Oh, Look, A Castle! ...

So a now long-told joke about me.... that I'm like a goldfish in a bowl (short attention span/memory, high enthusiasm)... I swim around the circle and see the little pink castle "Oh, look, a Castle!" -- so excited -- swim past and continue around the circle, swimming, swimming, la, la, la, and then come upon something shimmering and pink, what is it? "Oh, look a Castle!"

No Joke.

I am that easily amused, easily surprised, easily taken off guard by the same things that moments before I thought I had seen/known/heard for the first time... I'd like to think this flaw isn't lack of intelligence, per se, but rather the speed at which I go through my day and my total inability to stay still. I flit from one thing to the next -- intense and obsessive while I'm on something and then forgotten immediately when I'm on to the next. But, that being said, I'm no more or less pleased or interested in a previous item when I encounter it again later on. My attention span and memory just can't keep everything in line and order because I'm just not that tuned in anymore.

So dulled senses, dulled memory, dulled experience -- what's the root? Fear, suspension of belief (as opposed to the necessary suspension of disbelief), doubt, cynicism, my odd understanding/relationship with time, self-defense, and above all else, work.

If this blog is a truth serum, let me just say that this weekend I finally realized that I have actually crossed over into the realm of workaholism for real. I mean, I am actively using work as a means to avoid and escape myself, my life, my feelings, and everything around me. I'm actively neglecting other things in place of work and I'm obsessively unable to stop myself when I'm doing it, including choosing work over social interaction and/or family. Scary. A million miles away from what used to be me.

This is why I have not allowed myself to work more than 1 1/2 hours so far this whole weekend...because I know that it is a problem and that I have to take it seriously.

Time, however, is an even more interesting component of the "castle" phenomena of my thought process... I don't know if my understanding and relationship with time is really that much different than other people's, all I know is that it confuses and astounds me... I find it extremely difficult to distinguish months, years, weeks -- they all blend in strange inconsistent patterns. And ever since the beta left, time has been frozen for me. I'm not up on the date, I'm not sure of where I am in the year, and I continue to feel like it's November even though it's May. This eerie suspension of existence translates to everything in my house. There are chores, piles of paper, odd remembrances of October 2006 that haven't moved forward since his departure. Yet there are also a million outgrowths of completely new (and not here before) items that are comingling and growing up around all the stuff transfixed in time... It's an odd environment that I really need to do more to get a handle on.

That issue of control, however, is the kicker.... Now that I know I really don't have any, I vacillate back and forth between wanting to regain it and wanting to ignore any desire to ever have it again. I can't find a balance and instead I am oblivious to the world around me, swimming along dealing with things as they arise, but never focusing my attention, energy, or thoughts on any one thing long enough to not be surprised that there's a pink castle up ahead...