embouteillage

Suddenly it's the morning - a grey one. I stayed in bed until I could remember a specific motivation to get up. Still working through fall-out from the wine incident, I realized that, no matter how much I pretend, I am still holding out hope for something meaningful with someone. And so I can either work to destroy that hope or work to realize it. What got me out of bed was the latter.

Blockages
So many metaphors to mix; I'm excited. The French word for traffic jam is embouteillage, which means bottleneck, but also comes from embouteiller, which is to bottle up (wine). It's come up a lot in recent conversations about creativity. You can't be recklessly creative if you're blocked up about something - it's holding you back. Several people I know are in an unproductive, uncreative holding pattern, and the cause always seems to be some sort of personal crisis getting in the way of the flow. As for me, I think I've been creative recently, but maybe there are deeper depths to explore once I unbottle some of these traffic jams.

Tension / Release
My parents were apologetic, of course, not knowing about the wine. Like I said the other day, it's not about the object, the wine, whatever. That bottle didn't really contain wine, for me, but a year's worth of waiting, hoping, and disappointment. There was tension contained within that bubbled over Sunday night. That's the problem with bottling it up, creating tension; if you're in control of its release, great, but if not, then it's painful. It's like carrying gunpowder:you can either make some great fireworks or it explodes in your face. Ultimately, there was too much tension for its own good. Whoever it was meant for would have been overwhelmed by the significance, and so would I have been. It's like when I made pineapple mango pancakes for Cory. My sister had brought them back from her honeymoon in Hawaii, and I saved them for a year or two. So then I make them for breakfast and suddenly the whole thing becomes much more intense (for me). I'm an intensity junky.

And so, in conclusion, the things we keep we keep for our emotional attachment to them. In our Materialist culture, it's our' version of karma. See, really, in the East, in many of the religions, both good karma and bad karma carry a weight; the goal is not to accrue good karma (like points in some cosmic role-playing game) but to unburden yourself of all karma. ... Now that I say that, it sounds silly to say that Eastern religions have a goal. ... Well, for we in the West, to understand, let's stick with that and move on.