This election is being annoyingly loud thanks to my husband, I was thinking it was ironic Clinton stole money from the Haitian people by setting up a charity fund and keeping the money herself, then having the election stolen ie she gained the popular vote, but still lost the electoral college vote as did Gore. She stole and life stole from her. Donald Trump works hard, but disrespects people up and down the street, then he wonders why the world is constantly disrespectful to him. Joe Biden seems to have stolen a lot of money via business contracts using his families as shells, then he seems to have had his memories stolen of them and everything. It seems like there is a certain justice in the world, but it takes about 10 years to go into effect.

All that is conjecture, but it’s not worth looking it up to me, because what I find won’t be much more fact based than my own conjecture based on 1 musing while washing dishes.

I don’t believe in eye for eye karma, that leaves the universe blind.

But I do believe in live by the sword die by the sword. If you are always in battle killing, odds are much higher you may be the victim of killing as well.

PEBKAC means the problem exists between keyboard and chair, which means, the problem is you/me = “the user”.

My tech friends used to use it to discuss what was wrong when working in pairs of two, so they didn’t offend the person that was the problem.

But when you are the problem, your problem, the obstacle of your own goals, it quickly (or slowly) becomes the elephant in the room.

People will attempt to hold you back, they will slow you down with their priorities that don’t match yours, they will try to give you their chores to do, but ultimately it’s unlikely that anyone will hold you down or hold you back to the extent that you hold you down or hold you back.

The baby elephant is kept with a simple rope tied to a tree, it doesn’t break free, as an adult it’s kept with the same simple rope, it has learned not to struggle against the rope.

Haven’t I too?

When I talk to my husband about my goals he calls it whining, but when he talks about work gossip, somehow he thinks I should listen. I won’t. I don’t want to listen respectfully to someone who never listens to anyone else, both my daughter and my husband are like that, it gets very old. I know many people would tell me to be the change, to give them the feeling of being listened to, to wait and act correctly and they will follow, only they don’t. If you offer a free lunch some people will donate and others just take and leave, day after day. If you charge a quarter or a dollar it stops most of those people, those people won’t spend anything to heckle others, to malinger, those people prefer a completely free ride on the way to the riots, they won’t contribute gas money to get there. I’m so bitter after years of him going on and on but refusing to listen, but I see that it’s a PEBKAC issue.

In the book “Beyond Boundaries” John Townsend discusses two different kinds of boundaries, protective ones for when people keep stomping on your flower beds and core boundaries for life. Perhaps a perimeter electric fence for cattle and a white picket fence to define the inner garden of the home. I’ve had poor boundaries of both kinds all my life, but also a lack of distinguishing the different kinds of boundaries.

When you love someone the tendency is to give them free access to your heart and soul, but some people become mischievous with no limits, who would perhaps be fine with a security camera.

As a boy my husband liked to steal juice at the store, he liked to pull out the teacher’s chair or put a pin on it, I never wanted to think he would treat me that way, I wanted to think someone that misbehaved with other people would treat me well out of love, it hasn’t been that way, but it’s taken me so long to see it. And even longer to notice who is to blame, me.

I was told if you have a problem with someone you talk to them, you ask them to stop, that’s about the only thing I’ve tired with my husband and it’s had the same high failure rate with him that it’s had with almost all the people I’ve used it with.

In general the people who will stop if you ask them are not the ones who would be thoughtless enough to ignore that they are creating a problem for you.

Has anyone asked Al-Quaeda to stop? I think so, I don’t think they did. I know Hitler was asked to stop, but so was Winston Churchill.

So my main solution to problems I was armed with 1. Asking nicely for people to stop, hasn’t worked very much at all, I’m guessing 10% of the time, it’s probably time to figure out something else.

Perhaps when I’m trying to write I should demand my husband talk to me, perhaps that would be the best way for him to not want to talk to me…

Yesterday I tried to explain to him what writing meant to me and how I wanted to be more serious about really finishing a book, and already today he was interrupting me in every way he was before the talk, which he agreed with. He agrees with me 100%, but takes 0% of the actions that would help us work as a team.

I don’t hate my husband, I’m not looking to get rid of him, but rather, I’m trying to find a way to make progress towards my goals and he always seems to be in the way of new habits.

Perhaps he hates change, I don’t know, but I do know he encourages me to do something like “work out” or “see my friends” but then complains or blocks the real logistics of it coming to fruition. I didn’t see it for so long, but now that I do I don’t think I’ll be able to not see it.

Sometimes we have bad habits, like being rude, I’ll own that, I am rude to my loved ones, I regret it, I work on it, I’m not perfect.

