Anyway the wind blows
–Queen/Bohemian RhapsodyI still haven’t found what I’m looking for
–U2/
That’s always been the way I’ve lived my life. Not so much with a plan. Not so much with a desired direction. Not so much with even a clue of what I really wanted. Just going whichever way the wind, or whatever it is that stands for the wind in a life, took me.
Get married? Sure, if there’s a breeze blowing that way. Every 19 year old should be married. I don’t have any other plans. Why not?
Move to Europe? That could be fun. You can totally justify that so it SOUNDS like it makes sense, especially when a professor suggests it and you’re studying 4 or 5 languages already.
Piercing? Tattoo? Server administration or drawing class? New job? Whatever. Go ahead and do it. It’ll be fine.
Things have a way of popping up, and I shrug and do them. What makes that a little unusual, I think, is that I give it all the same amount of non-thought. Considering how much I think about a lot of random shit that really doesn’t matter, I think it’s a little weird that my life seems to just happen without the same level of angst that I apply to things like what books to take on vacation.
I’m not sure if that’s good or bad.
It just is what it is.
It seems to have worked out for me.
The one thing that has always been a priority is time. In any decision about work, more than money I’ve looked at how it impacts time. I’ve never wanted to make a ton of money. In the balance of time vs money, time always wins. I turned down a job once that was essentially written for everything I know–computers, foreign language and software. It was a slight pay increase, but I’d have lost 5 weeks of time off a year. They wouldn’t budge on that, and had already gone way outside of their pay scale to tempt me, and I didn’t take the job. More recently, I made a lateral move pay-wise which got me out of being on call after hours and into supporting a new application. Less prestigious, more time. Time won.
For someone who is as introspective as I am, it does baffle me a bit that I don’t have more of a directed approach to living life. Introspection is great and all, but maybe all of that thought should have some sort of point. Sort of like writing. Uh. Right. I just said that I am pointless. And I am. In pretty much all of the ways you can be. Certainly physically I’m too rounded to have any points left. Except my barbed tongue. My tongue, I am told, has a tendency to be quite pointed at times.
If it makes anyone feel better who has been the victim of my barbed tongue, generally what I thought just before I said something kind of horrific was usually much worse than what I said. That didn’t make anyone feel a bit better, did it? Well, it wasn’t really intended as an apology. More of an observation.
A boy I had broken up with once came over looking for more of an explanation of what happened. One minute I was happy, the next he was on the virtual curb. He didn’t understand. Rightfully so. I couldn’t even tell him why I’d been with him in the first place, so a reasonable explanation for the breakup was definitely beyond me. He gloomily said “you probably never loved me at all” and what came out of my mouth was “No, I didn’t.” Unkind. What I thought in the nano-second before it came out of my mouth was “I was only with you in the first place because I couldn’t have the person I really wanted. I couldn’t stand pretending I cared about you for one more minute.” More unkind, and thankfully unsaid.
This is one of the main reasons that I just didn’t talk much at all for so long. Talking without shredding someone’s feelings can be a bit of a challenge for me. I’m not naturally unkind, but when you have a lot of unsaid stuff stacking up inside you, it does tend to escape like a raging beast. Maybe that’s why I try so hard to actually use words now. If I let them out on a more regular basis, they tend to be a little milder. Maybe? I hope?
Which really has nothing to do with what I started writing about.
Stupid words.
Always leading me astray.
Or…can I be led astray if I don’t have a direction in the first place?
Hmmm….