Strangely Detached

I'm feeling strangely detached these days, back in a kind of gray space where all I do is drift. I could hypothesize about why, but it's easier to just shrug. I don't feel "bad" -- but I don't feel all that good either. Everything I should do seems to take far too much effort to actually work on. I keep telling myself I'll do it "shortly" but then I don't.

Going on the Quest was great, but it also really knocked my life around. I haven't done any exercising since I got back, nor have I been eating well. I haven't fully unpacked, cleaned and returned my borrowed gear.

Maybe I need to ground. As my last post indicated, I'm feeling strongly like I'm moving into a Pentacles/earth phase. But right now all those aspects of my life seem to be the source of my immobility. They feel too heavy to rise above, to get control over, to impact.

Maybe the "get control" is part of the problem of my thinking. Maybe I need a different approach. One of the lessons in the canyon was my tendency to want to deal with confrontation through either reason or control -- or control by means of reason. And some things (like rattlesnakes) don't respond well to either. A different approach, something more gentle, more transformative, is sometimes called for.

On a slightly different note, I talked yesterday with a friend of mine at work who is also the manager of the woman who got the job I wanted. It turns out that her present position involves a lot of work with our transportation partners, and that she has wanted to get into the transportation area for a long time, even before we had a specific department. So she evidently she not only has a far more directly relevant set of experiences than I had realized (or that I have), she has a long-term desire to work in this particular niche. It makes me feel better about not getting the job myself.

In the meantime, Jeannie and I have defined my Blue Chip goals for the quarter, and they are fairly aggressive, and will get me even more involved in the nitty-gritty of the department and division, while developing my skills in SAP, which is the company's primary program for information storage and reporting. Miss V is on vacation this week, which means that I'm picking up some of her tasks as well. We've been getting along so well the past few months that I'm regretting her absence more than I'm enjoying it.

Speaking of which, because she's gone it's my responsibility to set up for her boss's staff meeting this morning, so I'd better get going.

Happy Homecoming Haul

I returned home today to find a few days worth of Amazon.com shipments:

Season One of Remington Steele, one of my all-time favorite tv shows

The Tiger in the Well, book three of the Sally Lockhart trilogy (Thanks to the Divine ladyvivien for turning me onto these!)

Star Wars Empire: The Heart of the Rebellion, a trade paperback collection of the Dark Horse Star Wars comics featuring Princess Leia, spanning the time from just prior to ANH to just prior to TESB.

The Senses Bejewelled, by Cleo Cordell, the sequel to one of my all-time favorite erotic novels.

Where to begin??!!

Oh yeah. . . with my home. Lots to report on there, in the area of coming to terms with my home, and accepting the importance of being a homemaker. Of putting away my childish resistance to being like my traditional-role mother, and accepting the fact that if I don't do those home-maker-type-"things" no one else will. Of honoring the importance of Home, something I've been priveleged to take pretty much for granted. It's going to be a slow process of integration, but I think I'm starting to make some progress in the area of my internal issues. After all, no one has ever said that it was all I could do, or all I should do. But it's becoming increasingly clear that it is not something I can continue to ignore or treat in a haphazard fashion.

It Oughta Be A National Holiday!

Shamelessly Swiped from the Better-Informed-Than-I-Am saskia139

It was on this day in 1940 that Bugs Bunny made his debut in a cartoon called "A Wild Hare." Warner Brothers' writers and animators set out to make a rabbit who would be the epitome of cool. They modeled bugs on Groucho Marx with a carrot instead of a cigar. Mel Blanc gave him a Brooklyn accent. He was a nonchalant rabbit who chewed on his carrot in the face of all of his enemies and he was famous for the line, "What's up, doc?" which he used in that first cartoon when he met Elmer Fudd who was hunting rabbits.

As America entered World War II, Bugs Bunny became the most popular cartoon character in America, always defeating his enemies through sheer cleverness, oftentimes as a quick change artist.

(Saskia credits Writers Almanac for this tidbit of history.)

Interesting/Unusual Quizlet

Via the even more interesting thomryng

( We'll Always Have Paris )