Cat Power - The Moon

I'm listening to that song.  It's 9:30 on Sunday evening.  Spent the whole day laying around at Tony and Sam and Eli's house (dudes I went to HS with) watching football and playing their Xbox.  I always feel very conflicted on days like this; it feels so great to SLOTH but it gives me the sense that I'm betraying something fundamental that made me want to move here.  I feel like I've nursed a sort of moral responsibility in myself since being here...  and now it's grown into a self-depricating sense of urgency: "You MUST immerse yourself in the culture here!  You MUST bend / break personal boundaries!  You MUST explore yourself and explore history and explore literature and cooking and music and you MUST and MUST have the greatest time flying up and down streets in this city, because you WON'T be here forever!"

And a small (very small) part of me is very happy that I've at least got something nagging me, lighting a fire under my ass.  Because there have certainly been times when there was nothing under my ass, no sparks--not even a slight heat.  So it's nice to feel compelled to help myself feel new things and to be healthy.  And yet, at the same time, shit man do I love reminding myself / remembering that extinguishing that posterior flame can feel great.  Not just that, it can be necessary.

Don't get me wrong: I'm still lazy as hell, and I'm by no means some energetic freak who wants to organize every hour of his life down to the minute.  When I talk about the conflict between my general sense of urgency and my general sense of lethargy while in New Orleans, I mostly refer to a conflict in my head about who I should be, the way I should be living here.  I don't think I act purely based on impulse, and I think I've got an ok excuse for a rational mind, but I can't deny that my actions in the past have certainly not always occupied the "right" side of my judgment's "right vs. wrong" table.  I think about who I want to be, and who I should be, but it has always been very hard for me to put these dreams of myself into action, into fruition, to finally see myself becoming the person whom I want to become.  This is one of the reasons why I love that I moved down here: it is one of the larger self-inflicted butt-kickings I've ever received.

And it is possible to find an agreeable juncture of the ends of this conflict in me...  more than agreeable; pleasant, excellent, even.  The juncture is harmonious, and in its midst, I am in probably my most ecstatic state.  It is a state of mind and spirit where I feel that I'm simultaneously fulfilling my needs for this sense of urgency as well as for this sense of lethargy.  It is a harmony of my impulses to sculpt, to create, to discover, as well as my desires to be sculpted, to be created, to be found...  It is a place where my existence in my surroundings is least qualified, least complex, and most singular, because the flush of contentment I feel cleanses me of doubts and worries and fears.  I have felt this numerous times since being in New Orleans, and it has been wonderful.  And I think that might just be what having a sense of home is.

Though, of course, my home is in Seattle.  I can't wait to come up to visit for Christmas.

PS: Check out this time-lapse video of photographs taken hundreds of miles above the Earth...  pretty beautiful.  Stunning.     http://vimeo.com/michaelkoenig/earth-timelapse-iss

Love
Kevin