A Muddy Writing Day And Other Sticky Thoughts

Odd how some days are just different, for no obvious reason. Writing feels like walking in rubber boots across a muddy field today. Squish, squish. And the boots get heavier at each step, starting to fall off your feet.

It's a different feeling from my usual troubles with writing in English, which are more akin to trying to lift small delicate objects with mittened hands. I faintly feel their shape but not really, and crap, it is annoying. So today I wear mittens AND boots.

You know the depression that often comes when you are convalescing from a flu? On one of those first days when you are up and about and feel half-human again? And suddenly nothing seems worth living for, nothing has ever worked right in your life and you don't deserve to pollute the air by existing? Those mini-depressions are sent to us so that we can feel empathy with the sufferers of real depressions, but they also remind me of the nonexistence of some permanent self. I can easily imagine a very different Echidne on different days. I have even been some of those very different Echidnes, and I bet you have, too. Well, not Echidnes, but yous.

In some other reality a quite different Echidne hates chocolate and rants and raves about spinach and votes conservative. Or so some physicists say. I seriously doubt that conservative-voting part, but I'm willing to imagine such a reality. It would be a very liberal-feminist reality in which being conservative would mean holding on to the old values of equal opportunity, caring and justice.

It's a difficult thought experiment. An easier one is to see the whole world as interconnected, people, animals, plants, stones, everything, a web in which the borders of "self" and "other" become permeable. Not easy, but easier. What does such an interconnected world mean for politics?

This is what some people would call a writing exercize. I call it my payment for the week's work. To let me go on about something silly.