Playing with (the idea of) Death

I'm so moved to continue redesigning the blog - not near satisfied with the template I chose, and I'm realizing now it's way too similar to the template I picked for my other blog. But I clearly don't have time to fiddle with it. Here I am, holed up at a café in the neighborhood, working on my final thesis draft. Or trying to work on it, and continuing to get pulled into tinkering with the blog design. What's nice is that I am finally getting into some free styling philosophical discourse in the paper, away from the ideas of the psychoanalytic canon and into my own obsessions about the dynamics of death inside intimacy. It's freeing to be here and begin to explore and articulate my ideas in tangible written words. In some way, I'm sure I hoped to master my own death anxiety by writing this paper, and I know I won't accomplish that (I think it's pretty impossible.) But the more I force myself to confront it, and in fact to become playful with the ideas, even, the less it's triggering my intense anxiety. I'm inspired by something Irvin Yalom (one of my current heroes) said about dealing with death anxiety. He said that while actual, physical death ultimately destroys us, confronting the concept of death is our salvation. And on that note, it's back to the drawing board with me.