Inexhaustable

My inventive force is like a river, seeming to flow unending whither I will it or no. “Ah!” cries out the Gentle Reader, “Here is the opening statement of a man who has written, a man who has written at length and well, a man, in short, who is setting goals and achieving them, creating words linked by insight and breath taking beauty.”

Well, no. That was the opening statement, rather, of a man who has discovered yet another facet of Passive Aggression. Pox on all dysfunction!

The key to note, in PA behaviors, is that the passive aggressor will always be the Victim, an honest man and true in a world of knaves, put upon by stress and circumstance and always called to pay for the sins and omissions of others. Clever PAs will have wonderous rationale to show that there was no viable choice but to be so put upon, but still they sing the song of Innocent Victim.

Mostly I am removed from this behavior, by clarity of vision, iron strength of will, and godlike focus. But.

Workdays, I work 12 hours graveyard, 3 days I add in two hours to move my son around and take him to school. Friday I sleep, then rise and socialize for a few hours, meet with my family, and rest so that Saturday I can be a day person, that day being given entirely over to being with the children. Sunday, then, becomes my catch-up day for housekeeping, sometimes something fun, plus whatever little things pop up when one is involved in a horde of social interactions, family and otherwise.

I have not described much time spent, idle hands twiddling thumbs wistfully, wishing for something to do. This is because that sort of time doesn’t happen much.

Then I have my list of things I Want to do, but may or may not get to. Work on the motorcycle. Exercise a few hours a week. Sleep in. Take in the occasional movie. Read, ferchrissake, a book. Usually I omit some of those that I may do the others. Fine, that’s life; we make choices and balance needs.

And then, a week late, I registered in NaNoWriMo. I registered the same day Zelda went in for surgery, the week I omitted most of my sleep so that I could be supportive for kids and Zelda and so forth. And this week I have Orycon. And, in between, has been about 7 hours per week of fighting — no, not fighting(1), intense discussion that is characterized by opposed viewpoints and negative emotions — with Zelda(2).

I seem to have undertaken a task, NaNoWriMo, which it simply isn’t likely I can succeed at. Do I have time to write? Surely. Write 50,000 words in four weeks, weeks without time for even a day sleeping in? Perhaps not. Perhaps, in fact, the goal was a bit lofty. In fact. I am considering the possibility that the goal was undertaken specifically because it was enormous, I was late, there were things that would interfere with achieving it … the goal may have been undertaken because I would try, and try nobly, and, through no fault of my own, fail. Zelda’s fault, fate’s fault, duty’s fault, not MY fault, my inabilty to write this novel would have had nothing to do with me, I would have been

a victim.

Balls.

New goal: finish the novel I have started. Write 5k words per week on it. And stop setting myself up to fail like this. It’s embarassing to manifest such low levels of sapience.


>(1)A fight is not what I thought it was. I thought a fight was an argument with emotions attached. No, not at all. What I described is merely an intense discussion, or perhaps an emotionally charged encounter. When I insisted on calling emotionally charged encounters wherein both participants were exchanging their view through the medium of yelling, slamming doors, and stomping about the house, Zelda demonstrated that I was in error, nomenclaturally. She began to spout some of the most hurtful statements she could think of, manufacturing some out of whole cloth. She waxed lyrical over my shortcomings as a father, not stating these as her opinion but quoting both children to support her view. Later, she admitted that some of what she said was spurious and intended specifically to hurt me as much as she could. That, she said, was a fight. A fight is an emotionally charged argment in which one or more of the participants do their level best to hurt one another.

And why did Zelda choose to fight in the case cited above? Because I made her mad by saying something was a fight, when it wasn’t, so she decided to SHOW me what a fight was. Well.

She did, in fact, demonstrate something to me very clearly. I suppose thanks are in order.

>(2)Why do I continue to have encounters with Zelda? My policy line has been that she has the kids. We are not divorced, and I may be able to divorce amicably (hah! We can’t be married amicably!) and divide custody, given that I make it feasable for Zelda to be pleasant. That is, I may not fight, but she must be permitted to do so. For how long? Until about $2k has been saved, so that I can move into another apartment with bedrooms for kids, and pay for divorce proceedings.

The policy line is flawed. Deeply. A bad divorce will leave me just as I am, without children living with me and putting forth several hundred dollars a month for the kids. I will be discussing this analysis with a couple people to check my work, but I suspect that the policy line was manufactured so that I could continue to be a victim.

I’ll post my findings when I have them.