it's a good day for a little bit of writing

i'm tired, my audio gear is at home helping to break in the new 225s, and things are going just not as well as they might be going today.

i'm in a reflective mood. that's good for writing and bad for everything else, i've come to realize.

i wondered earlier today, if i didn't have the difficulties that i had, but instead had other difficulties, would i be better or worse off? i suppose i'll really never know -- at the moment, the difficulties that plague me most pointedly are the ones i'll likely never conquer, so from here on out, i'll only be gaining difficulties, since it's a given that i have N permanent ones, and N + M is greater than N for all M greater than 0.

it occurred to me as i was bringing my lunch back to my desk that the combination of a sufficiently broad world view, coupled or replaced with a creative imagination, glued together with an objective analytical mind, is the deadly enemy of happiness.

the more i think about things "objectively" the worse off i gather i am. throw in a good dose of imagination, and i can visualize a universe of improvements to my life.

this thought, i suppose, was the culmination of this morning's grumbly ruminations, spawned from waking up too early, unhappy dreams (themselves born of the usual unhappies that flutter unstoppably through my mindscape now and again), unhappy allergies, and unhappy annoyances with my landlords and brewing setup (heh).

ironically, though, a dash of imagination, a splash of objectivity, and a hash of worldliness, real or imagined (and still, considering, i'm not convinced that one outshines the other), tempered by mood or will, combine and reveal the exact opposite of the conclusion i reached above: the more i think about things "objectively" the better off i gather i am.

how can it be that both are true?

it simply is. i may never be rid of my troubles, or at least, if i rid myself of some, the void will be filled with others. and yet, at the same time, i live a life of above average happiness, and so if i fail to reach some arbitrary level of joy above the above average level, that's not so bad overall, uber alles.

i used to think (really recently, on the cosmic sclae) that this was a "settling" attitude. now i think, perhaps, it is simply reality. it's an old truism that the more power one acquires in life, the less freedom one has. as a simple example, consider wealth. there's a sweet-spot, i suppose, but i'm not there. i'm hardly poor, but yet, to "get the most" out of my money requires constant attention, research, and careful tracking. and still, i'm just basically making it up as i go along. were i poor, i wouldn't have to worry about what effect the housing bubbleburst will have on the stocks in my 401k. at the same time, i'd be poor, with all the problems that brings.

i recently told 203 that life is too short for any person to do all the things they want to do. that used to be something i could say or think without a painful, internal cringe. that used to be something that didn't grate back when there really wasn't anything i wanted to do. and now, i have so many things i wish to do, and i'm so far behind, it's rather irritating. i'm not a patient person, and yet i've waited almost my entire life to have my life. and sometimes, more often than i'd like, when i consider 203, who occupies my thoughts with frightening consistency, i am reminded not only of how long i had to wait to find her, but of how much longer she didn't wait to find me -- because she didn't so much know she was looking for me, just as i didn't know i was looking for her, but she got started in the search a lot sooner.

and the irony of it all (second only to the greater irony that i find my poor little mind constantly deadlocked by such tangled twists of irony) is that, of course, these qualities in each of us are among the milieu of qualities that brought us together, and bring us together, and keep us together.

my life, so far, has been like a firework -- a long, slow, uneventful ascent punctuated by an explosion of bright sound and fire. what shape it will form i do not know, and how long the explosion will continue, i cannot say. but i can say that the fiery streamers of this hopefully long-lived burst of life, and the shimmering glow of the wandering star that i have somehow netted, bring into sharp detail the dullness of the ascent. in contemplating the as-they-weres, i see so many might-have-beens, from the earliest pre-teen years right up to the late twenties, and as i wallow and whinge in irritating gen-X self-fascination, i see concurrently how lucky i have always been to allow me to reach this point of (probably (i mean, i assume (or imagine, if you will))) enviable happiness. and so i get the hodge with the podge, as i indulge myself, tiredly, with boring familiarity, in the realization that my past was lived not as Jean-Luc Picard, but as the far less interesting Jeen Luck Pick-erd, if you remember that episode where his heart blows up (and i know you do).

quoth The Dude, "that's a bummer, man."