Stresses and Stressors and Life On My Tardis

Life is stressful and full of stressors.  That's not news to anyone.  Time is money and money can be converted into time.  The time it takes you to read this is time you could've spent making money.  Or maybe it is time you are spending making money.  Getting paid to read blogs.  Or maybe getting paid to do something, anything, besides read blogs.  Shame on you.  The time it takes to write this could have been spent working as a dishwasher at Eat n' Park.  Or could've been spent getting shopping carts at Kmart and trying not to completely lose it and burn the place to the ground.

Life has many different stresses to it.  Some of those stresses are more intense than others.  Just about all of those stresses demand some sort of relief, some sort of answer, and you can only ignore the bell for so long before they break in and tear you to pieces and sack your fortress and leaving nothing more than a few shreds of clothing and broken cookware and a few charred pages in their wake.  You have to answer the bell.  Eventually.  It's critical to your survival.

The sad part is, in order to answer those stresses, you have to introduce stressors.  Jobs, tasks, relationships, a stressor is anything you take on, voluntarily or not, to help alleviate the stresses, the ambient tensions of your existence, of being alive in a shared world.  If the world were not shared.  If the world were entirely yours, there would be a single bridge.  A single leap from stresses to peace.  A back and forth street, a channel, two lanes wide, and perfect. However, it is a shared world.  There is no single leap and there never will be.

To achieve any sort of relief from stresses you must introduce or have already introduced stressors.  Stressors which often times do introduce stresses of their own.  The channel becomes layered denser and denser with lanes upon lanes of tasks and responses all in the name of achieving a peaceful state or a state of greater fluidity and less tension than what your own ambience, your own existence, demands by the fact that you are alive and breathing and as such will not remain so in an entropic universe.  By the way, did you ever see Tropic Thunder?  Hilarious movie.  I highly recommend you watch it if you haven't seen it.  Came out a while ago.  Should be available for rental or something by now.  Robert Downey Jr's in it.  Tom Cruise to.  Surprisingly good.

Anyway, it's truly mystifying sometimes when you step back and look at and draw the circuit board, the ridiculous interstate  highway map of what you have to do just to feel good, normal, and whole, on this shared planet, in this country, in your state, in your city where you call yourself a citizen.  It's troubling sometimes.  From the time you are alone as a child until the time you die, so much of your energy will be spent on trying to return your state to a single bridge.  Return to the two channel direct connection.  The single bridge.  It's amazing the damage adding a single extra link, one more node, to the graph does.

Time is money and money is time, so let's move this thing forward.  I get that time is money, but I also get that what America values my time at is not what I value my time at.  I have precious little of it, not because I'm particularly busy, but because it is very difficult at times to function on a, for lack of a better term, "normal" level.  A level normative to my peers and expectations of someone my approximate age, build, and general intelligence.  My head wears out very quickly and I have to rest and gain space to gather myself before re-engaging.  I don't blame mental disorder as much as it's part of how I function and maintain myself now.  It's not something distinct of myself, it's incorporated [really, it's only a matter of perspective, part of yourself, outside yourself, what difference does it make from the outside observer looking in?  Very little.  The only difference looking in from the outside is viewing it one way sounds like you make "convenient" excuses when you do not perform and looking at it the other way sounds like you are a person who is unreliable and irresponsible and maladjusted, but you try to work on yourself.  "Attaboy, chap!  If you work hard enough you'll get there."  Eat me.].

At any rate, the way I understand it is spending your time allows you to convert it into money which you can use to purchase things you may need or want, things you would never have the time to learn how to make, gather materials, and then produce on your own.  The question is the conversion rate.  If the fastest I can convert time into money is a certain figure per hour, it will cost a certain amount of time to get X or Y thing, necessary or not.  Then the question becomes how much time will it cost to maintain X or Y thing at that time to money conversion rate.

With all of the time being drawn out of you, how much time is going to be left for simply living.  Will you spend most of your "free" time recovering from work so that you can go back to work so that you can keep X or Y thing you thought you needed or wanted?  How fast is that going to kill you.  How much stress is that stressor going to introduce and are there enough channels flowing back to ever break the loop long enough to have time to feel whole?  My time is worth more than the conversion rate offered.  I'll do without, thank you.  If my conversion rate changes, I will reconsider.  Until it does I am happy maintaining what I have, where I am, keeping the channels as simple as possible so that I do have time to enjoy life and write and breath and sleep.  I get it, the more money you make the "better" your life will be near the end.  I am sorry.  My mind will not work that way.  I wish many nights and days that it did.  That it functioned properly and reliably and all of the other words that make an effective and productive, ever climbing upward, American.  It doesn't.  I won't get to enjoy that.  I won't get to see that.  But hey, I could always win the lottery or something.  Wouldn't that be a gas.

Life on my Tardis is pretty okay.  Often times when I do manage to save up money and get near the cusp of making a capital improvement to my life or my ship, something breaks.  I laugh saying it because it's happened so many times it feels nearly inevitable, to the point where whenever I save up any significant amount of money I start to get anxious and wondered what the ship is going to pull out of it's hat next.  I sometimes think the answer may be a credit card, but after being buried by student loans that turned out to be all for nought I refuse to live beyond my means.  No credit cards unless they're already paid for, in which case they're not really credit cards are they?  I still have never owned a credit card and I'm damn near 30.  I had a Target card back in the day, but I think we all know that doesn't really count.  Besides, that ended in utter disaster too.  I will not do it.  If you have to make payments on something, you probably shouldn't have it right now.  Simple as that.  Of course that also leaves no space for emergencies and heaven knows there have been emergencies aboard my ship.  Gross injuries to my musculoskeletal system as wheel.  Pretty sure I still have a torn ligament in my thumb and being uninsured, that range of motion is just going to be gone by the time it heals on its own.  "You should have gone to the hospital!"  Yeah, right.  Of course.  It's a part of my life I've kind of resigned myself to.  As fast as I can improve and repair things is just as fast as they'll break and splinter and burn up and fizzle out.  Life aboard my Tardis.  One step ahead of the fire, but boy it would be nice to be a couple more steps ahead, or even a block away would be swell.

What day is it?  Sunday, 6 P.M.  Are you sure?  Yeah.  No.  Wait a minute, it's 6 A.M.!  What the hell happened?  It's Tuesday!?  What happened to Monday?  Weren't we supposed to be somewhere?  It's 6 P.M. on Tuesday.  Are you sure?  Well, okay.  We'll call them tomorrow morning at 6 A.M. and explain everything.  Yes, that will be Wednesday.  I'm pretty sure they don't want to hear it now.  What do you mean we're 5 miles from home.  This is a park bench?  Come on, man.  Get it together.  The Tardis will get you to any point in time or space within a 5 second 5 inch radius.  Except when it doesn't.



Bjork - "Enjoy (Dark Jedi Remix)"  There have been a lot of great reimaginings of Bjork's music.  This is one of my favorites of late.  So dark.  So playful.  So wonderfully and beautifully mechanically.