Tuesdays With Abhorrent Fiends vol. 20

Happy Thanksgiving Eve eve.
I have no idea what I am doing on Thanksgiving. If I go to T-day dinner with Dave's relatives, we gotta get there super early in the afternoon. Which means if I DO have T-day brunch at home with Dad as I'd been assuming, I gotta get up on time and no dawdling around over chitchat. I don't know what Amber and Pearl are doing, and even with this, Amber called last night and I didn't answer! Is it really this job that's making me like this? I was bad before but I just don't know. Maybe I shouldn't be so hard on myself. It's just the imagined weight of other people's expectations and the obligations that come with loyalty is heavy on my mind. I tend to react to that heaviness by slowing down and sometimes grinding to a complete standstill, which is another face of the problem.

You know what, on a completely unrelated note? I love working accounts payable. I really do. I like talking to vendors on the phone and making sure our books match, and then if they don't getting documents from them and entering them until they DO match. I love taking copious notes and logging every conceivable piece of information relating to an account or a transaction. I love even the process of such filing and note-taking. Because the whole time I'm picturing my future self or future co-worker frantically searching for this one piece of information that someone is yelling about, finding my work and saying "Aha!" and dashing off to make everything better. I like getting people the money they're owed. I like taking bills and making them go away. If I can't do it in my own life, at least I can do it at work, ya?

If my job here was just accounting and payroll, I could do it. It's the private parties thing that drives me completely insane. It's a full-time job and eats my entire day two or three days out of the week. Accounting stuff is always last priority. Guests and parties can't wait, vendors and employees can. Arrgh. Granted, all of my bosses are very human about things when you get a chance to sit them down and have them understand what is actually happening. But if they're rushed, or have incomplete info, or I confuse them with too many things, it's all "they can wait!" "I'll take care of it! (proceeds not to take care of it)" and "why are you wasting your time with this?" Maybe it would be easier with only one boss. Maybe it would be easier with only two hats. I swear to dog if they hire a fulltime private party person I would be willing to stay here longer. Possibly a very long time. Now that I don't suck quite so much at my three jobs I don't dread the day as much, some days hardly at all. I just hate things slipping through the cracks, I hate the fact that I have to do a mediocre job all around because it's either that or be wonderful on one thing and completely fail at the other two. And failing at any one would be an unmitigated disaster for the restaurant.

So I love accounts department stuff enough to want to do that as my day job for the rest of my life if I have to. If I can't, you know, work part-time while I'm getting my doctorate in something somewhere. Or find some way to write enough things to have people read and buy them. Or find some way to record my music so people can listen to it. That last I'm getting increasingly pessimistic about. Even the writing, I'm getting pessimistic about. I'm starting to look forward to working until I die as long as the work doesn't make me want to cry every day.

I was consulting with myself last night, mourning that I haven't been having dreams or unusual communications or experiences lately. And I asked myself, Do you really want them? Do you really, actually want them? I had to say, Not really. Not now. I haven't got the emotional energy to spare. Well then that's why.

I know enough about the personality's interactions with gravity now to know that unless I'm facing death, incredibly old and facing death, or some other such extreme circumstance, levitation is probably out of the question. It requires a total and unadulterated lightness of being. Any emotional baggage whatsoever, any interface other than what you're born with, any film slipped between your inner eye and the world, and the circuit can't complete. When Christ said we had to be as little children to enter the kingdom of heaven, he was talking about a lot of stuff. But in this sense it's undeniable. Building a personality is like building an onion, like that famous chambered nautilus that dead guy wrote the poem about. Layer by layer, the soul is protected from the universe by the very same tissues that permit it to be a part of the universe. Naked little shell-less living creatures can do anything. Gravity itself may bend for them, and time. But naked souls desire nothing, for they have no bonds. We are too heavy to fly--but if we were any lighter, we would not be able to stand up under our own weight. We must be bound enough into the world to become what we are. So when we are old and facing death, or just facing death, maybe there can be a moment where we set all those heavy things aside, not because we do not understand them or do not honor them, but because they are no longer necessary for us.