perfection through planning. i am ever trying to do this life correctly, to make the appropriate choices at the appropriate times and do all the preparation for the future now. i find that i cannot know enough. there is no way, surely, to do it all right. there will always be struggle. but is it silly to be so planned about it? to try so hard at having such an organized and prepared little life when surely there will always be surprises and curve balls, accidents and mistakes made? it is stupid to presume that one can ever be truly prepared. we cannot predict one moment to the next or the years stretched before us. it is simply one foot in front of the other and one block built at a time and yet i try so hard to do and to be everything. is it a fruitless endeavor? is it wasting the precious time i have or making better use of it? will i fail? will i succeed? am i trying too hard, setting myself up? is it inevitable that i will make some mistakes and successfully avoid others? am i searching here for meaning and purpose, design and intent in a universe that is merely random? or is there some way to control it all? some way to set things in motion the way that i've decided they should be by choosing and acting in accordance with all the possibilities of the universe? can't i simply pick? or are the two issues not at all interrelated as i am making them out to be? am i being ridiculous? am i searching the crevices of my life for evidence of the divine, trying to instill a sense of karma where there is none? is it not just a story we tell ourselves that there is god and there is finite anything? am i here attempting in my own small ways to create a mythology that can deem my psychological processes appropriate or improper? sometimes i long for the had of god to part the clouds and point out all the answers to all my questions, namely that what i do is what i am supposed to do, that all i am is rightly me. it would be nice to expel self-doubt so neatly and finally with a flick of the divine wrist, but it seems ultimately a little stupid and counter to the point of all this, should there be, in fact, a point. the point is to get on with it all and of course to get it on. i can only endeavor to do my best whether by design or by accident. i can only endeavor to be purely me by listening to my own voice coming out in my questions and to create myself moment by moment in the image most desirable to me. it is whatever it is. questioning each tiny motivation is to but leave questions hanging about on the air like rhetoric. there is no design other than what i put forth and not everything is within my control. there are too many others wandering about sporadically and randomly colliding in a great waltz of chaos for any of this to even vaguely resemble preordination.

i have not the time to sit in constant contemplation of the meaning of things, of my life, of the infinite. i move back into the mode of planning and doing and feeling decent and have nothing to say about it. i started to see a therapist and just as i sit on her couch and begin to speak, my words feel so small, so unnecessary, so spent. i have already said it all in conversation and on paper and online. i have already cast out all the concepts and theories of my struggle and come oddly to the conclusion that i am not at all crazy, despite the intensity and frequency and tenor of my words, they are but evidence of such small, normal problems that are but the stuff of life and ebb and flow just like the weather. i am left with nothing more to work through at the moment, hardly anything at all to say. i can revisit all the issues i've expounded upon so clearly already and realize only that there must be ways to live in avoidance of the threshold where rage sets in, at least for the benefit of my children and then of course to funnel that energy elsewhere into more self-serving and restorative exercises. but of course there is no way to avoid yelling at my kids forever. bad days will surely come and i must simply work through it all as best i can. i will but move through my life and read and write and sort and sift as applicable as is my usual nature. it is so odd to sit on the other side of it and to realize that what in one moment feels so extraordinary is actually entirely mundane.

