life? don't talk to me about life.

Things are starting to settle in a little bit here at the new job. My fears of enforced internet silence are fading and I'm even venturing back into IM, after being reassured by one of my designers that the internet policy here isn't, in practice, as draconian as the lawyer speak in the handout they give you in orientation might make you believe.

So far this gig has been good. Basically my days seem to be: design, maybe a meeting (or three on wednesdays), and then design the rest of the day. Pretty great, as far as I can see. We'll see how my first couple of designs go over on Wednesday, but this appears to be a pretty decent fit.

In other news, I have some weird muscle thing in my shoulder. I don't know if it's tension or if I'm sleeping weird, but it's been going on for over a week now. I tend to believe it's stress. Ella is due any time now, and I don't feel prepared.

Intellectually I realize that I will NEVER feel prepared, but there are some things that I really can do to get ready for her arrival (buy curtains for the nursery, get rid of even more books in the office to make more space, etc.) but I don't seem to be doing them.

Yesterday I had one of my minor revelations. Or, well, I started thinking about something I think about a lot in a slightly different way.

I know very well that I like to avoid things by putting my mind elsewhere -- in a book, a game, online -- but it suddenly seemed like this was part of a major shift in my life that has taken place over the past several years.

I'm getting older and feeling the weight of responsibilities from the outside world and expectations from myself to be certain things or have accomplished certain things, which I haven't. For the longest time I lived my life in this "artist's bubble" in which I discounted the real world and its necessities (money, planning for the future, etc) which made it easy to live my life in a kind of romantic fiction of what was going to happen to me -- my writing was going to make me famous/respected/wealthy.

I can no longer fool myself into accepting that story as real. This came as something of a shock to me several years ago, when it dawned on me that the fantasy future I'd been dreaming of hadn't arrived and that I was, in fact, going to have to step into the real world and learn to deal with basic things I'd avoided for a long time if I was going to get the things I wanted.

So, now, I'm stuck in this place where the whisps of that fantasy world are still inviting, but I am living more and more in the day-to-day world. I'm having a hard time reconciling the two. I don't want to give up that romantic, creative place (because it wasn't like I didn't work while I lived in my artist's dreamworld -- I did a lot of good, hard work writing and it was very worthwhile) but I have yet to find a way to make it part of my life again.

Anyone who has an idea of how to do that is welcome to tell me.