Teapot In A Tempest
2007-04-12, 10:34

Clearly, I need some sort of brain transplant.

In my job, I process a lot of samples, and to keep them organized and able to be accessed at a later date if need be, I label them with the date and time that they were tested, which is good enough for my purposes to uniquify (I just made that word up - I like it) them. So marking one with today's date is no biggie, because after all, the company didn't exist (I think) in 1907, and in 2107...

...will it still be around? Where will this thing that I'm holding be in 100 years? Will it be in someone's trunk of things that their grandkids will discover in their attic? Will it be (most likely) taking up space in a landfill? Will it have completely deteriorated by then? Good lord, I'll be dead by the time this date/time marker applies to anything again! AAAHHH!

And suddenly the world seems so much more tenuous, temporary. I've been grappling with the concepts of the meaninglessness of form and that things don't go away, they just become something else. But to me, the fact that forms are temporary and tenuous makes those forms all the more important. As a child, I as one of those who would build something with my LEGOs and would keep it in that shape for as long as I could manage, effectively turning it into whatever toy it was designed to be (usually a spaceship or robot or both - thank you, Battle of the Planets and Voltron) rather than a conglomeration of pieces. Keeping that form was a way for me to stave off the chaos around me, a way for me to combat the inevitability of disassemblance. Unfortunately, I'm pretty terrible in life at holding things together unless the situation has reached critical, when I try -and usually fail - to scramble and reassemble things to their original state. Or more properly, I put something together and rely on the fact that it will stay that way, which I don't think is the same as taking something for granted. Maybe it is. But things don't stay, and I have to deal with the reality of the pieces rather than the whole and when the thing gets put back together it's inherently changed.

I try to accept the fact that Things Come Apart, and that it's a normal progression in life (having kids forces this issue to no small degree), and that sometimes you need to Let Things Go. And I'd to think that I'm making some headway. But then I remember that, somewhere in our basement, is a box of LEGO that I got for an Xmas past, that has a little ship that I built in it, and that, deep down, I hope it's still in one piece.

Goodbye, Kurt.

I know it's been too long since I've written anything. I've wanted to. I've killed at least five entries that I started and didn't finish. I have a lot going on in my head, and little of it can be discussed here, because I don't feel like I have the room to be wrong without consequence. It's no one's fault; it just is. I'm not going to stop writing - at least I certainly hope so. But it seems like there's more and more I can't say because of worry about hurting others' feelings or giving a wrong impression. I've never been totally disclosing about my personal life in an online journal, it's just that the things I don't talk about have been outweighing the things I can, at least lately. That's changing though, I think. I hope.

-- End Transmission --