Love is not enough

I don't really feel like composing a post today. Business issues, interpersonal tensions in my family, emotional problems, and life just generally being complicated. Which raises the question: what do I do when shit happens on the road?

There's a lot that could go wrong, as I've alluded to periodically since I started blogging about this hare-brained idea a couple weeks ago. I could have bad luck getting interviews. My car could break down. Murphy's Law being what it is, I'm not going to drive up the West Coast and down the East Coast without having shit happen at least once and probably more often than that. I'm not good at dealing with shit. You could call that the central problem of my life. And a lot of things fall under the rubric of "shit," including money, work, hostility, complexity of any kind, and the unexpected. I'm hoping that leaving my comfort zone -- putting my comfort zone up to 2700 miles over the horizon, actually, given what a big country we live in -- will help me learn to deal with shit, but that's not enough. I need a plan.

I have a cell phone. (I need to switch plans, but I'm having trouble arsing myself to do so; see above diatribe on the subject of shit.) The cell phone (in places with towers) and the laptop (in places with Internet access) will help tie me to my support network, so I don't have to deal with everything alone. I want to minimize how much whining my friends have to put up with, though, so I also have to be able to cope by myself. If things are going badly, some days -- if I'm in a friendly city -- I may just skip the highway, pay for an extra day at the motel, and kick back. Maybe look for one interview; maybe not. Decompress. Then get back on the road.

So between now and then I need to work on my coping. Remind myself that what I'm doing is worth it. Because if I stop believing that then there is no journey.