wherever you go, there you are.

Packing. Man, I just hate packing. It's not as bad this time as when I moved from London; at least I'm dealing with a humane amount of clobber, and there's far less chucking out that wants doing. I reckon I'll have the bulk of it done within a week.

Which is good, because I'm going to need the time and the space for some serious magick. See, travelling is all well and good but there's this eentsy problem: You carry all your old mental baggage with you, whether you realise it or not. How much you take away from all your new experiences depends to a large extent on how much you're prepared to leave behind. If all you do is import the same old obsessions and behavioural tics then you haven't really gone anywhere. All you've done is spend a lot of time and money to stand still. (Oh, and then you come home and bang on ad fucking nauseum for the next fifteen years about how those two months in Goa changed your life, preferably to someone who can't afford a day-trip to fucking Calais-- but I digress.)

I really can't afford that sort of dead weight anymore. There's this agglomeration of old crud that I'm just dying to excise from my personality.

There's the tendency to go into avoid mode when I'm anxious about something, rather than face up to it. Since one of the things that makes me anxious is meeting new people, this is a bad trait to carry to a new country. I'll be meeting a lot of new people and trying to get to grips with a new language and a new culture; locking myself in the flat won't be terribly helpful.

Then there's the whole job business. In the past, I've tended to accept unpleasant dead-end work situations because I'd convinced myself that there was no choice in the matter. This must cease forthwith.

Then there's the lack of motivation. Focus isn't the problem. Time isn't the problem. Ambition isn't the problem. Ability isn't the problem. The problem is that when faced with the necessity of actually doing some work, be it a piece of writing or an exercize in circuit design or whatever, I tend to panic. It's like: "I might not be able to complete this satisfactorily, so what's the point of even getting started. Blaah."

All this must and shall change, not just because it's uncomfortable and boring but because it's completely fucking pathetic. Fuck it. I know I can do better than this.

You think I like being this petty? You think I like being 29 years old and feeling like a pickled adolescent? Goddamn it, where's my maturity? There was supposed to be maturity! They promised! And yet here I am, still stuck in the bloody moebius-strip Bildungsroman that is my life.

Trouble is, knowing your problems and being able to solve them are two different things. I've made a lot of progress over the last few months but something tells me that to get further, Magick needs to happen. Big magick. Regulation-length sigils just aren't going to cut it.