. Between working from home and working night owl hours, it's easy for me to forget to put on real clothes and go outside every so often. While the fresh air may be trying to kill me, I could probably use the vitamin D, and the socialization.

4. DRINK GOOD. With all due respect to Mr Guthrie, I want to expand my alcoholic horizons this year, from trying out more of the local beers to adding some of the better reviewed absinthes to my liquor cabinet.

5. READ LOTS OF GOOD BOOKS AND WRITE EVERY DAY. When scheduling gets crazy, one of the first things to fall by the roadside is my own writing. The next is recreational reading. I miss both, and so this year, instead of being something to fit around the schedule, they're going to be part of the schedule. That includes staying on top of the journals, and getting older entries properly tagged. All thirteen years of them.

And a corollary: read less tabloid fodder and media gossip, view fewer celebrity photos. This isn't a new resolution for me. I was never big on gossip rags, and working in retail during Britney Spears' Very Bad Year, seeing her mental illness played out over rows of magazines every day for entertainment, didn't raise my opinion of them. Unfortunately it's easier to get sucked into gossip online, where you're often looking at a row of links to news stories mixed with a row of links to stories that shouldn't be considered news at all. ("The Senate passed a bill requiring--wait a minute, Lindsay Lohan did what?")

It also weirds me out that our celebrities have WWF-style heroes, villains, grudges and sob stories that are wheeled out as a form of advertising every time they have a movie coming out. That can't be healthy for us as a culture.

But mostly, it's the idea that being a celebrity means someone gives up their right to common respect and privacy--that they don't have the right to sit in their own yard without cameras peering over hedges, that they can't walk their kid to school without hiring someone to first push the press out of the way, or that it's acceptable to put lives at risk chasing them through traffic in search of that perfect shot. And for what? For a picture to put in a magazine intentionally designed to make the rest of us feel old, fat, ugly and unhip so we'll buy products to fix what isn't broken. Why feed that beast? Why pay anyone to make myself and a handful of famous strangers miserable, when I generally feel better not knowing or caring who's seeing/breaking up with/stalking who?

6. DON'T GET LONESOME. I'm not just an introvert, I'm one of those introverts that makes other introverts uncomfortable. But I've been slack when it comes to maintaining my social ties lately, so this year I'm going to make an effort not to be such a hermit--from a family game night with the nephew, to taking a friend up on an offer to tutor me in local beers.

7. LEARN PEOPLE BETTER. I've seen some cooing over Guthrie's self-awareness, and even a project on Tumblr about interviewing people to learn them better. As a girl with roots in southern Missouri, though, I suspect Woody was using 'learn' in the rural sense--that this really means "Teach people more effectively." That's how I'm taking it, albeit in a personal direction.

Though I rant about random topics that rile me and get way too cozy with the TMI, I'm really a pretty private person. I don't open up often or easily about my personal life, feelings, beliefs, relationship status--anything, really.

In my hesitation to become that friend who won't shut up about their cause or their boyfriend or their faith, I've become instead something of a relatable blank slate. The end result is that I find myself fairly often with an angry ___ who is upset because suddenly my experience/feeling/opinion/belief doesn't mesh with what they've projected onto me, and I'm not an angry ___ too. (It's usually atheists. Don't know why.) I'm never whatever enough to fit the idea they've formed of me, so they want to push me to their position, or lecture me on how wrong I am to not be like them, or tell me what I really am/believe (and you would not believe how much that pisses me off). There I am, left with the awkward choice of smoothing things over and putting up with their crap for the sake of peace, or telling them to fuck off and dealing with the fall-out. I admit that I lean more toward the latter these days, because life's too short to cater to other people's personal issues. But anyway.

Essentially, I need to open up more, and get comfortable with expressing who I am and what I think (etc.) a little more, and not worry so much about becoming that creepy friend who nags you for wearing leather, or being targeted by that creepy friend if I reveal that I'm not also a Baptist/vegan/UFOologist.

