Please insert ritual apologies for having not posted in far too long here. There haven't been any crises or upheavals preventing me, just the usual struggle to cram the too many things I want to do into too little time. I've mostly been spending my time writing fiction rather than blog posts, which is a great change of pace and I'm glad for it, but I do feel the tug of wanting to produce more content for poor Parentheticals. All of which leads me to today's metaphorical musing, about being a Pinball Wizard.

I started thinking about pinball the other day as the perfect metaphor for the two-sided feeling of bouncing back and forth between two tendencies, with all the shiny noisy rewards and perilous pitfalls one bumps into in between. Specifically, I was thinking about how I'm constantly flipping the little silver balls of my time and attention back and forth between a driving desire (and sharply-honed ability) to Get Things Done, and an appreciation of what's already been accomplished (not to mention an appreciation of all the little pieces that had to align in order for those accomplishments to happen, whether or not it was me that aligned them or they Just Happened). Sometimes my balls run into obstacles and head off in unexpected or unhelpful directions, and sometimes they let me rack up tons of GTD or Appreciation points, and sometimes no matter what I do or how masterfully I flip (or shake the whole game while cursing and railing against fate and luck), that ball just vanishes into the dark void and I have to start over. 

Now, I am a pretty good "pinball" player, but I still have to think about it too hard. (Do this, do that! Appreciate how far you've come! Try to head for that corner over there, it'll give you way more points. Head up that ramp! Now down! Hey look at that shiny light! Cool, by doing this I got even more points! Can I do it again? Aw, look at how many points I've already racked up, I really am a wizard!) What I want is to get to the point where I'm like the Pinball Wizard from the Who song, who plays by intuition and wins because he doesn't get distracted by all the shiny noisy. I want to get to the point where I just *know* when it's time to push and use my Juggler superpowers to get things done, and when it's time to be my own cheerleader and hang out in appreciation mode. Of course, the only way to get to that point is to wean myself away from the shiny noisy distractions, or at least to pay more attention to the flippers (that actually *are* under my control) than to the variety of things my balls collide into or the unpredictable ways the balls bounce. Hey, Pinball Wizardry isn't a school of magic for everyone's tastes, but it's what I'm studying right now...