Serenity Now

I don’t even know if this will calm me down.

I’m having another panic attack. I started having them back in February. First time in my life. I have no clue what brought it on, though I have my suspicions as to a likely culprit. Thinking about the future. Thinking about law school. Not thinking about rowing, my mind wandering and bouncing. Some combination.

There is a theory that goes something like this: everyone is capable of panic attacks or anxiety attacks. Each of us has a glass that can hold a certain amount of anxiety. Once that glass of liquid emotion is full,  overflow, and you have water all over the table, or in this case, a case of the shakes and shortness of breath at the office.

Perhaps my glass is just really small, or maybe it’s always been almost full but nothing before February overwhelmed its carrying capacity. Regardless, I should really stop pouring.

I started this damn blog to get out of the way of my frustrations. Well, here we go. Currently I’m Indiana Jones running from a running boulder of frustrations. Except in this version of Raiders of the Lost Ark, he gets crushed by the that big rolling ball and goes and cries about it later on his weblog.

LOOK OUT INDY! Thousands of dollars of therapy await if you can’t outrun it!

Jesus.

What sets it off? That’s for part2. I need to go running and get some fucking perspective here.

Inescapable

From a recent article in The Atlantic Monthly about Section 8 housing, crime, and the movement of poverty from ghettos to suburbs:

Kids who leave poor neighborhoods at a young age still have trouble keeping up with their peers, studies show. They catch up for a while and then, after a few years, slip back. Truly escaping poverty seems to require a will as strong as a spy’s: you have to disappear to a strange land, forget where you came from, and ignore the suspicions of everyone around you. Otherwise, you can easily find yourself right back where you started.

Wow, what a great paragraph. Times like these I want to scrap all of my terribly overwrought postings on dreams and past loves and figure out how to bring real justice and change to our communities. Doing something concrete. Building. Growing. Improving.

I dance around in my head for hours but I’ll inevitable be back in the same place when I decide to tumble out of there. If I put my forehead on a baseball bat and spin myself around in a circle for a 1/2 hour, it may feel like I’ve made a long journey but I’m exactly where I started.

So how do I precipitate change? How do I combine this with everything else I’m doing?

Nerding it up in the nerdery.

Libraries also do it for me. I have recurring sexual fantasies involving geeky, bookish professor/librarian/scientist dames with buns in their hair and glasses on their nose. Usually the dream involves doing it on a desk/behind the bookshelves/on a lab bench (that’s quite a bunsen burner you have there!).