Hey buds,
This is the last time I’ll write to you at the age of 30. I was going to turn today’s Disco Diaries into a quiz (“Which Katya Childhood Birthday Are You?”), but instead I decided to mull over this bad habit I have of avoiding what I actually like with a weird Halloween-themed metaphor.
Corn maze syndrome
Do you ever feel like instead of just going straight for the thing you want to do, you create maze of obstacles that make it hard to get there?
Say the thing you want to do is carve a pumpkin. Maybe you’ve never done this before because your parents were more into making popcorn balls, or because when your school had carve-a-pumpkin day you were out playing hooky. No matter. The pumpkin and the carving kit are there, sitting on an autumnal bail of hay in the front of a corn maze. You just have to pick it up, and you can give it a go!
But wait — isn’t it a shame you missed carve-a-pumpkin day? You would be so much more prepared had you taken advantage of that opportunity, or had a mentor who showed you how it’s done. So what can you do to supplement?
You turn to the yellow pages. Art classes with Miss Mummy seem promising at first, but then your eyes land on something better — Witch Glinda the Gourd Wizard. If you could just meet with her once or twice, you’d be ready to carve the pumpkin, no doubt. The problem is that Glinda is on the other side of the corn maze. You decide that if the pumpkin is your passion, the trek is worth the effort, and so you set off.
Along the way, you get hungry and have to stop at Devil’s Diner for a plate of huevos rancheros. Later you get lost in the maze and have to follow a trick-or-treater dressed like Gollum to get back to the main road, but the kid just gets you even more turned around. Eventually, you realize you’ll be on this journey for a while, and will need to make some cash. You take a job at a hot dog joint called Franks-enstein as a prep cook. This sort of appealed to you because part of the job was cutting up pumpkins and squash, and it seems like it might be good practice.
Week after week, you spend your nights off venturing deeper into the maze, still trying to find the way to Glinda. You’re miserable in the maze. You decide that you don’t like prepping squash for the hot dogs, and your boss Frank is poor company.
Finally, you accept that you’re getting nothing out of this time, so you mosey back to the maze’s entrance, head hanging low. On your way out, you pass the pumpkin, slightly wilted now, and cry out in defeat, still undeserving, you feel — or perhaps unprepared— to partake in this thing you suspect might bring you so much joy.
I have to assume, for my own sanity, that I’m not the only one with a few pumpkins sitting in wait. There are projects that excite me to no end but, for some reason I stop myself from giving them the time of day. If I wait too long, that pumpkin wilts and gets tossed into the cemetery of dead ideas.
Cemetery of Dead Ideas concept sketch in progress
I haven’t really felt happy with how I’m spending a lot of my time lately, and I think it’s corn maze syndrome. I don’t trust myself to lead and I believe manifesting my wishes requires getting in good favor with people doing their own thing. Things get tangled and confusing, my intuition gets trampled, my own voice is tuned out of my head.
But that just won’t do.
Songs for us
This morning, Lætitia Sadier — founding member of Stereolab — posted a two-hour radio show of music that thrills her. Listen to her soft, French voice introduce these songs, all of them incredible.
In between tracks, she shares quotes and notes about why these songs stand out to her. Here is my favorite, serving to stimulate and inspire at a time when I’m feeling a little lost, and a little sad about it.
“[Man] tries to convince himself and women (he's succeeded best at convincing women) that the female function is to bear and raise children and to relax, comfort and boost the ego if the male; that her function is such as to make her interchangeable with every other female. In actual fact, the female function is to relate, groove, love and be herself, […] to explore, discover, invent, solve problems crack jokes, make music -- all with love. In other words, create a magic world.”
- Valerie Solanas, The Scum Manifesto
Thank you so much for tuning in, as always. See you next Friday.
Katya