So, in addition to tuning a few things up under the hood and getting my blog posts going back to ye olde Facebook, I decided to bust out some Variation on the Theme in light of the solstice.

I've been noodling on a real redesign with one of my mother's students for a while now, but it's not the sort of thing I've had a ton of time to invest serious energy into, and ergo things have kind of stalled.

But I want to write more, and have been sort of hating on my old rust-colored sexyface theme. Maybe this is part of what's blocking, I think, and I went ahead and cropped myself out a new photo, generated a little background to match, and set some new colors. New coat of paint on this lonely old town; inspiration, I'm ready for ya!

The bigger changes I want to make are about content organization and whatnot, but I think the sad fact is that until I start generating said content, energy invested in organization would be questionably allocated. There's always more time for fancy-pants layouts and whatnot. The more pressing question is what, pray tell, would fill the boxes, and how might it get written?

Scouring The Sources Of My Windless Sails

After yesterday's post, which looked at how my working life was sucking my will to live, I started thinking a bit bigger. Work is top of mind at the moment, so that's the first thing to come out, but getting that out of the way made room for deeper/better reflection.

The existential crisis is of course about more than just my jibity job; it's about who I am as a person, and the world around me.

One of the big things is I have this general feeling that time is running out!, that I've got to make something of myself now or never. However, casual examination reveals this is a falsehood. While I'm not a kid anymore, neither am I anywhere near the twilight of my human capacities. It's just the stress talking. This ticking-clock pressure can be handled, I think, with just a little more balance and deep breathing.

I'm also not really happy with myself in terms of my health. Since falling off my bike in May and going into a more sedintary cycle, I'm definitely feeling more giggly and slow. The answer here is pretty clear — start working out, duh, and maybe cut back the beer on weeknights — and it only takes a bit of willpower to implement. This is the sort of thing that's hard when you're all caught up in other things, but tends to melt away pretty easily if you focus on it for half a minute.

More troubling is the external world around me. I haven't blogged much about politics or current events lately, and mainly its because the whole thing is pretty monumentally depressing. I won't even begin to dig into the details here, but suffice to say that things are not going well with the world, and without any scapegoat in the form of a Bush Administration, it becomes harder and harder not to see all of this as a total systemic failure. There are plenty of low-level political fights worth having — and I do have hope that the Health Care Reform ball that's begun rolling will add up to something meaningful — but the general drift of events is still towards the precipice.

With the undercurrent of doom running strong, the obvious wrongness of the status quo — for instance, thigh lube — becomes a constant source of deflating disappointment. It's hard to see how our modern way of life survives this, and so one begins wondering who will make it and who won't, and why. I preach a dark future.

This one is hard. It's hard to get super-excited when you feel that even your best putative achievements amount to little more than yelling into the void. It's a cynical-depressive position, and not one I enjoy occupying, but until/unless I can unravel another transcendental win, feels like I'm stuck here.

So I do the little things. I fixed my bike. I did some decent stretching. I repaired the toilet. I spruced up the blog. I took a bit of pleasure in the World Cup. None of this changes the fact that I'm sort of burned/bummed out, but getting anywhere is really a matter of putting one foot in front of the other. The only way out is through.