I was this close to telling you what the Top Secret Plans are. I just wrote half an entry explaining everything and laying it all out and getting into all the work I’ve done over the past eighteen months and how yesterday I received some very disappointing news about the Plans. I was going to ask for the help of the internet to make the Plans happen, and I was going to give up the little silly dream of announcing on this journal, with much fanfare, that the Plans have come to pass! just because I am so tired and discouraged about the Plans right now.
Yesterday I got this email saying, basically, that the Plans could be delayed by three years. All the work and effort and money and time and thought I’ve put into the Plans, well, that’s all fine and good, but I may just have to wait to do them the way I want to do them. In fact I may not be able to do them at all. I don’t know yet. I got the email yesterday and saw the words “July 2006” and “one to two year long process” and I couldn’t even really understand what that meant. Three years? How did I miss the fact, after all the calling and emailing and researching and discussing and pondering, how was I so completely unprepared? I just sort of stared at the screen and then replied, asking for confirmation that, really, this will take three years? And the answer I received back, very quickly, since apparently this organization has decided to become the model of expedited efficiency in the last week, even though I have been calling and emailing them for months without answer…anyway, the answer was “Oh, I’m sorry, did we say a one-to-two-year waiting period? No, that’s completely wrong. I meant a one-to-two-year waiting period if you’re lucky. And I just put the email in its appropriate folder and went to an herbal soapmaking class with some girls from my work and made a thing of lemon-lime scented glycerin soap with some plastic lizards embedded therein. I can still hardly think about it, even though I have to start not only thinking about but acting upon this information as soon as possible, like, today.
All is, not, I’m happy to say, completely lost at this point. There is a Plan B. There is a Plan C. There may potentially be a Plan D or E or whatever the hell, but I don’t know yet. I have to check, I have to see, I have to find out. What I do know is that it’s getting harder and harder to keep motivated to make the Plans happen…after all this time spent thinking about them and trying to make them happen, I’ve received very little feedback or support. I had one very positive development occur a couple of months ago, and then my Plans-related trip to New York went pretty well, and that was encouraging. But there have been long stretches of days and weeks and months where I kept trying to research and figure out and take into consideration, and nothing happened. No one returned my calls or my emails, and all of a sudden another week would have gone by, and…nothing. Now it’s August, now it’s September. Now it’s October and soon it will be 2006 and will I have completely wasted 2005? I can’t tell, I don’t know.
Three years. Where were you three years ago? Where will you be three years from now, do you know? How do you know? Three years ago this week my friends Rob and Anna came to visit for a weekend, and I met Omar and Monty. I had been working at my old job for a couple of months and was still getting used to being employed, having to go into work every single day. I was smack in the middle of a relationship with someone who didn’t love me and couldn’t tell me he didn’t love me, and I was thinking about that a lot. I’d cut my hair from its previous hippie length to a more manageable and slightly less split-endy shoulder-blade length, and I’d been doing this crazy online journal thing for about ten months. I had about ten readers at the time. I was just sort of doodling along…I’d graduated from social work school but wasn’t able to get a real social work job, and I think I was just sort of marking time, the way we all do, or a lot of us anyway, for long stretches of our lives.
If you’d told me then what I’d be doing in three years, I would not have believed that I’d leave that relationship, that I’d cut my hair off, that all my friends would have babies, that I’d live in two different houses in two years, that I’d go to Europe twice in one year, that I’d finally make it to the intermediate bellydance class, that I’d meet and become friends with people I’d get to know from the journal, that I would make a fantastic octopus plate. How could I know those things? How could I have planned then for what I’m doing now, for what I’m trying to be now? When I thought the plans would happen next year I could easily think three years ahead…but I don’t know if I can think about the next three years just staying where I am, doing what I’m doing. I love my city and my friends and my very fun weekends, but I don’t know. Another three years. If I have lost some motivation now I can’t imagine that I will be able to keep it up for three years. I can’t even imagine myself at thirty-three but I can imagine how three years can just sort of go by without my much noticing…and I don’t want to do that anymore. I want to do something bigger and ostensibly more exciting. I want to do the Plans.
So today and this weekend I’ll do some more research and make some more calls and write some more email. I don’t know if any of that will make much difference or if I will have to completely reshape the way I think about the next couple of years. I’m going to keep the Plans a halfway secret a little while longer, I think…mostly because of my magical thinking that believes that if I don’t tell the internet then I still have a chance to make them happen. I may crack soon, though. I may just give up.