Written Tuesday evening. Didn't get to finding the links and posting until Thursday morning. Read the article. You'll understand...

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I store up ambition for the weekend, just in time to be tackled by my ambivilance. I'd have a list of things to accoomplish in the coming fin de semana, but the lethargy of choice usually meant I'd stay home, getting ready to do things, and spending so much time making everything optimal to work (or getting stuck in front of the TV) that soon the clock ticked around the the fateful five o'clock, that time by which if I wasn't underway, I'd already feel defeated because 5 is close to 6 and coming up on 7, the time when things start getting dark, and the time when I'd get home on a workday, so if I didn't feel like making something of the evening after a day at work, how could I bring myself to do it now?

This clearly had to stop.

A lot of intropsection revealed the following interesting insights:

• I'm afraid of success. As long as I'm not giving my 100%, then I can't fail inside, because I could attribute the failure to my not giving my all. But, if I do give my all, and it turns out to not be enough, then it's not that I failed, but that I'm incapable of success.
• I likw creating things, and often feel a sense of loss, of time wasted, when I do things that don't have permenent, tangible end products. I used to be an avid gamer, but nowadays I think about the prospect of sitting home alone for a weekend and churning my way through Half-Life II or Diablo II, networked or otherwise, and think about how it's just another drug, wasting valuable time for little more than an increased ability to play that game. (Irony so thick you can lap it up.)
• I don't have a spontaneous social life. Nearly all my friends live between 8 and 70 miles away, and those who are closer are those with their own social circles and a dearth of free spontaneous time. If I want to see a movie, I plan it between four and twenty days in advance.
• How the above factors combine when it comes to meeting new people is an exercise left to the reader.

Clearly, a change was called for.

It wasn't always like this...

A good part of the problem was accursed Berkeley. Having a car in Berkeley means walking a lot, or working your travels around the ebb and flow of cars, Bereley's tidal urban detrius.

On weekdays, the meters start filling up around 9am, and by 10 spaces are scarce, with those vacated by residents going to work quickly filled by commuting students. Around 3pm the student exodus exceeds the inflow, and spaces start to appear until the wave inverts around 5:30 and residents start coming home. By 7pm spaces are scarce again, and won't free up until 10pm, when those visitng friends, drinking, or studying late start heading home, and the influx is low.

On weekends it's almost reversed. The spaces are empty until nearly 1pm, then they quickly fill, to stay packed until nearly midnight.

All this leads to windows: It's hard to do something during the day if you know you'll have to walk a half-mile home from the closest parking space (which you only know is the closest because you followed your regular parking circuit twice to find the 'edge' where spaces go from nil to plentiful). Instead, you plan activities not around the traffic that moves, but that that is supposed to stand still.

Time for a change...

So as I've mentioned before, the commute is a beast, a killer of time, a murderer of sleep, and while it gives me in tome to write introspective soliloquies like this one, those six hours a week are bought at the expense of a great many more.

The solution isn't a simple change. A paradigm shift would be abandoned nearly as abruptly as it starts. A lifestyle is a heavy boat, and trying to turn it 90 degrees in an instant would only succeed in tipping it over by the might of the momentum it carries.

There are the small things: Do laundry when you only have a load or two, not when you no longer have anything to wear.

Ditto for dishes.

Next comes weekends: Make plans. Give themes to weekends. Get excited. Home is the place you get to escape from on a weekend, not cocoon yourself inside while waitng for yourself to do the things you know you won't.

In the words of Gary Graves, a drama teacher of mine who, in spite of some questionable productions, was one of my better mentors, "make the bold choice." (Alternatively, you can take the words of Dark Angel's 'Original Cindy' when she admits, 'it's a large life.')

Skydiving is a good example. I didn't go out to Byron ten days ago out of defiance against a life half-lived, but as an opportunity to experience something new (the latter being a natural positive, the former merely a double-negative).

And the fun doesn't stop there. This last weekend's original plan was to take a kitesurfing lesson with my father. Though they were booked (and I'm going on my own this coming weekend), and our alternate foray into flying model planes had disasterous results, it was still a thing to do. Any weekend that I don't have to complain about the jesus freaks because I wasn't home for them to torment is a good weekend. The more I do this, the more it sinks in.

Well, I'm starting to approach Jack London Square, without even getting to the heart of what is likely the most rambling post I've written in months.

Tonight and tomorrow morning is Beltane (okay, so finishing and editing took a while. Today's Beltane). Celebrated as a pagan holiday representing the renewing of the annual cycle, it's the closest thing to a spiritual new year. Medieval (and earlier) druidic cultures witnessed Beltane as nature's fertility rite. It was the time when the god and goddess came together to start the seed of a new goddess. In proper imitative ritual, it's the time when young couples would by and by leave the celebration to wander into the woods and fields and make merry, either for their own fertility, or in the fields, to ensure the fertility of the coming crops.

This month I'm seeding my metaphoric fields, planting for the longer view. I'm changing the way I work, the way I play, and to some degree the way I think.

As always, I'll keep you posted over the next few weeks on the more tangible changes.

Have a great Beltane everyone!