radical
I'm feeling an urge to do something different. Wild. Unexpected. Probably reckless, definitely silly. The kind of thing I'll live to regret. Or not.
Every once in a while, I need to shake things up. Wipe the whiteboard clean and start over again with a brand-new set of brightly colored markers in a whole new palette.
I moved into a new apartment in September. I don't really recommend that kind of timing, if you work in education and live in a place where it's regularly 110° F during the day in late summer. But Fred and I are settling in nicely, and I'm even learning to deal with not having a dishwasher for the first time since 1992. I adore my new neighborhood, which is quiet and established but easy walking distance to many things, and people, I love. Fun is, pretty much literally, right around the corner.
Moving was a first step toward a new perspective on the world, a slight shift in focus that highlights previously hidden shadows. I think that's at least part of why I feel I need to do something radical, turn on a white hot spotlight to sear away the dark bits.
I've done quite a few reckless and dramatic things in my life, large and small. The successful ones have usually been those I took my time planning ahead of time. To the outside world, they often looked like sudden changes or out of character behavior, but that's just because I didn't show my work as I meanedered along the way from point A to point B. (The spontaneous acts of recklessness often turned out to be ill-conceived, not surprisingly. Hence my preference for a more systematic approach to radicality. Welcome to my paradoxical world!)
I'm feeling all experimental these days, though. Maybe, the truly crazy and reckless thing would be to share what I'm thinking and scheming, try on my various future lives right here, out in public. I tend to compartmentalize a lot--this journal was much more open when it was primarily read by people I never expected to interact with in real life, who didn't know anything about me besides what was on the screen here. Now, between the collision of the real and virtual worlds, a career of sorts that gives me a professional online presence of sorts, and the fragments of my self strewn across the Internet like bits of a shattered Christmas ornament, it's a lot harder for me to speak (well, write) freely. It takes a lot of courage, and would probably be unwise.
Kind of radical, even.
I ain't promising anything too exciting. I'm not sure I can do what I'd really like to without shooting myself in the stylishly shod foot. But I'm having Thoughts, and feeling a little wild, so maybe I can make this Holidailies round into my mad scientist's laboratory, and run some wacky experiments. (Plus, of course, tell cute stories about my cat. This is the Internet, after all.)