(no subject)

The namesake character in Kevin Hearne's Iron Druid series is a several-thousand-year-old druid. He has tremendous magical power that would allow him to commit major acts of environmentally-motivated guerilla warfare. He is bound to protect the spirit of the planet he lives on. He could destroy mining equipment at open-pit excavations in the Appalachians, disable the fracking equipment causing ground water pollution and earthquakes, or numerous other things. But he does not. Not because he isn't motivated, but because it would be a drop in the bucket.

I imagine I feel a bit like that when I see things being passed around Facebook like a video of a law enforcement officer slamming a 12-year-old girl's face into the ground. It's horrific and it makes me angry. I feel obligated to make an angry phone call. I feel obligated to go to the place it happened and protest. But I can't call everyone and go everywhere. I believe in the need to do something for someone; doing nothing gets nowhere. But I don't know how to discriminate.

I think the answer is to do what looks doable. Something local. Something approachable. Helping people repair their bikes or working in an animal shelter. It's difficult to justify that to myself when I feel like there are more and better things I could be doing.

I'm feeling a mixture of large parts of anger at the state of the world and futility at my inability to change it lately, even if I were actively working at it, and it's frustrating. I'm also realizing that I've made many choices in my life out of a sense of obligation, and I need to figure out when a sense of obligation, whether to a friend, family, partner, or the people of the world at large is unhealthy. I'm not very good, I think, at knowing what I actually want. Conversely, I'm very good at thinking that I want what other people want me to want.

I talked with Danae at length about that last night. I'll likely write more about it later.

Guitar

For the first time in most of ten years, I can play guitar without lingering low-to-medium intensity wrist pain. My primary hope for the surgery was to be able to do long-distance bike trips, but this is a pretty awesome fringe benefit. I learned how to play a few chords left-handed, but never got very good with it. It's been a long time since I worked on chords and played songs.

The last couple times, I pulled up a reference E online and then tuned the other five strings by ear. I did that again tonight, but after a bit I decided to download a tuning app for my tablet to show housemate N. I'd thought I was doing a halfway decent job tuning by ear: I was wrong!

Now I need to get my printer down here so I can make copies of various tab sheets again. I have no idea where my old binder of them went.