But I’m so serious about finding out how I can leave this state of not following my goals, I’m looking at what I’ve been doing, which hasn’t been working, and what the people who are working are doing that has been working, I’m combing over life with a finer comb and it’s come up with some metaphorical lice.

The biggest one is me, allowing myself to get distracted, allowing myself to stay stuck, but another is that I have to fight my spouse to work on the habits I am trying to create rather than being helped. I weight about 110 lbs, he weights 170 lbs, I can carry him a short distance, but he should either be carrying me or walking beside me, I shouldn’t be forced to over come more difficulty consistently by the relationship I co-created with him.

In the past I start writing a lot, then there is some huge fire to put out in the family, in the marriage, he should be putting fires out when he is home, he should stop causing them, but he doesn’t, he says he will, then does nothing differently, what is his game?

I want to table all those problems indefinitely, because whenever I’ve tried to do anything about them it’s been a wasted effort, but perhaps that’s a rope that I can break now?

In the 7 Habits of Highly Effective People Stephen Covey makes the point that personal matters, relationships, should be the main focus of life, not the side focus, because they can so easily destroy or detract whatever other work you are doing, you may as well turn directly towards those focuses.

I really don’t want to do that.

To a large degree I want to remain a lone wolf, even though I’m in the middle of a pack, I’m married, I’m raising a family, but I hate it.

I hate not being able to decide where we go, I hate the slow pace of life, I know someday things will be different, but I hate so much of the lifestyle right now. I hate having a squirming baby on top of me, I hate my son stopping and starting breast feeding, I wish he would start and finish and be done, I hate 94% of this life style, I hate pee leaking on my dress right after I showered, I hate stepping in my husband’s pee puddle in the morning and in the evening and hearing him tell me the bathroom needs to be cleaned, I hate the way he does things so much differently than me and won’t meet me half way or on my side, I’ve hated much more than I liked and if I’ve said so, whatever I’ve said was the tip of the hate-burg.

I was a person that probably should have staid single, someone who likes when their things haven’t moved, when dirty socks aren’t on top of the table and in random places… someone who enjoyed sleeping alone, enjoyed hiking alone and enjoyed dinning alone.

Now I’m married, I do my best at it, but I don’t think it’s a superior life style by any means. Perhaps it’s better for the children, but I don’t enjoy it and I don’t know if my husband does. He says he does, but his honesty is not without question.

This post is pretty dark and bitter, but perhaps sifting through the darkness and bitterness is part of the process of seeing what went wrong, the mechanism for failure in my life and a clue to the road out of the pit of writer’s block I’m having? I don’t know.

I do feel better, I could probably delete what I have written and still feel better, but for some reason I don’t think there is anything dangerous about the truth.

Life is hard and marriage is harder.

It’s like a diamond sofa, diamonds maybe nice, but you want to be comfortable on the sofa after the rest of life was tiring, and instead you get the most difficult challenge in life that not only won’t go away but will light all your knitted sweaters on fire until you address that baseball game that you were supposed to go to together 10 years ago.

We definitely waste my energy being not a good enough team, so maybe I should try to create a better team rather than just trying to retreat to make progress on the things I enjoy?

I really don’t want to try, I remember counseling, begging to go, because I did care, and having so much damn resistance, he always makes me set it up and then won’t go, I fucking hate that, how about don’t make me do any work and don’t go, yuck.

I remember a few months ago being neutral towards my marriage, and somewhere along the lines I slipped into bitter and than flamboyantly bitter. I don’t even know when it happened, I think it was a shade further each day, but I don’t really know.

There is so much sadness, so much lack of hope it will get better, so much disappointment that marriage requires so much effort and gives so little encouragement, good conversation or good company, and I know I’m part or all of most of those problems, but somehow that doesn’t make it much better. I don’t know how to be the part of solutions, because I don’t know if solutions exist, I’ve seen so few good marriages, I don’t know if they are mythological or possible, and if they are I don’t know if they are possible in my life time and for me. Some people climb Everest, but most don’t, it seems like a encouraging marriage is a harder peak than Everest. If I divorce maybe I’ll climb Everest then, to find out what was harder between the marriage or the mountain for real.

Maybe Everest is much harder, but I’m lying at the base of this marriage, exhausted from constant failure to ascend and the other one I have no prior failures to discourage me mentally, I have never failed to break that rope.

I feel my hopelessness floating upwards and outwards from my stomach, it feels like a balloon filled with air instead of helium, something that looks from the outside much as it should, but is hollow on the inside and fails to perform what function it was made to do.

Like a balloon that sits in a chair looking fine, something in my soul hovers on the floor instead of getting up and rising to the occasion.

