and the stars came out and filled up the sky

You ever get the feeling like you're waiting to live? Like you keep saying to yourself that "oh I can't do that until..." or "I'll wait until....to start thinking about that." I kind of came to the realization that I had been doing a lot of that lately. Not really putting things off because I didn't want to do them right that second, but more like putting them off because I thought I wasn't in the position that I wanted to be in so I could really enjoy them. Example, so I'm not so cryptic: I want to cook. I really want to get dirty and make some delicious recipies and have a fridge stocked with yummy ingredients and do some really awesome stuff with food. I kept telling myself that I wouldn't spend money on really nice things or really get into cooking in our kitchen because for the most part(before the housemate cleaned it up and moved everything around) it was a pit. I probably still won't spend money on nice things like knives and whatnot that my housemates would probably use and break or destroy(not that I don't trust them), but I figured all the time I spend waiting until I do things like move into my own space or get a new car or this, that, or the other thing are all really just postponing my own life.

I always said I wouldn't be that guy, that guy who says he'll wait until whenever to do whatever, and here I am slipped into that without me even knowing. Well, we'll put a stop to that quickly enough. First things first, I'm not going to werk tomorrow. I have a ton of things I'd like to get done and work doesn't afford me the opportunity to really do them, as I'm one of the few intelligent people in our office. Example: today a good number of the intelligent people were all out sick. I was the only intelligent person left in our office proper. It was a nightmare. I didn't get anything done that I wanted to, work-related or not, and I wound up taking calls and walk-in clients all day and then having to backtrack over some of my idiot cowerker's previous calls and fix whatever mess they'd made. Seriously though, some of the people I work with really need to find new lines of werk if they can't do anything but be negative and create a depressing work environment all the time. I'm sure you know the type of people I'm talking about. Sometimes I really do try to be the nice person, to go out of my way to help people and to be a good person when I do my job and interact with my clients, and while I wish I could say the same for my cowerkers, it's just not true. In the meantime, the selfish part of me says that at least I'm doing some good and making someone's day brighter, and that maybe someone will take notice of the good werk that I'm doing, but all in all I'm not doing it for recognition, I'm doing it because to some degree I enjoy it and it's a chance to use my skills. One of my colleagues proclaimed today "i'm not learning anything here anymore!" as an excuse to be a whiny bitch-ahem-sorry, and it was all I could do to say "you don't know anything anyway, and the reason you're not learning anything is because you don't want to learn, you don't care, and you're probably not bright enough to pick anything up. Please, prove me wrong." But alas, I try not to be to confrontational with the people I interact with at werk.

How does this all tie up? Well, I for one aren't learning too much more in my current position, not because there isn't more to learn, but because what there is to learn now isn't really relevant to what I'm tasked with doing, which is what sucks. So I stagnate. I say "oh, I'll study that when I need to," and that's not the mentality I want. I don't want to be the girl who whines all the time and is incessently rude to our clients to the point where they call and make jokes about her when they speak to me. I refuse to be her, unhappy with everything, unhappy with life, unhappy with her job, just plain unhappy. I refuse. I want to grow, I want to change, I want to live, I want to learn, I want to be more than people give me credit for. Already I can happily say that most people I werk with have no idea what my skillset is or what I'm really capable of-mostly because I don't use that skillset at werk-but that's not enough. I have to keep growing, learning.

This kind of prompted me to do something I've always been telling myself I need to do, to live the life I create inside my head. I need to be the person I want to be, instead of loooking inwards to him and seeing him do the things he does in my ideal world. I need to make that world a reality, and when there are obstacles to that I need to think of ways around them. The Phoenix in my mind? That's me. And I'll do everything I can to be him. I've already come a long long way, and I'm not going to stop now, not for whiny cowerkers, not for sloppy housemates. If I get stopped along The Path, I want it to be for a good reason, damn it, not for something stupid like this. So this has kind of pushed me in gear, and hopefully reading this over again and again will help keep the drive going in me-keep me doing little things from exercising and trying to eat better for myself all the way up to reading more and writing more, and back out to continuing my studies even when it seems like a lot of werk, or learning that new software package, or reading that new manual or keeping up on the news. I have to keep going. I have to. This is the way, this is the path.

I think the Elenari Elves refer to it as Des'Tai.

Thank you, Raevyn, for pointing that out to me.