One way of living in the world, one goal at least for some, is to be fully alive in each moment, to be entirely aware and awake and noticing. Each tick of time steps past your notice, each action is conscious, each breath a choice that is made.
Another way is to numb yourself to the passing of time, to skip past the dull intervening moments to reach the goal on the horizon, the pot of gold.
As in all things, I am of both minds about this. I find the press and clutter of daily tasks and housecleaning tedium to be too jard sometimes, and at the same time to be so painfully uninteresting that I can't bear to fix the mess around me, so it is easier to simply skip through time and let it flow past unnoticed.
And still I want to make each moment count, to be useful, though I find this level of connection is only easily achieved by me when I am focusing on some creative task.
And when I am creating, I can squeeze some tedious effort out of me as a side effect sometimes.
It is still, though, as if I am waiting for something. There is something missing, something coming on the horizon, something that I want to skip ahead to great and bypass the many tedious seconds that lie between now and then.
What that something is I cannot say.
So I get this amusing struggle inside my own head.
Speaking of amusing, one project that I hope to invent and build in the next few months is a giant earthquake-based subwoofer. To couple multiple vibrating devices to the earth and drive them through amplifiers to make the earth sing in its basso profundo voice for me, the rumblings of god or the devil at my feet.
If you have any ideas or interesting in this project, let me know... I would welcome colloborators.
In Taiji we are learning Chen style. This is very different from Yang! It should be fun, once we get past feeling hopeless.
A number of projects are looming up in the queue, some scheduled some in the process of finding dates:
A welding weekend for fun and friends; a lifecasting session, at least; game playing! And, of course, dancing begins again this week.
Ahhh, the holidays are past, and I'm back at work and heading in to the new year.
There are no single major projects queued up for 2006, though I do have a theme in mind for the year. This will be the year I work on my sculpting skills -- and to this end I have purchased a number of good and mediocre books on the subject.
Also notable for this year will be that detail that I will _not_ be working on Haunted Trails... but will be applying myself to some other Halloween project or other.
Banging off the old year come two notable events, one of which is only notable for being extremely annoying. Some asshole Chinese person went and edited all of my user pages in the simreal TWiki, putting lots of crap and spam in them. Tonight I'll hand-edit all of the user pages and lock them down so they can only be edited by their owners. Jeez, those asshole spammers, they really should all just drop dead.
The other notable event was that I got a dragon tattoo on my back! Over six hours under the needle, doing a full back piece in one sitting. Note for the curious, shading hurts like hell when done over fresh outlining.
The dragons are custom designs by Geoff Massey, the tattoo guy I used at HPP Ink in Eugene, Oregon. He went all out for me, and created serpent-like dragons (kind of like seahorses) in a Giger-esque style. Excellent work, unique, and well executed.
I'll post a picture eventually.
