Peeking out

Gawd, just ignore this ramble.

I've been in a blog and commenting rut. The blog rut should be no big deal for me personally. I don't consider myself a writer of any sort; I just have a place where I can randomly dump things when I need to get them off my chest. It's not like there's been a shortage of things I'd want to dump about. The rut is bigger than that. Big enough so that I'm not even commenting hardly at all, which is a bigger deal for me personally.

Change makes you more susceptible to things. The changes that have taken place in life recently have not been huge. The start of the school year. Realizing summer projects need to be wrapped up or scrapped. Family visiting and speaking of doing preliminary retirement locale scouting. Spouse taking a few college classes. Realizing that while we'd love to move to city B and it's much lower cost of housing and better public transport etc, employer B in that city just doesn't have spouse's kind of job, even if they are pretty much the "main office" for his specialized area (which, we all know, easily becomes a rut that keeps you working for employer A at location A since oh, the early 80s).

And all this overlaps, as I look at those high school course offerings while talking to son about how his middle school HS credit courses in Latin and Algebra/Geometry will open up more opportunities for him, and see how my area of so-called expertise is now a joke. Not only could I now take in HS now what I went to get a college degree for in the 80s, but I could take other affiliated classes in HS that are so necessary now but didn't even exist then (ah, technology. I had no clue, rode the cool wave, and blew it by not moving up to dreaded supervisor or something.) It overlaps as I think about those house projects, no longer so much for getting things in shape for a possible sale, now some feel like wasted time and money if we're just going to stay here and watch, say, the new carpet get as crappy as the old.

It's a general sense of loss of direction, or main purpose, and I think great you guys, take classes, sign up for parks and rec stuff, and extracurricular school stuff, really it's great and I want you to do that, and I have yet to fathom how there'd be enough room for me to do something too. Like there's little flexibility left, and if we don't move I need to go back to work and I cannot just take any job with any hours because of all the scheduling already in place, and my degree is so flipping worthless now unless I use it to get a second one and well, what would that be? Well, I'd want to figure that out by targeted volunteering first, because while I would eat up those cultural anth and sociology courses, can my low stress threshold handle full time employment in that area? And so I end up just wanting to move again, for that smaller mortgage and getting away from dumb homeowners associations and because I really worked up a hate for this house, but there's nothing cheaper enough in a 60 mile radius of job A to benefit from such a thing.

Then I get hit with the outside stuff. It's always there, of course, it just hits harder when you're more susceptible like this. Things like the story of Natasha Kampusch's escape from 8 years of captivity, or the Kenton, Ohio football players who got preferential treatment in sentencing after seriously injuring two people in a prank and boy would I have lots to say about that if I could put the words together, or following the Jill Carroll story as it's been published over the past few weeks, or receiving the next DVD, The Corporation, from my Netflix queue and getting all worked up watching it, or arriving at the first anniversary of Katrina hitting the gulf coast.

So I sit here and and am just trying to figure out what to latch onto to pull me out of it in a positive way, while at the same time knowing I have to be a bit avoidant about the whole thing from a stress management standpoint, as I cannot and will not take psych meds again and really fuck things up for another 5 years.

And, well, doesn't all that make me feel great and not worthless at all! Heh, I'm a bit on overload and even I think it's pathetic.

Told you not to read.

Edited to add:

Dear Googlers searching for pictures of Natasha Kampusch,

Please do share why you think you are entitled to see what this young woman looks like. She is human being. You only know who she is because she had a lot of bad shit happen to her and she dared to survive it. She deserves the time and space to gain her life back, the life owed to her, without millions of strangers getting in the way of that.