little losses
April 8, 2003 05:31 PM

Last week all my websites died.

It was a minor loss, in the grand scheme of things, but it was also devastating. Total dissolution of the collab site I'd built with these other people. Over a year. Disappearance of a handful of the best-written journal entries ever to escape my fingers. History. Even the design site that never quite earned the level of focus I wanted to give it and didn't.

In first blush, it was failing everyone else that got me all cold air over desert skin emotional. Then it was - oh, my - these things are really important to me.

I dreamt the other night that I quit another volunteer job (working for a professional organization for a profession that the organization sometimes makes me want to not pursue) and began designing webpages for every NOW chapter in America. This might be a sign to quit that potentially career-furthering volunteer gig or even to consider what career-furthering means, if anything, to me. It might be images strung together in my subconscious.

Images of no good. I have one image of myself as defined by my career, and one defined by the things I do by accident. Something about these tiny losses made me think about my career as a job and the accidents as what I do.

Words like tailspin come to mind.