seal | My navel, Jane Austen, camp, and posting in F minor

I don't know abut others, but my life has never been straight forward, it has always been filled with doubt, hesitations and analysis from many possible angles. A friend once told me that all these things came from being an impulsive and emotional nature at heart, and from being trained at a very young age that these were lesser qualities to have, and since I was also considered fairly intelligent, a close male relative once compared me to a noble metal that was at the same time impure. (he was Polish, and the Poles are prone to categorizing, romanticizing their taxonomy and then trying to excuse it all by a patina of logic, in this process it's probably important to remember that what came first was a knee jerk emotional bias, which started the whole damn thing)

Anyway, I'm always partially ashamed of being slow and introspective when it comes to the big things, the things in which you should be clear and cut cleanly and swiftly with a sharp blade.

It can take me such time to realize why I feel or think a certain way...and it scares me that there may be people out there who are so fast. So very fast, and yet still make the right decisions.

I think a life crisis is just like that when it comes with years, not with particular triggers or blatant happenings. We discover what our subconscious didn't want us to discover, or we see things from angles that we didn't see before and it can be a really heavy experience.

There are certain films and books I come back to when I feel at odds in this particular way, I guess there is a whole collection. They are just there to kickstart certain thoughts or emotions..I could give you a list, probably more impressive than Sense and Sensibility or Persuasion by Austen, but Austen can really take the short cut into this swamp for me.

In Austen stories there are these long silences, in which nothing happens, in which all the pauses are meaningful and in which choices are extremely important and often set in stone once they've been made, so in the rare occasion where a character is given a second chance, it is gently climactic. And everyone and their dog is analyzing everybody's feelings, except the bad guys. That's actually what sets bad and good guys apart in Austen stories, the bad guys never analyze, they just gossip and tend to their own urges without a second thought. And they are swift, their decisions are always very swift, have you noticed that when reading or watching Austen?

Austen's stories always divide people by certain lines, the women for instance, are mostly young with flowing hair and full cheeks, and then you become a matron with one of those white bubbly indoor lady-caps. Children do not count and aren't very interesting in these stories, but the spinsters are, even though there are very few of them and they eventually also get married in the end. The spinsters however, are always portrayed in a thoughtful and many layered way..lingering around thirty, having made many sacrifices and had such abundance of time to think and analyze what went wrong, why and in what way.
The men can be interesting too, except that they are not vulnerable to age in the same way as the women are. They too, often carry lots of emotional baggage with them which is not explained or revealed until pretty far into the novel, which in retrospect explains why they were odd or rude or whathaveyou.

I don't know why I came back to Jane Austen today. It's been a few years I suppose, and I have piles of new, interesting stuff to read or watch, but Austen it was. I've been quite a bit under the weather the whole week, which hasn't been easy while hiking with kids in the foothills.
It was also enlightening to quest-lead a group that was fairly functional and talented, it taught me that in spite of that, I'm still not sure this job is for me in the long run.

There are so many things I should like with the work, and I do truly respect and like the vision of the company...but in the end I'm left feeling pretty hollow and hesitant.

I can do the acting, I can do the paperwork (and lord knows there is plenty), I can do the camp leader bossy thing, I can do the security thing, I can do the physical thing, I can do the role playing rules, I like kids in general...but in the end...I dunnow.

I'm trying to figure it out, maybe the simple truth is that I'm a sissy or something.
One thing that struck me as interesting the other day though, was that I find the pauses in the job, the hardest to endure. The times where I have to pretend camp spirit, where I feel I should be peppy and energetic with kids and adults while not quest leading. It made me understand why I find acting on the stage easier than this.

We'll see what happens. This post is unfocused and maudlin and truly makes me nostalgic for the old days of LJ..when I felt I could write these without shame. Still, for the love of LJ, which I will never leave, unless it's shut down for apocalyptic reasons, I'll start posting in F minor again in this shack.