maintenance

one of the most frustrating aspects of adult life, for me, has to be the incessant maintenance required of us in just about everything that we do. this is an inescapable facet, i believe, but i still feel the need to make note of it. it just took me two hours to swap out all the music on my ipod, and replace it with various tunes which i had hunted and gathered like a tribal warrior with a flash-drive spear. there is the endless question of what will and won't make the cut onto my portable music player, because there has to be a delicate balance there....a good amount of organic, fresh produce, which spurs the mind and body in quite a different way than the processed and already-digested music which we have incorporated and cycled into our personalities already. then too, there is the consideration of leveling and balancing the recipe overall, such that you don't end up genre-heavy because you didn't take the time to level off your spoons correctly. nothing worse than a playlist with too much nutmeg in it; it will throw off the whole flavor of your month. then of course one has selected 20 gigs instead of the required 16, and you must go back to pare down the whole thing.

but the point is that this maintenance, constant, is deadening, dulling; it robs us of such vital and diminishing time in our lives. i know some people who relish kneading their fingers into this, but personally i just can't understand it. i want to do, not prepare. probably an immature perspective for me to adopt, but what really is immaturity but an unwillingness to accept the way things are? a healthy idealism has its positive sides, as well. one should struggle to not become to sheepish in their allowances for the intrusion of life's harshness. we probably often put up with much more than we should.

this is only accentuated by the fact that i work at a medical device company, which requires the most stringent of all possible documentation regarding anything that happens in the process of developing and/or selling a product. you can perhaps imagine how frustrating it is to have to do something, anything, and then record it in a particular format.....also involved is knowledge of the format, the medium, the jargon, and keeping an eye out for how to describe something that you would normally just DO, and forget about afterwards.

maintenance creeps into my life from all fronts...there is the keeping up with cleaning, hygiene, paperwork (bank, phone, insurance, taxes, junk mail, real mail, the mail that is kind of real and kind of junk), exercise, diet. these are the realities which are not told to you when you are growing up; they are the chisels of operable society which eventually wear people down into little lumps of their original potential. i know people so involved that they could go for weeks, viably months, perhaps years, of nothing but such maintenance. maintenance and life become inextricable. friends get offended, consciously or subconsciously, if they are not kept up with every so often; i feel it in myself and can infer from that. having many friends becomes a whole system of its own, an solar system in which planets cannot swing too far from your star before they start to drain warmth, before the flora and fauna which grows between two people begin to die off and begin to be brushed away for different climates. a comfort: there are exceptions to this.

what is frustrating about the whole thing is that you can't really understand all the intricacies of something until you dig into it yourself. this makes these mundane preparations and adjustments necessary, to avoid being coddled into a general sense of luxurious ignorance. nobody likes someone who can't do any footwork for themselves, or won't. i recently heard about a service, a help-desk secretary sort of thing, and people are now contracting out this service who aren't busy professionals....some are just average people who don't want to deal with contesting a visa charge, or haggling over a doctor's bill, or going out to buy argyle socks. instead they pay a modest fee to have someone else take care of their busy-work. this sounds fantastic, but also ridiculous to a degree. like trying to buy back time wasted at a different market price. i suppose the real question is, does busy-work really constitute wasted time? so much that i write on here is a direct refuting of typical value systems, which so many people seem to have such an easy time with. i'm not sure what is different about myself, such that i was not able to adopt many of the same systems as the average person. many people would be completely content living on a ranch in a small town, doing work for the day, taking care of children until the night, sleeping in the liminal spaces between. or a law firm; pick your flavor. there's a good chance that i myself could be completely content with this storybook farmhand lifestyle. these are just things to be threshed out, combed for, well, really, whatever i can find of myself in them. what else could i be searching for? there does seem to be a genuine, good, productive feeling that emerges from accomplishing little tasks, or big tasks, which have nothing to do with some transcendental truth or existential realization. certainly those little tasks provide more concreteness, a more solid realization of something than that other, which is a constantly fluctuating field and wavers along with me from hour to hour. but am i conditioned to feel good, to feel justified after a day of errands? have i moved myself any closer to some goal; have i oiled some machinery which aids in that other?
is there a point?

can i develop something, some logic pattern, a cerebral independence, such that it eliminates the need for this? can i exist in two places at the same time?