If anyone’s curious…

This morning, I stood in my bedroom looking out the window in the direction of the rising sun. While I marveled at the beauty of light through trees, I thought a lot about what was happening to my eyes. How I learned in grade school that the pupil dilates to mitigate the amount of light coming into the eye. Every once in a while, when I am standing around, I take photos of myself in the moment, sometimes in unusual compositions. This morning, I thought to take a picture of my own eye at this extreme dilation. I have a lot of paranoia associated with my mental illness and one object of that paranoia is my cell phone camera. You could say I have a love/hate relationship with it. Isn’t that how we are with everything? Anyway, I thought better to take it from the side of my eye and went about selecting the camera settings without looking into the screen. I lifted the camera phone to the right-hand side of my head and adjusted my hand and arm positioning. I thought of the shutter button as a trigger under my first finger as I lined up a clear shot. I decided against capturing the self-indulgent microbites in my phone. Maybe I’ll set up a tripod later and reenact it.  

One of my paranoid delusions is this idea that I am in the running for some ambiguous career opportunity if only I can follow all the unspoken rules to a tee. The career is one I am interested in but can’t really name. It’s powerful and connected to an underground society of some kind. In my mind, the career is with a secret force for good, and I very much want to be a force for good in the world. Part of this delusion is that the people making the decisions with this group are very disappointed in me for smoking pot and they are constantly letting me know how badly I am fucking up by smoking, but they don’t say it outright. I infer this information from media I consume. If I mess up by not following the rules, or misinterpreting them, I lose the shot at the position (I never have it securely) and I’ll have blown up my life for nothing. I talked to my therapist about these delusions this week. I talked about how I think the swat team that was here on my birthday read my personal journals and then shared the contents, how I’ve noted interestingly timed posts, emails, and computer glitches and had referred to them often along the way. I told him I felt as though I was being unknowingly assessed for my cognitive fitness and emotional control under high stress and that I sense the entity behind it wanted to push me as far as I can go to see how useful I can be to them, and if I break then…fuck me, right? No skin off their backs if some mom of three can never think again. There’s thousands more like her. My therapist said I was under a lot of stress and uncertainty regarding my personal relationships, and don’t I think these connections could be my pattern seeking brain’s response to all of that? I said yes, that very well could be, and I punched the elevator button with more force than necessary on the way out.

You know what I thought on the way home? Why would I want a job from people who would treat me like that?

You know all those people that say paying attention is it? They say you just have to pay attention and everything will become clear to you. The trouble is no one else can tell you what you should pay attention to. You get to decide that. Well, you usually get to decide. I didn’t get to decide the other day when I was filling out an online application that required a photo id, and before I knew it, I had been biometrically scanned and saved to the company’s digital memory bank. I was not told this would be happening and there was no explanation of what a biometric scan is. Only because I am uniquely interested in the subject did I have any idea at all what had just happened to me. The screen was set up like one of those frame your face inside the face ovals and the more I struggled to align my face with the oval the more unpredictable the cameras angle became, causing me to move the camera around my face to try to align it. Scan complete! The fuck? Fuck. Remember that paranoia I mentioned earlier? Maybe it was my fault, though. I wasn’t paying attention.

I also had to follow up with a few clients who were late delivering content for their marketing pieces slated for my week. They both apologized for the delay, but my schedule has been set back and I have double the work next week. Can’t complain too much about that, being my own boss is worth a few polite emails reminding other grown-ups that I am a grown-up, too and sometimes I have things going on in my life that might require a time commitment. I’m incredible grateful to work for myself. I get to have breakfast with girlfriends every Tuesday morning, and I can make schedule adjustments so that I never have to miss a kid’s school event, track meet, or dance performance. I can do the annoying errands like a pharmacy pick-up, and grocery shopping in the middle of the day when less people are there doing the same thing. I can take on more work when I need more money and pass when I want more time. However, my passion doesn’t lie with graphic design. For now, it is a means to an end.

And summer. Oh, summer is a difficult season for me. Everyone is home in my usually very quiet house. And while I genuinely love playing in the pool with them, and driving to the park to run around in unbearable temperatures in what feels like pressurized humidity, my day must expand to accommodate these activities. Nothing gets cut. This week also included the last birthday celebration in the birthday gauntlet. Laser tag (I got a little too caught up in it), some arcade games, and build-your-own frozen yogurt sundaes with 5 nine-year-olds and a couple of remarkably patient teenage siblings. I try to make the most of it. I went paddle boarding to celebrate a friend and loyal reader’s birthday. The weather was perfect, and the company was fun and laid back. I felt like I did in my twenties, until the next morning when my back reminded me that I have in fact aged (I like to think; gracefully) into my fifth decade.

I am looking forward to the fall. I’m finally returning to school after years of dreaming about it. I’ve only enrolled in only one class this first semester. I didn’t want to overwhelm my already busy schedule, and my brain sure ain’t what it used to be. I’ll be studying philosophy at my local community college. The tuition is a stretch financially, but something tells me its worth it.

But for today, in the last weeks of summer, I am sitting in the shade of an…. I’m gonna say, oak? on the lawn of my co-opted pool, listening to tinny music through the best sound system we could afford. Occasionally interrupted by the life guards whistle.

This time a long loud blow signals the end of adult swim and if you pay attention, you get to witness joy appear from everywhere to dive into the water heart first.