Rotate the foodstuffs!

I complain too much.  This is a good life I have.  I had the good, blind fortune to be born in the First World.  I'm pursuing my interests and passions.  I'm making enough money that I can, and do, spend a good portion on non-essential, luxury items: TV, books, music, fancy food.  My financial outlook is stable and secure for at least three years in the future.  I'm educated, perhaps overly so.  I have friends in multiple cities all over this country each happy and excited to see me.  I live in a country that, for all its faults, allows me the freedom to be who I want to be, to live how I want to live.  I have a family that is both endlessly supportive and unfalteringly loving.  There are, certainly things I would like to change about my life, but I have the opportunity to effect those changes, so they're not really worth getting bent out of shape over, and no one's fault but my own.

*shrug* I'm in a very peaceful mood right now, and I wanted to write this down so that next time I'm in a bad mood I can go back and reread it and remind myself that I am, in fact, quite blessed.

Thank you all for your comments on my last entry.  I want you to bear in mind that I do appreciate them, despite whatever else I may say.  You should also know that I just went and re-read them, and I'm reacting much more positively toward them; but this is based off an earlier reading, which stewed and led to a big bout of introspection.

I really should have disabled comments before I posted that damn thing.  Here's the deal: I know you meant well, but I don't take criticism well.  Sure, I can pretend to take it well, but in actuality even slight criticism elicits a seething defensiveness inside my head.  I get ridiculously steamed.  It's a flaw I'm working on, with middling success - hard to take constructive criticism, even from yourself, when it pisses you off.

What's that you say?  You weren't critical?  We-e-e-ell.... yes.  It's true, you weren't.  I know this intellectually.  That being said, the comments, to my diseased mind, lightly imply a lack of perspective on my part.  And my diseased mind further extrapolates that to criticism.  And then my panties spontaneously bunch.  Like I said, middling success.

Anyway, clarifying: the problem I mentioned yesterday is not a question of making things work together harmoniously, or of a fictive exclusive choice between options.  Y'all seem to think I meant that, and I blame it on the verb mesh.  In fact, it's a question of timing and scheduling.  It's just shitty timing, really.  No, not everything has to happen right this second, but right now I'm in a little bit of limbo, not even knowing where I am next year and the years after, so it's a mite stressful.  I'm also feeling a little bit like I'm betraying myself, like I'm in danger of abandoning a writing dream, which really upsets me.

I'm flighty.  I know I am.  I rely more on emotion than on logic and reason in my decision-making progress, I always have.  There is an inherent danger in this: I run the risk of latching onto the new and interesting rather than the deep and enduring.  Luckily, I've got enough practicality/healthy sense of self-preservation to enforce a sort of waiting period in which to discern which category my newest idea belongs in.  And in the end, it's an acceptable risk, because I think I do better with this sort of thought.  Although I always think of practicalities, my emotional response to my environment is very important.  Also, without getting all spiritual-weird, I think I'm more open this way to an understanding of what my 'calling' is, and that's important to me.

Going at this from a different angle, let me just respond a bit to various ideas that have been floated to me both in comments and in IM chats.  First off, I don't, at least at this point, wish to do anything with a writing camp.  Maybe I might get interested in it at some point, but it doesn't really strike me as something I want to do.  A writing component in a more generalist camp perhaps.  Really, though, if my pipe dreams were coming true I'd be getting my MFA, then working on site at a camp (as a ranger?  director?) and writing *not* as a part of my job.

Second, it's been suggested that there are camps that might be nearer to wherever I end up next year.  This is true, there are.  However, for the moment at least I am quite committed to Camp Bon Coeur.  No matter where I end up next year, I fully intend to come back to Louisiana to work camp.  People come from Ohio, New York, and New Jersey to do so, not to mention Scotland and Germany -- surely I can too.  The main difficulty is that I don't want to be just a counselor/instructor, I want to become more involved in planning and development (which is the course I'm currently on)-- that's hard enough from an hour away in Baton Rouge, yet more so out-of-state.

A final note here: we would desperately love to have our own facility, instead of renting.  This is way out of reach for us.  Luke, Andrea, and I sat around on Tuesday night plotting to marry old rich people Anna Nicole Smith-style, and we even sent a video to that show Ty Pennington does, although the project's WAY bigger than anything they've ever done.  Seriously, we're thinking so far outside the box we can't see it anymore.  In all honesty it was more joking that anything else, but the sentiment's real.  So, on the extreme off-chance that someone knows of an individual or company that's trying to find a worthy recipient for a generous donation, you can inform them of our camp.  We're very professional, we do a world of good for our campers, and we can guarantee that the money would be well-spent.  Just so you know.  It's either that or sell ourselves into indentured servitude, probably to an oil company.