Only boring people get bored.

I keep telling this to myself. It is one of those horrible aphorism thrown about by busybody aunts who chide any complaint and encourage guilt, but I might be one of those people kind of people deep down. I don't particularly encourage guilt; I'm more in the camp of perpetual re-analysis for results and reshaping future actions accordingly, but none of the handwringing over episodes that one would rather not repeat. If you repeat them and hate the results again, you should feel stupid, not guilty (sometimes I am stupid, but I try my best not to be). Anyway, I am more prone to chiding complaints than coddling them. Particularly when I am the one complaining.

I am currently bored, and it is stupid. Actually, boredom isn't the right word. Maybe I am more restless. Because I spend so little time on land when I am working, I feel like time on land is valuable and I shouldn't waste the goodness. I like working up here on boats specifically because it gives me time to crawl into my own head and cut myself off from the world and read. And I have my stupidly heavy suitcase full of books that I look forward to reading, so I could just pull one out and get started. But I can do that at sea and I am on land, so I can't sit reading a book without the potential of terra firma nagging me that I should be doing something that I won't be able to do when we finally set sail.

I've been wandering about and enjoying the beauty of the area and rambling around town and enjoying time spent with friends here, but I already do so much alone and on my own time that I kind of don't feel like wandering around by myself at the moment with no partner in crime. I've got a couple of friends in town who are awesome co-troublemakers at night, but who have real jobs and so I've got an expanding series of days with no one to ramble with.

I might get up tomorrow and try to find somewhere to build a snow man or something else fun that you can do in the snow, but even though I'm staying plenty warm and like the white fluffy landscape, I'm really more of a tropical soul. I want to go hiking and swimming and even just lay on a beach or in the grass. I know, wah wah wah. Just feeling a little disjointed and I'll quit my complaining. Don't worry, my moments of self pity are short lived (self pity is something that is mercilessly brutalized and destroyed by the other inhabitants in my head) and I'll get back to normal.

the written word

I like to think that I'm well-spoken. I know that I can be. I'm aware of my voice and tone and attempt(and often fail) to be careful with my words. But more and more I feel like I can't truely get points across until I can write it down. Not just that I can't say it, but that I almost can't fully form thoughts without the written component to hammer them out.

I wonder what my mind would be like without the gift of computers and word processers. My handwriting is miserable. I've made peace with this, and thank you very much, no, trying harder won't won't make it any better. And besides being hard to read, I write slowly. I want to believe I write quickly, but I don't. And the faster my mind moves, the slower that pencil moves. The only things that I can really enjoy composing by hand are songs and poems, with their shorter stretches and the mental exercises which make their construction slower, at a pace my pen can manage (yes, I write poems and songs. The songs might see the light of day; the poems rarely do.). I enjoy these mediums, but they aren't the main ways I sort my thoughts, though I think they might be if I was unable to type. If I didn't have this way to write, I'd most likely be a very different person and I'm not inclined to think it would be an improvement.

I'm thinking about this as I'm arguing with myself about whether or not to write about my trip to New Orleans. Whether to dig into trauma or bury it. Ultimately, we all know that buring things often encourages them to grow, while putting them through a written harvest let's you glean something from even the most uncomfortable of crops...