Updated Plans and Future Fun
I’ve been trying for days to get a blog entry written, to update you all on how my plans are shaping up, but I was down with the flu for a bit, and now that I’m all better, I’m very, very busy and I’ve also been having a little writer’s block and general tiredness and falling-asleep-earliness from the Winter Blahs. But then Mistress Yoko wrote to me yesterday and asked me to update her on my plans, and of course I can’t delay answering Mistress Yoko’s emails, so I wrote her a nice, long update last night. Then, this morning, she wrote back to me and ordered me to get the update posted in my blog today. Well, that lit a fire under my procrastinating butt, since my butt knows all too well what can happen to it if I don’t meet Mistress Yoko’s deadlines! So here’s the update…
I’d originally planned to get my revenge on Valkyrie before Valentine’s Day, and then to go into the monastery in mid-March. I’d also expected (with considerable trepidation, of course) that aside from preparing for the transition to the monastic life, I’d have to spend a lot of time this Winter suffering various indignities at Neige’s hands, for Mistress Yoko’s amusement. But of course, at the time that I left for my 2-month stay at the monastery this past October, I didn’t know yet that Neige would be away all this month (she’s off doing some kind of “intentional community” thing with people she met at Burning Man this past Summer). Also, I didn’t know yet how poorly things would go with my family at Christmas.
So, early this month, I found myself in an unexpected situation… I had more time on my hands than I’d expected (since whatever plans Mistress Yoko had for me were on hold until Neige’s return in February), and I also had more anxiety than expected about my future (since if I ever give up the monastic life, I’ll now have only my own savings and investments to fall back on, not the support of my family).
Well, as fate would have it, it was at this point that my longtime employers (the ones I’d parted ways with to go into the monastery this past October) called me up and asked if I would be willing to come back and work as a consultant for a couple of months, at an even higher rate than I’d been paid as a regular employee. Naturally, I jumped at the opportunity to fill my unexpected free time with gainful employment that would allow me to pad out my safety net quite nicely! So I’m back at the old company again, working my little butt off, until sometime in late February.
When this consulting stint is done, I’ll need time to do the things I’d originally planned to be doing now, like studying at the local zen center, putting in some volunteer time (I haven’t decided what organization I want to volunteer with yet), and lording it over Valkyrie. So I’ve pushed back my departure time by about five or six weeks… I now plan to leave for the monastery in late April instead of mid-March.
I soon realized that the one problem with all this was that I would be at the tail end of my consulting job, working long hours, during early February, which would mean that I wouldn’t have much time to enjoy my revenge on Valkyrie properly! I was quite unhappy with this.
Fortunately, Valkyrie was quite unhappy herself, when she learned how long Neige was going to be out of town. Poor foolish Valkyrie still doesn’t believe that I’m really clever enough to pull off my revenge scheme! Valkyrie says that she wants Neige to be right here in my apartment when the deadline for my revenge comes, so that Valkyrie can immediately start torturing me to rub in my failure!
So, I’ve been negotiating with Valkyrie… I want my revenge to happen when I has more time to enjoy it, and Valkyrie wants to be sure that Neige can be around when the deadline comes… so Valkyrie and I have now reached a new agreement: the deadline for my revenge on Valkyrie has been pushed back from Valentine’s Day to the Ides of March.
Valkyrie thinks that this change works to her advantage, because it lets her torment me more, since Neige will be around in March… but actually, it works more to my advantage, because my revenge plot will succeed, and in March I’ll have far more leisure to enjoy it!
So that’s the big update, and it’s good news for everyone (except Valkyrie, though the poor thing is too foolish to realize that yet)… I’ll be around a bit longer, and although my updates might continue to be a bit infrequent for the next four of five weeks, you can look forward to lots of fun posts here all through March and April!