My New Ideal Life

It has presuppositions, like affordable (to me and to the world) fuel, time, less debt, less need for health insurance.

Pots, new studios, textiles, new textile people, reading materials science texts, seeing old friends, getting better at gardening, driving a lot. A lot of West.

Want to hang out? I can leave anytime. I need a second cat carrier and harness/leash, though.

I should be writing. Or continuing the debate about determinism and free will I've had three times today with three different people. Don't they both fail, but at the same time, aren't they both only complete systems in the extreme? (I don't know where this 'complete system' jargon is from, but I'm using it.) And aren't incomplete systems structurally instable enough to warrant one's resistance to them? I mean, why believe in something that already is falling apart?

And can determinism free us from concern? If everything is determined, then nothing matters; if everything is determined, though, we have no way of knowing either what has been determined already or the fact that things ARE determined already.

And free will is just lame. You can't actually make any choice you want. Ask a sociologist.

And isn't overeducation kind of lame, too? When do I give back to the work force for real? When does my balance go positive? I take and take and I leave with no marketable skills. I do have lots of tricks for alphabetizing, I am increasing my proficiency in PowerPoint (hate), Access (hate), and Excel (ambivalence). Less paper cuts these days.

Maybe I need to ... go for a drive in the south fields, get into the clay studio once the flooding is gone (it flooded, yes, a CLAY studio where moisture is our enemy and for whatever reason, clay is stored in cardboard boxes on the floor of a basement), make some new food to eat tomorrow. Make that "warm and nutty cinnamon quinoa with raspberries," that "red lentil and cauliflower curry," some more bread. Some more hummus for Noah's Triumphant Return.

Have I told you the story of my pinch pot and pit fire project, the one I did for my advisor's nature writing class in college? I brought clay I'd dug to some wild place and make a pinch pot. Good-looking pots. I dug a pit. I put pots in it and lit a fire.

All the pots exploded in the first three minutes.

But maybe, minus the pit fire, it's worth repeating.