It’s November again. How did that happen? Oh, wait, the usual way: time passed while I wasn’t looking.<\/p>\n
November is when I usually do something mildly or extremely insane to jump start my creativity. Last year, I participated in National Novel Writing Month<\/a>, that frenzy of masochistic novel writing in which you commit to 50,000 words in 30 days. This year, I chose to be a National Blog Posting Month<\/a>, a slightly less masochistic 30 original posts in 30 days commitment. This isn’t the first year I’ve chosen NaBloPoMo over NaNoWriMo<\/acronym>, but it’s the first year I’ve made the decision for so many different reasons.<\/p>\n The state of the blogger this year is in flux. It hasn’t been a good late summer\/early fall for me. I turned 40 this year which in and of itself isn’t a bad thing. Turning 40 is better than the alternative<\/acronym> but the experience wasn’t enhanced any by bringing my mother home from an unexpected 5 day stay in the hospital on my actual birthday. Though, I suppose, if you look at it from another perspective, bringing her home was better than the alternative<\/acronym>.<\/p>\n My work situation has gone from bad – we’re moving office and sticking you in a dark hole with another person and all the servers among other events – to worse – and…here’s your 15% pay cut and yes, we’re going to be big enough assholes that we’re going to make you browbeat us into giving you compensatory time off – and I wouldn’t be surprised if it gets even worse<\/acronym> before I finally rid myself of these people. And it’s the ridding myself of these people that’s put me in this state of dry flux.<\/p>\n Though, strictly speaking, that’s not entirely true. I was dried out and bored with my job before Management started in with the big, obvious cuts. For the past two years, my job has been affected by a curious entropy that isn’t quite expansion, nor is it quite contraction: the reduction of resources required to do anything interesting or unique while slowly, surely, turning up expectations. It’s a strange process, a little bit like that experiment that proved frogs will hop out of a pot of boiling water but won’t notice until it’s too late that you’ve gradually turned their nice, room temperature bath into a boiling death cauldron.If I think back, really hard, the true dehydration, the draining away of creative juice and interest, didn’t start until June or so. I can vaguely recall a cold few days spend in Key West in March during which I would get up, take my novel to be edited to the local coffee house, get a cup of tea and sit and work while absorbing the locals’ gossip as they chattered in the background. And I managed to carry that home with me, to finish the first edit on that book and start an edit on the second book I’ve got in my queue<\/acronym>. So, I’m not quite sure what happened but some time between March and the beginning of October I got bored with my life and burned out with my job, and as we all know, bored, burned out people are uninteresting. This is why the State of the Blogger is “in flux.”<\/p>\n I’m trying to change my perspective. I’m trying to reengage with the world, to see the small, interesting things that used to delight me so. I’m trying to be confident that no matter how bad things look – less pay, job alternatives that seem like more of the same only in a different outfit, rampant economic misery that appears to have no end, and a media-industrial complex that just will not shut up about the inane<\/acronym> – life does have the capacity to get better.<\/p>\n I am, in a sense, trying to counter the feeling that I’m totally, utterly powerless and the almost constant desire to scream until I feel better that goes with it.<\/p>\n I know, not a happy statement, but I’m not one of those people who is inclined to whisper things (unemployment)<\/span> that seem unpleasant or that shouldn’t be discussed “in polite company” and I never have been. That doesn’t mean, though, that the next 30 days are going to be nothing but sturm und drang. They also aren’t going to be nothing but “my job sucks; isn’t Management stupid?” though there will be some of that<\/acronym>.<\/p>\n What the next 30 days are going to be is an experiment, a pressure valve on life so that scream comes out as a long, slow whistle instead of a throat scraping roar. Or maybe I should be screaming, who knows. I guess I’ll find out this month.<\/p>\n