I may not be broken, but there is a blown fuse somewhere, a short circuit that should be resolved before a new fuse is added…

It’s more difficult to troubleshoot a tech error when a problem exists between the keyboard and the chair and it’s more significantly more difficult to troubleshoot a problem when the problem is your troubleshooting ability itself.

One day my computer got broken, the power chord became disconnected from the monitor so the monitor was only darkness, Tech Guru’s YouTube video showed me how to fix that in a few minutes, I was tentative, but I tried and I did fix this computer I’m writing on right now. I fixed the computer preventing me from writing in less than an hour, how long will it take me to fix the emotional problem preventing me from writing the book I want to finish by end of next year?

Essentially life is something that is imperfect, reactants form products, but it’s never 100% complete, because as the products form some move backwards towards the initial state, an equilibrium may lie far towards either the reactant side or product side, but it’s never complete, life is messier than that.

Day 2, trying to write at night, it’s 10:33 PM, I was kind of ready on time, I was looking for writing jobs… I thought if I wanted to write articles it would be easy to do, but it’s not as easy as I had supposed from the other side of the fence. I’m sure that there are good projects out there, but so far I’ve found more scams than reasonable projects. Perhaps from the work at home flood, or perhaps it was always that way “in real life”.

Interestingly I don’t want money so much as I want accountability, I was interested in having a writing coach, therefore paying the writing coach, so earning something from writing would seem worthwhile and found money has no bills attached.

It took a long time to set up an upwork account, everything didn’t work it seemed, the ID upload, the profile picture, seemingly everything, yet in the end it did and I applied to three projects (which I noticed were already full of enough applicants by the time I did, not a day later then the projects were posted).

Freelance sounds really cool, but actually, I guess it kind of means scrounging for jobs. I’m a freelance writer now I guess. I’ve said that for awhile, but I haven’t looked for jobs until today.

So was that or wasn’t that avoiding writing?

Today I had a free sample with a writing coach, which I don’t know about fitting into life right now.

Before the meeting I was thinking that I do always seem to have success at meeting goals for life, just that it comes slowly. This year I did a few good things, learned to cook, taught multiplication, adjusted to teaching for dyslexia, over coming shyness a bit, pushing myself out of my comfort zone.

One thing that slows me down is a lack of prioritize what project matters when I have no way to know which one will pay off and what will lead to something that I find rewarding, I basically will never know before hand and if I wait to know to start I will never start.

I like to do too many things…. or many not too many, but I have trouble picking and sticking to one project all the way.

Things I like to do:
1. Educational Diagrams
2. Metrics for Emotions
3. Educational Graphic Design
4. Digital Illustration
5. Writing Books
6. Reading Books
7. Comic Books
8. Research
9. Teaching Art
10. Teaching Martial Arts
11. Teaching Outdoor School – Charlotte Mason Inspired
12. Reading Advocacy
13. Math Advocacy
14. Science Advocacy
15. Game Design
16. 3D Sculpting/CAD
17. Banana Exercise Classes
18. Stoic Philosophy Everyday Life Applications
19. Blogging
20. Self Help Class Design

So, it’s not for lack of skills, passion, or interest, but lack of determination and focus to commit to one project and finish it.

I’ve been gravitating to writing a book as a project to get out of my comfort zone, it’s something I’ve always wanted to do, yet there are fears of it shattering dreams I’ve had since childhood.

I really fell in love, married, and a few years later, it’s not all picnics, it’s almost completely not picnics. I don’t know if I’m ready to let writing a book become real and stop being a fantasy.

I don’t “really” know what I want to do, I don’t “really” know what project is the best use of time or resources, but to live is to not know and do something isn’t it?

I really enjoyed the session with the writing coach, she had climbed Everest, but still struggled to actually start writing a book afterwards for two years. It’s so common a thing, so human a thing, but I look down on myself instead of looking for a way out of the writer’s block crevasse.

My son is throwing the biggest fit tonight, as if he knows I’m trying to peruse my life goals, there are certain activities that kids have a radar for and don’t tolerate without a fit. I don’t know why using the bathroom is not acceptable, leaving to get them a candy from the other room gets a pass? How do they know at age 1 and why do they hate when you seek independence, how do they even know? Maybe I can tell what I was meant to do in life by how much my kids resent me trying to do it? If they let me with no fight, that’s not it… just kidding.

My husband is helping my son tonight, he seems okay, he was awake anyways so, that’s nice that this second day, though difficult didn’t end in me giving up.

I’m supposed to know what I want to do, so I said I want to write my book and the two after it that I see in my mind as one unit.

