Harrumph

I find myself increasingly grumpy of late.

A lot of it is burnout, I think. From work, from life, from the world racing to see if it will perish from a cataclysmic heat death before the mostly-hairless primates commit enough senseless acts of violence to decimate the global population to just the uber-wealthy and a controllable caste of coal- and waste-shovellers.

Man, what a depressing sentence.

A reformed #GirlBoss, I've realized that the people-pleasing tendencies that set me up for abusive relationships are the same that got me hired into exploitative roles created by a cast of vainglorious incompetents and benevolent monsters. And then I would hustle in off-hours to supplement my pittance of a paycheck, believing this was How It's Supposed To Be and incapable of dreaming of better.

And now I see young upstarts thinking their manic ideations are executable strategy and genius to boot, roasting anything that doesn't match their algorithmically-prescribed vibeboard and being generally unhelpful when the deliverables come due. The patience my mentors had for me when I was precisely that, more or less, I now appreciate with the depth and vastness of all the world's oceans.

I've sold my cleverness and bought bewilderment, is what I'm saying. Only my initial purchase was more than I can use up in a timely manner, and I seem to have accidentally signed up for a subscription, somehow, and there's no clear way how to cancel. It better not involve a phone call.

Mindfulness, meditation, and exercise, books and websites suggest. Coping strategies, my therapist offers, which sounds obvious but is fairly helpful coming from an actual human professional.

Writing this out is helpful, as well, in part because it's still fun watching how the consumption of Vonnegut, Rushdie, Singer, and Thompson at an impressionable age plays out on my keyboard. I've convinced myself that I held a little cleverness back, after all, vainglorious incompetent that I am.

I'd like to do more of this writing in my free time, ideally with far fewer I statements. They are exhausting to write. Bless the poor sucker who is bamboozled into reading them.

Bug watching has become one of those coping strategies. One finds they're never alone once they recognize the inherent consciousness of all living lifeforms, and therefore need never be bored as there's plenty of potential friends around. And insects, spiders, gastropods, and isopods just have the coolest bodies.

An anecdote: Throughout childhood and beyond, I was deeply afraid of close-up images of bugs. If I opened an issue of National Geographic to the wrong page, I would fling the magazine across the room. This new pastime interest represents a solid 180, although I still get pretty nervous if a webpage or iNaturalist entry springs too detailed of an image on me. The faces in particular. Might be the eyes.

It made a miserably hot summer more bearable, that's for sure, the carousel of multi-legged creatures thriving in the humidity and searing sun. Soon, the tiny legion of stinkbugs that persist indoors through winter will have to sustain me until spring. As long as they don't get comfortable in my personal effects or act aggressively, the one or two that I find in a given room at a given time are allowed to stay. Interestingly, in the winter months there have been several instances across years where I'll reach for or turn my gaze on a random or completely ignorable everyday object to find a stinkbug perched there. Which sounds like an infestation, but I swear it's only happenstance. What do they want from me?

My attention, maybe. A moment's recognition that we are of the same star-stuff and collective consciousness, sharing for the briefest sliver of time a connection on this fallible corporeal plane against all odds, knowing that eventually our bodies will dissolve, our self-hoods soon following once the ripples left by our actions in life and the memories maintained by our loved ones inevitably dilute and fade, our life-forces having reintegrated into the everything-encompassing All at the moment of death or shortly thereafter.

I've haven't quite fully grasped non-dualism, but it's something I aspire to.

Meanwhile, I'll try not to believe that my efforts are worthless and resist biting people.