Rambling About Goals and stuff.

Hello, audience. Here's my first post for 2014, though since I haven't been especially good about posting regularly ever, I wouldn't read too much into it. It honestly just occurred to me that it's New Years day, so expect no lofty resolutions from me. I don't have plans for a regular posting schedule, or anything like that. I do intend to do more writing in the near future, but I'll have to be a little (or a lot) more disciplined about everything.

Damn you, Discipline! You and The Pendulum can just go away, and I'll keep wasting a lot of time.

 This game may or may not have eaten nearly half a day since I bought it like three days ago...

Actually, discipline is closely related to the thing I was actually intending to muse on. (Publicly musing seems dangerous, and yet it's one of my best ways to think.) My older brother was in town "for Christmas" (he actually arrived on the 26th), and something he said to me while he was here was that "you are either moving toward a goal, or moving away from it." Or something quite similar to that, anyway, and I've been thinking about that idea.

I have several goals, some of them more nebulous than I'd like to admit, and I am (despite what seems to be popular opinion,) actively pursuing at least some of them.

Admittedly, the one I'm moving toward most actively is moving into an apartment, followed by finding a different job, but those either don't seem to count, or seem depressingly impotent.

But I'm not sure I agree with my dear brother. The essence of that thought is definitely something I agree with, and it seems a little nit-picky (ewwwww....nits.) to bother disagreeing at all, but I do. Goals are not always something you can actively pursue; sometimes there's a time for such things, or sometimes goals don't always have clear paths to pursue.

This sounds a little defensive, now that I say it out loud (or in print), and I don't deny that I could definitely be working harder on most of my goals, but it's something I think is still true.

There seems to be this trend, especially in my generation--I don't know about you older or younger people, but I suspect that it's also prevalent--that you are supposed to have a Direction, and a Plan. People begin asking about such things literally the second you graduate high school, and they always disapprove if you don't have an answer, because if you don't have a mission for your life, the expectation is that you will hop into the grooves worn by previous generations and go to college, get married, reproduce, and do something professional in fields you tested well in during school. Usually in that order.

God forbid you don't have a distinct list of goals, complete with dates, deadlines, and color codes. Because the people that don't have a Plan grow up to be losers. You don't want to be a loser, do you?

Not that I can say much in answer to that mentality. I'm an artist.

Some people I've known have a clear idea of what they want to accomplish with their lives, and they're doing what they think is necessary to making those things happen, like getting the pertinent degrees and certifications and suchlike, and in some ways I definitely envy that, but I don't think it's necessary. People say all the time that life is a journey, and it's about the journey, and other variations on that idea, but it seems like no one treats it that way. Experiencing life as a series of shaping events and experiences is seen as short-sighted and lazy even as people post inspirational photo-manipulations and quotes on their social networking pages saying just that.

But only if you have a defined destination. We don't want tourists or explorers.

I think this falls into the same category of "no winning" as the housewife dilemma. For those who don't know what I mean, even after years of women being allowed to work and have careers, there is still this idea that if you have a career, you hate your kids, or are selfish for having your own life and not having kids, but on the other side, if you choose not to have a career, and stay home with those same children, you're wasting your potential, and it's seen as a total cop out of having your own life.

The difficulty with these situations, I think, is that they're both not true, and people are forcing their presumptions on someone else, and demanding that other people make the same choice for the reasons they would, when that is impossible.

Not everyone has to do the same thing. It's okay to do and think and be different. We don't have to hate people for that.

Another thing that people say and don't do...I think the internet is going to call everyone on their hypocrisy someday.

I hope I'm not online that day.

Some random thoughts and stuff.

You know the quote "I put the 'fun' in 'funeral'"?

It kept running through my head on monday at my grandfather's memorial service, and it made me feel like a terrible person. But since it started with my mother and her siblings giggling uncontrollably through the prelude, I don't feel quite so badly.

I mostly sat there watching my family giggle and whisper in our pews at the front of the church, and I kept thinking (and may have commented to my darling cousin) that we are bad mourners. I've had a really good time at both family funerals I've been to this year, which is kind of boggling, because they were for both my maternal grandparents, the core of all family holidays. I think the world may fall apart this Christmas without Grandmum, the matriarch humming her way about the house, feeding everyone and scolding us goodnaturedly at every opportunity, and Grandpa's sarcasm, wit, and Pall Malls holding court over the livingroom...

These, theoretical readers, are two of the coolest people you'll never meet.

Anyways, as we were all laying claim to pieces of their home (pieces of their lives, I think), the thought kept returning that we're kind of horrible at all this, and as I took my turn driving a few hours on the long trip back home, it occurred to me to connect this experience--having fun and enjoying my family even as we were together to mourn the death of another superhero--to a conversation my little sister and I had a few months ago. It actually began in the context of relationships, but quickly expanded to take in more facets of life.

Someone told me not long before that conversation, that if they were told that they could never fall in love, never be a parent or a spouse, they wouldn't really see the point in living, and that was utterly inconceivable to me

(Admit it, we're all thinking it.

Or maybe just me..)

because there's nothing in my life I can say that about. I was telling Becca this, and she agreed with me.

If someone told me that I would never be published, never paint again, never be a parent, never travel the world, never get married, etc., yes, I would be crushed. I'd spend a few minutes in the mental fetal position wondering why I should even bother, but then I'd get up, and find something else to do with my life. If there's one thing I intend to do with my life, it's to survive it. And if I can't do that, I'm dead and my life is over anyway, so no problem.

Becca and I came to the conclusion that unless the world actually ends, it's not the end of the world.

This is an attitude that I've seen repeatedly in my family, though never actually named by any of us until my sister and I discussed it. We are a clan of survivors, and we've survived a fair share of crap. Some of the strongest, most amazing people I've met are related to me.

So maybe we're not bad mourners. Maybe we just understand that life goes on. Yes, we mourn. Yes, we appreciate what's been lost, but we don't lose sight of everything else in the face of that either, which I find to be a virtue rather than a flaw.