Attaching to the Day

 Monday April 18^th

Three questions you can ask yourself each morning to attach to the day:

1.       Why does the work I do matter to me?

2.       Who are the People who support me in my success?

3.       What would I like to focus on today?

Why does the work I do matter to me? Why do I find it meaningful?

I surround myself with colour. I suppose it is in rebellion to the fact that society and the education system have relegated me to work that I find unpleasant in one particular manner or another. I do not know why. People talk about suffering the unpleasant stuff to gain endurance and understanding. But once you are in a position of taking difficult jobs it is there for a lifetime. Like it is a lifetime of enduring, for a large part of your life, unpleasantness. You never escape from it. At least that is what I found. Either significant others in the job refer to me as someone low or base. Or I work an unpleasant job. For example,  my repetitive job is agonizing and monotonous. Like doing one thing the whole time, I am working. Let us say entering receipts. I have no other occupation but doing that the whole time.

Or significant others make it clear that to them  I am stupid or brutish. I am a very poor woman at this time.  And yet I try to dress attractively as befits a woman who is working. I have my own company and poverty permitting, I spend all of my time trying to find that secret sauce to get rid of my own condition of poverty. And the big part of the struggle is believing in my own dignity. I find it quite terrible to think of wearing only one or two dresses. Like a uniform. Case in point, the mask thing, with the pandemic, bothers me. Simple dress codes and masks hide your face. You have no face. You have no identity. That is why working for the poor, or the rich, and taking nothing for yourself, bothers me. If you have no possessions that, is it. I find it does not make my life easier. It makes one truly poor. If you were to die tomorrow, you would have no testimony to your particular talents or that you existed at all.

When I work, I work always to create a legend of myself. It sounds contradictory: I on the one hand am extremely poor (and with low self-esteem because of it). And yet I try to surround myself with colours. Always colours. If I do not create a work of art, I create a fantasy world. I think about my life, problems, and solutions. I mull over situations both past and present. I keep on saying to myself, having no paying job, that I am base. And I suppose that is why I immerse myself in colours. If I were feeling better, I would love to continue going to the high arts. Also, if I had more money. Now the money I spent on live performance is going to money spent on my computer work.

Contracts, contract, contracts. Always contracts. Just today I had internet installed in my new apartment. They only do it with a two-year contract. Of your internet will be very slow. I also have a two-year contract on my phone. And yet, As I write and listen to Netflix and Spotify, to YouTube, and Facebook, I feel connected to somebody out there.

Who are the people who support you and your success? Who is in your corner who wishes you to do well? These are the people who are rooting you on. Even your younger self.

I am listening to meditation apps, and they repeatedly talk about getting rid of all this techno bulls**t. of unplugging. To go for walks, to read a book to get back into nature. Is there anybody out there who has had a world of only this? And has been sick at heart from the relentless reality? I find the social network like watching television but doing something that I dreamt of as a child. Now I can interact with the action. I do not do it very much. But the computer gives me a world of thought to step into. Like writing on a blog that people will read. Instead of being just myself, mostly unable to talk or mingle. But the contracts are scary though.

Occasionally in my life, I meet a celebrity. I really find these meetings very important. Impressive. I find a thrill in them. It is an old habit. I know that often they are not the way they look when they are “famous” Often they go back to being and looking regular. But I trip on the extraordinary encounters I have with celebrities. I believe I know, from life experiences certain celebrities write to me or about me. From another world perhaps once our very brief encounter has ended. But even though the message is not perfectly what I want it to be. I feel touched and important when someone writes a song with me in mind. I hear on the radio. I see it on YouTube. I still trip on it after so many years.

What do I want to focus on today?

The challenge is, for me, to look at the big picture. Right now, I just moved into my own apartment after living in a religious community for decades. SO, there are dozens of boxes of stuff to put away. The move has been taking up my time for months now. I just paid the movers to move me and there are still a lot of things in the old place. I have been packing. Now I am unpacking. Now really cool stuff that is happening. For example, I now have an easy chair with a stool for my feet. What a luxury. There is enough room for this. So, I do not have the time or energy to do the seven artwork a week (one for each day) as I want. But I am placing my stuff in the best way possible. So, although I am not producing as much as I would like I hope this experience will reap more and better positive work output. So, for now I focus on placing my stuff. Not only unpacking but getting the best bang for my bucks.

Note: APril 25, 2022

As I read what I wrote before, I think of myself as black: I write resembling someone with the same thought perspective as Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman written by Arther Miller in 1949.