The Grind

Blogging has been low on the priorities of late. June was a whirlwind at work and then a crash-course in emotional endurance that I may just be getting over now. I have been doing a great deal of visioning and hoping in the last few weeks: how can I find a way to be a productive creative person AND keep a house, maintain a relationship & do my job? I have been thinking that not needing sleep would be a nice start, alas that is not really possible unless I want to be a big ole bitch to everyone. Besides not enough sleep would likely get in the way of productivity...
So-- the economic climate being what it is (oil and food prices steadily rising, rising, rising) T and I have been having some serious conversations about how to make it all happen this year. Luckily, there *are places where we can trim. Sadly it is going to require of us a level of inner "lawfulness" heretofore unseen (ie actually following a budget, instead of just writing it and then filing it in the drawer). But we have The Oasis here, and we must make the necessary choices to heat it and feed ourselves in it.
But I have so many wants! And what a powerful drug wanting is. I have spent so much of my brainspace railing against materialistic monoculture-- only to look deep in my heart and see it there lurking like an ironic promise kept by some other self.
I WANT gap jeans.
I WANT a digital camera.
I WANT a new tattoo.
I WANT to go out to lunch.
I WANT to have the summer off.
WANT, WANT, WANTS!

Sigh, the brat factor, eh? or it is it less about my being a brat and more about the American Dream? No matter how "radical" one feels oneself to be there is still a level of inescapable conditioning that seeps in to even the most astute mind. I like my creature comforts, that's for sure. And there was certainly no lack of them when I was growing up (despite the Boston/Shreveport economic split). So here I am, a grown-up with a house and a big pile of want trying to wade through it as best I can. Trying to balance the wants table against the needs table and just hoping that I can find my way through the maze that it is.
I was just re-reading Huxley's Brave New World and marveling at how deep their conditioning was cut into them-- truely starting at conception. Certainly I was not created on an assembly line and then intentionally conditioned to be what I am through "sleep teaching" and specific embryonic advantages and disadvantages. But Huxley's warning feels very timely, still. Some say we are born just who we are-- personality and tastes and procilvities already there waiting to be honed with experience. But I say who we are born as (and become more fully as time marches on) is meddled with by the media monoculture! For exampel, natural tastes are turned into WANT, and therefore exploited by Nabisco and Gap and Delta. How can we escape it???
Perhaps this is what I will try to address with my writing, and with my teaching, for the rest of my days.