Hopefully by 12-31-2021 I am done with the first book, I want to get started today and tomorrow.

I’m writing an article, but I hope that making the space for writing, defending my decision to right, strengthening my resolve, I hope that it creates the castle in my mind where I can sit down and write “the novel”.

I was trying to find the difference between the writers who do write and the ones who don’t. I’m attending two writer’s groups now and I notice nobody are flakes or untalented in either group, but the ones who are writing are driven and focused.

I’m trying to be focused and determined starting now.

To be focused I know one particular problem I have is wanting to jump from project to project.

FOCUS
Writing the trilogy’s first book due end of next year.
Writing freelance articles at least trying.

The writing coach told me to “do” not “try,” but I’m such an honest person, I don’t want to confuse the difference. What I’m doing for now is trying, because trying is the most I can possibly commit to right now.

Possibly I have to light the fuse and run rather than waiting for the fuse to light itself, but also I’m not going to throw a grenade until I have a target and I’m not sure if I do.

I was in bed with my baby who usually doesn’t throw a fit from 10-11 PM, but tonight did, my husband asked me to take the baby, but at least he helped for a long while, I took my baby, fed him, he fell asleep and I got out of bed to finish this article.

It may be insignificant to everyone else, it may be optional, it may be non-paying, but it mattered to me.

I have this superstition growing that if I write, my writing will find all the readers it needs to, whether that is 0 or 1 or 1 million, kind of like a “Field of Dreams” if you build it they will come kind of superstition.

Today I resumed outdoor school after being inside while we were all sick, I served the three meals that feels like three thousand, I did the laundry, the dishes, I did enough, I gave my daughter a kiss, looked at her for who she is, helped her with math, I did at least 200 things that I “should do,” but I think this article at 11:31 PM is the first thing I’ve done that “I want to do” that feels like it matters to me.

I know the kids are supposed to matter to me, but I want something that belongs to just me, without them, I guess I want some self, some individuality, I want to be an adult that can speak as an adult.

I had almost forgotten what the adult world was like and I don’t mean in a “adult movie” way, just a normal adult way. Being able to say things like DMV instead of “the place where all the driver’s licences are given, where you will go to be able to drive safely and get the privilege of sharing the road that your taxes pay for, taxes are added to items we buy and also taken from our income at the federal level, if you care about tax rates you can vote, but your vote doesn’t decide what will happen, it’s a community effort… that’s right the popular vote doesn’t always decide the president, it typically coincides with the electoral college, the electoral college was decided a long time ago when those in power didn’t trust the average person, who was not very well educated at all, sure there is corruption and confusion in the system, but that does happen in most large countries, well we live here because our ancestors were moderately destitute, so they came as workers here and now I need to go to the DMV”.

Going to the library branch writer’s meet up reminded me of that adult world.

I don’t know how many ABC videos it took before I forgot who I was, how many Baby Signing Time songs, but I so miss the normal life.

I miss being sick and laying around the house in bed, without helping anyone else get water or deal with anxiety or talk about their feelings or feed others.

My 4-year-old wants to be a baby again, and I want to be a single adult again, not to date, just for the purposes of not having to help anyone at all on an average day.

I look back on the days I used to call off from work for a food poisoning or stomach flu and they now seem like a high water mark, because I got to lay down and not get up to do all the things I usually do, I got to curl up with a book or a movie and take a nap, I got to order take out and not split it three ways and serve it and clean it and answer questions throughout the meal about the inevitability of death as well as how if my daughter can escape to another planet she can then marry her brother, which she knows we don’t want her to do… ha.

There used to be silence. I used to eat my snacks by myself. Those were the days.

But I guess no one loved me. That was harrowing.

One one side there was abundant rest and barely any love, the other side abundant love and barely any rest.

I suppose if there is a heaven it’s the only place that has both rest and love.

If I write every night it won’t be so hard to start writing about the book characters, or research, or scenes, and if I write the book time after time, one day it will be done, and I think someday I’ll know if it was the right thing or not, but someday way after I did the work of it and I will have to do the work knowing full well that I don’t know how successful, lucrative, rewarding, helpful or significant it will be to me or anyone else.

You don’t have to see the whole staircase, just take the first step.”

– Martin Luther Kind Jr.

Tonight I’m taking the second step, on an invisible staircase, to a place I can’t see, in a building I’m unfamiliar, with in a country I can’t name, but somehow it feels right. Thank you for helping me take that step, thank you for the welcome, or begrudging acceptance, into the world of the night writers it’s unexpectedly nice to be here with you, across time, writing under the waning crescent moon.

🌘