For the record: I'm a relatively liberal blue-haired bisexual hammock-dwelling pulp-reading hippie-ish single neopagan who eats meat, listens to whatever damn music feels good at the time, and really only feels strongly about reproductive rights and single spaces after sentences. (Never double. It's a relic of the printing press and HTML ignores it anyway. Let it go.) There's probably more worth adding, but nothing comes to mind at the moment. If you're conservative, don't eat meat, don't dig hammocks, listen only to K-pop, etc., it makes me no nevermind.

8. STAY GLAD. I used to live within walking distance of one of the world's greatest gardens; now I'm a tedious bus ride from any of the city's fun activities. I used to live beside a well-planted park, in a picturesque neighborhood that I wandered with a camera in hand; I now live in a closely packed neighborhood with bland lawns, where I feel like an intrusive guest even without the camera. I used to have my own little garden, with plantings older than I was and a makeshift pond; now I have a tiny patch of weedy dirt that I share with a rotating cast of neighbors who always, always, take it over and ruin it.

I've let this vague, sulky, gloomy dissatisfaction rule my roost far too long. I need to zhenzhify my outlook! To look up and find the beauty in the moment and where I'm at, to look out over the neighborhood not as an intruder but as an explorer, to take bootyloads of photos and share them, if only to remind myself that it's not where my body is, it's where my head is.

9. SAVE DOUGH. Enough said, right?

10. LOVE EVERYBODY. And I do, even when I don't.

I keep vowing to improve my social skills, and I keep failing miserably at it.

No, I'm not fishing for reassurance. I'm very aware of my flaws in this regard, that's all. I don't remember birthdays, anniversaries or holidays. I rarely send presents, and when I do it's almost never on time or in alignment with the proper social etiquette for such things. (Oh hullo, box that I should have sent dracunculus ages ago. Oh, her birthday was last month. Double fail!) I don't hang out much, and I don't like hanging out that involves spending money because I feel guilty over what I'm not spending money on instead, like, say, that new fridge. Or pants. Egads, do I need new pants. I've never mastered the art of dropping in on people, and I always feel creepy when I'm visiting folks just by virtue of being in the room. For example, I'm pretty sure saying that after bringing up pants was pretty creepy.

When you think about it, it's kind of amazing that I've even made friends. And not out of yarn and plasticine, if you dig my meaning.

Back in the retail days, I promised myself I'd hang out with the co-worker friends once in a while, but their timing was insane. Who wants to end an 8-hour shift in a popular store where you're surrounded by people by going to a popular bar where you'll be surrounded by people? Everyone except me, as it turns out. My full-time schedule frustrated non-work friends too, because I was reluctant to give up one of my days off--my few, precious, people-free days off--and not at all willing to 'just tell the boss you can't work that day.'

I'll give them the former, because that's all me being a hermit. But the latter? Asking me to either blow off an already set work day or go to war to rearrange it so that I can go hang out with someone who doesn't understand, "I'm working"? Who asks that? (In my experience, the guy who was on his third write-up and about to be fired, the girl who complained that management wouldn't give her the hours she thought she deserved, and that one relative who never understood why I took jobs so seriously, mostly because she rarely had one. But that was supposed to be rhetorical.)

So I thought it was all explained, all just bad timing combined with my crappy hours. Then I ditched it all for the freelancing gig, which theoretically means I can set my own hours, or at least carve out more of them for other people, and instead I've only gotten worse about it.

Do I prioritize work first because it's so sporadic that I don't dare take it for granted? Sometimes, yes. Like the party I was actually looking forward to and planning on attending up until an hour beforehand, when I had to admit defeat and settle in for the night to fix an exploded work project that was due omgrightnow. I'm still grumpy about that, but it was a big next-month's-rent gig and I couldn't afford to blow it off.

And sometimes, when a nine-to-fiver tells me, "Now that I'm off we should go do something," as if I don't even have a schedule to be taken into consideration. It makes me want to hand them the latest mammoth undertaking and tell them, "No, finish that, then we'll go do something."

But other times I know that, even if the work is pouring in right now, it can wait and I should go be social, but then I tell myself, "But maybe if I get this done there will be more work, and what if urgent work comes in while I'm out? And going out means finding pants and spending money..."

There's nothing else for it but to keep trying, I guess. I wonder if Tina's game for getting together. Maybe we can go shopping for pants...