CW 37

To no one in particular,

5919, here!

I usually send out my weekly report over the wire to the others. But today, I'll put it here. It's personal and it's embarrassing and it's just really parochial.

Have you heard of Julia Cameron? She's famous for having written The Artist's Way, the bible of creators everywhere. One of the tools of the recovering artist is the three pages exercise. Look it up. I do my three pages every morning. But this is more like my weekly mental dump.

I'm always grateful for the view from my window. I see trees, grassy plains, flowers, shrubbery. There are many birds: parakeets, peacocks, peahens, and many other kinds of birds who make all sorts of noises as soon as the sun comes up. 

We're planning on moving soon to a more a permanent place. Though, permanent doesn't really mean much in our context. By more permanent, I'm talking about months, possibly a couple of years, but no more. But I also don't want to move. I don't want to commit to a lease and have to deal with bullshit when the water runs out or the power goes out. Once we leave here, we're on our own. Once we leave here, it also means that I'm committing to living on this planet and working this job. Neither or these things is particularly bad. But when we left home, we took a major quality of life hit. And when we left home, we also realized that we aspired to a certain kind of life. We're not looking to live extravagantly. We're looking for enough. We're looking to live in a more harmonious way with our star systen. We resolved that our next adventure would be to live in a little farmhouse somewhere on a blue planet and we'd look to be frugal and as self-sufficient as possible. We know more or less where we'll be in about three years. But for now, moving, at least for me, involves a degree of hassle that I'm not comfortable putting up with. It also means that it will be a little bit more difficult to hit our goal of having a 50% savings rate every month. But I'm also not sure we can stay here. They may have other plans, other people that they want to house. I'll have to talk to the housing chief.

Work was alright, though Thursday was really rough. I thought my stomach problems were on the mend, but I could barely keep it together for most of the morning. I believed that I'd been suffering from food poisoning, but I think it might actually be some sort of acid imbalance. The pain came back Friday night and I was able to beat it nearly immediately by eating curd. But other than that, I finished a big part of the work that was on my plate. 

The job is what it is. In and of itself, the worksite is fundamentally flawed, plagued by poor hiring practices, ineffective management, and attempts to appear functional rather than actually being functional. Long-term this is not a place for me. My colleagues from off-planet and I know that Corp. is either a trampoline for bigger and better things, or you remain here on autopilot. A colleague of mine wants to be a writer. He quit in the before times but came back because the money was good. But he wants out. He has a choice: do the minimum, go home, and work on his book in the evenings or on the weekends, if he isn't too tired, if he isn't fielding hundreds of stupid messages; or he can choose to use the opportunities available to him at Corp. to make the connections he needs to make to eventually be free. 

E and I usually check in once a week. We came here knowing that we were on a timeline. We want our freedom, too, and so, in as much as possible, we try to move forward in a deliberate fashion. We have objectives and we have deadlines at which we want these objectives to be met. It's a big change for us. For forty plus cycles, we moved following certain rules thinking that way was the dolce vita. We got jobs, went for advanced degrees, had little ones. But we weren't anywhere closer to being out of grind. In fact, when the disaster hit, our options were extremely limited and we realized how incredibly vulnerable we were to social dysfunction. We've since realized we have to make our own moves, and to live life on our own terms.

Our conversation yesterday was important in that regard. We affirmed certain commitments to ourselves and to one another. We're moving forward together on building a portfolio of activities that will allow us to be independent and work from anywhere for ourselves. We're almost there. We're building it. We're not revolutionizing the world. But then again our goal is only to revolutionize our little world. We won't be filthy fucking rich, but we'll have enough and we'll live well.

Little by little, we're building a community of our own, too. T-D is from T1 which is also far away from here. Her and E are becoming friends. It's important for E, especially after having taken care for so long of N and O for so long and so far away from anyone and any place familiar to her. And we've always wanted to have a community of fellow travelers like us. It's hard out there and it's so easy to lose touch. Ship failures aren't uncommon. And when you don't die in transit, life on planet or on station can get in the way. Relationships are fragile out here. 

T-D as it turns out is also on a path similar to ours. She's got 4 years on-planet before heading to parts unknown again, though next time, she hopes she'll be leaving a little richer and a little less encumbered by the need to work for credits. She wants to live somewhere where it's less hot. Definitely not a climate-controlled station. A planet, she says, somewhere nice and developed.

We sympathize.