the words do not come out, they do not speak, they stay hidden, bottled within me. i have nothing but a need to speak this, to work it out somehow. instead i stack them up inside, reaching to my limits, building pressure. what will happen if the boundary is breached? will my heart stop? will a blood vessel in my brain burst, squirting fountains of red from out my nostrils? or will it all merely dissolve away eventually, the moments ticking a removal of each brick of pressure and anger from beneath the words in their ascent? will i simply write it out and lose the need? is this the funneling of energy elsewhere? or is it simply too tiring to keep up so that all that steam fizzes out through my ears, leaving me spent, exhausted? how do i do? how do i make use of all of this, find ways to not repeat all these mistakes that i make? anything i try to assign to this bad day to identify it, to map it and find the solution just turns to dust, slips through my fingers like so much sand. my brain turns into a muddle. the jigsaw puzzle pieces change shape as i go to fit them together; the colors blur. i cannot even see what i am doing or how i am thinking. what is this? i feel such guilt, such sadness all born from such outrage born from nothing. today we are all sick, except aleks who was sick yesterday, but is better today. somehow his vacation from mischief brought on by the illness must now be made up for, so he is exploring all crevices of things-he-need-not-touch while the rest of us try to just keep breathing as our nostrils close up and our throats swell and our brains fog. this has led to much frustration on my part as i try to care for the baby and jon sleeps on the couch. i tried to do nothing with him - watching a movie while the others slept - and it ended badly as he kept pulling my hair and the baby woke up. i went to lay down with sebastian who needed me beside him to get more sleep and left aleks with the movie. in this time he scaled heights of the closet never before scaled and got things down and cut things up. upon my discovery of this in my tired, lone-parent state, i acted in ways i should not have, accidentally bumping his head in the process and left in no shape to apologize. jon wakes to child screaming and rushes in to take aleks out, cuddling him and trying to make him better. this is fine except that i am left feeling so judged and in no place to heal my self and in no place to actually improve upon my behavior. so i am left with all the words in my head as i pick up and put away: i spend half my life organizing storage and putting things out of aleks' reach, it seems. things that do not belong to me and whose purpose and function is a mystery - boxes computer equipment came in and and millions of random cd-roms, the bicycle tire pump that's supposed to be in the basement, board games, bookbags, all manner of things that do not belong to me. and what happens to all of these things i have so carefully organized is that they get pulled out and put back in wrong places, only for me to organize again and still i have no idea what their use is and even as they are exposed to daylight by those who might in fact know if they are needed at all, they are ignored and jammed and packed away again and again. and i am judged for my frustration and my inability to keep it together just as i was judged for being the one who was sick just after christmas - when jon was the one taking care of both children (as i do every day) when he was well and had a house full of assistance and aleks was not on a well-again rampage. when i had the flu and could hardly move without aching and he was perfectly well, still he was angry and bitter, annoyed that he could not get back to his work and still i tried my best to accommodate him. it all feels so unfair. i don't get a day off from anything, certainly not without paying a heavy emotional toll. and now all i need is help. i need to not be this way, or to not be made to feel such guilt, such judgment cast my way for having a bad day. intervention is indeed needed, but only in the form of emotional support. because i have no one else. everyday i am fighting this battle alone. i am thinking all the thoughts and making the decisions by myself. there is hardly any aid and there is only my hand guiding both of us, trying to figure this out and find ways to be more effective and all that happens is that i become more and more of a failure.

i am, in some small and some not-so-small ways, doing better. i am not screaming. i am not descended into madness. i am interested and participating in the world around me. right now, i am really fine. why should there be times when i am crazy, when all the world seems dark and i am scared of the irreparable harm i may be inflicting on my son? most likely, the only person irrevocably scarred by my rage is me. it is the cycle of fury and guilt that makes the universe bleak. it is that my violent speech is so beyond my control - a monster springs forth from the pit of my belly with such inertia and so surprisingly, that i am stuck, powerless to stop it. there is a me that stands by watching, knowing all the correct ways to handle the situation and instead staring slack-jawed in helpless horror. all the guilt in the world does nothing to dissuade the rambling, ranting me, does nothing to reduce the monster's size. i do all this writing and considering in search of the magic bullet to slay the beast for good. i am forever searching for a way out of the mess, as though this were separate from my life, merely some temporary setback - as though i could distinguish between myself as i am and myself as this other. but where are the lines, the boundaries? how am i not myself? how am i not myself? how am i not myself? how am i not myself? how am i not myself? how am i not myself? how am i not myself? how am i not myself? how am i not myself? how am i not myself? how am i not myself? how am i not myself? how am i not myself? how am i not myself?

how am i not myself? that's sort of the thing about me - i am always very much uniquely me. in all the messy, not-so-nice, aggressive, blunt, funny, sarcastic, down-to-earth-ishness ways that i am me and the me comes out in my speech and in my actions - i am me. i am often intensely me. i wear my heart on my sleeve. i literally broadcast my heart across the internet. i am loud and i am hyper. it is how i am organized and how i am capable of doing all the things i do. it is how i am creative and how i am insightful; how i am inventive, decisive, compassionate, cruel, empathetic. how i am positive is how i am negative. how i am perfect is how i am flawed. i try to separate the two sides out to leave nothing but the parts i like. i try to battle the me that is painful, but really i think the best i can hope for is to not rub the parts i don't like so much in trying to scrub me clean that i am left raw and unable to cope. there is a balance here in me, but it is far from perfect or exact. the sides are not prevalent in equal measure. the more i push and prod myself to do better, or more perfect, the more the stressed, angry, bitter me comes out to release the pent-up tension. i cannot be perfect. i cannot do everything. and it is okay to even not be okay. it is okay to feel sad and flawed or angry and bitter. it's just a part of the whole. i am ever trying to balance it out, however unconsciously. i am always in the act of doing more or less, working towards just being, towards just going towards. towards the future, towards an outcome, towards a resting point, towards an action or experience. i am a body in motion, in time and in circumstance. i must find a way to stop the battle. i cannot cut off the limb that holds the ax. it's all a part of the same thing and the key is to accept what is; to be who i am in all the ways that i am. in trying to escape the wrathful me, i deny the entire person and it only digs the hole deeper and makes my world feel bleak and hopeless. i must find ways to accept myself and not aggravate the aggravated by trying to push it away or cover it up. how i let these emotions out is of course important, but the way i try to escape my life is not the solution for moving through it.