Lovesick

This is worse than being in love, or having a terrible crush on someone who doesn't know you exist. Here I am, pining away after a company. Oh, IDEO, if only you'd call me. *Sigh*

And on top of it, now I'm longing for ways to get more blues dancing in my life. Went to a great workshop weekend, and feeling blues to call out to me more now even than swing dancing. And yet, very little opportunity for practice and such.

I've done what I can with both these things, so there's no use in thinking about them more. I've submitted my cover letter, my resume, and my website to IDEO. I will call them again tomorrow, and this time when their voicemail kicks in I'll just leave a message. And they probably won't call back, or if they do they'll just say "yes we got your application" on my voicemail. And I've contacted someone about practicing blues dancing with me. It's just that it might be a month or so before we can even try practicing once. I can't afford to go to Austin, Texas for BluesShout, so there's no use in thinking about that anymore.

Last night I couldn't sleep because my whole body was on high alert, thinking about blues dancing and IDEO. I'm not sure how I manage that. Too many waking dreams? How do I manage to daydream so much about a job interview? Seriously... do normal people do that? Walk around living their lives while they imagine what they'd say to this or that question, making up scenarios and opportunities in their head? I seem to manage it rather well myself.

It's wonderful that I've found things that excite me. Why not appreciate that and let go of all the longing? Reminds me of something I read not so long ago... looked it up. From Ruling Your World: "Desire is a creature with an endless appetite. Like a spark put to dry grass, it just consumes. By its very nature, it can never be satisfied, because it is rooted in the aggression of looking outside ourselves for relief. That expectation always results in disappointment, self-generated pain. It's the mind giving itself a hard time." Right. Makes sense. So... I was feeling fairly content, and then finding something I get really into somehow made me more unhappy because I got caught up in desire and expectations and disappointment? Well, we can't be having any of that. I found these things in the first place because I was just settling in and enjoying what was in front of me. It's fundamentally good for me to explore and appreciate them. Just need to have my mind stop giving itself a hard time now.

It's easy to see the power of desire... My daydreams about IDEO (which I've clearly managed to idolize the way one unrealistically idolizes an object of romantic infatuation) can actually be quite enjoyable themselves. It can be hard to let go of grasping desires when the very experience of desiring can be thrilling. But I find myself losing my focus on the life in front of me. There is so much to appreciate and interact with, and I'm letting it slip away the more I long for things like IDEO and blues dancing. Enough so that even realizing this, I can't just snap back to being present, I just find myself still grasping and desiring, wanting to get back to where I was in the moment and somehow still not there. Yes, that's right, I'm grasping at the desire to let go of grasping and desire. In the past I'd just get further twisted up in that - because ultimately, that's always been my largest desire and I've let my head give me a hard time about it so many times over by now. But this times around, there's a certain lovely irony in it. It's amusing. It's human. I will simply do what I can.