In My Head

[Thanks to Off the Wall, a cool SoCo shop for this reflection shot.]

I find things to worry about. From the ridiculous to the sublime. What is happening here? What just happened there? What if this happens? Or that? When will I die? What if I run out of money? What if the world ends, more or less?

Meanwhile though I sometimes find a way to enjoy reading (and typing if not writing). I whack a tennis ball for a winner and am thrilled. I take a walk, looking at houses and lawns, dogs and other walkers as well as litter and blades of grass. I think: it's great to be alive, observing this moving this way. And really: who cares what's next.

Still...I'm going to get that air bag recall in my car looked at this week, I swear.

A Part, Apart

People wear me out. There. I've said it. It's enervates me to socialize. (Enervate, vt, to weaken mentally or physically.) I like alone time even if I'm out among strangers but not specifically supposed to be engaged with them.

I took this photo in Dallas, on McKinney Avenue, while walking around by myself. (FFP was getting a massage in the hotel spa.)

I realized today that I'm the right age and in the appropriate physical decline to participate in group travel. But. No. Cruise, maybe. (I still want to get FFP to try a cruise.)

On the other hand I like to be a part of things. I like to be included. As a kid I wanted to be in groups that had uniforms. I loved uniforms.

Now I don't want to belong to groups. But I do want to feel like I'm a part of things. But, you know, apart. I've been feeling a little depressed and adrift lately. I hate to feel like that. Especially when I should feel great. When, by external measures, things are going great.

Ephemeral and Colorful

This morning I was doing my best impression of sleeping in. Which due to tennis some mornings and other duties, like being at the courthouse yesterday, is surprisingly hard for this retired girl to achieve. But FFP woke me to see the contrail tracing up the sky by the Frost Bank. It was pretty dramatic. Fleeting. But dramatic. Dawn and dusk are like that: colorful and dramatic. Just like the drama at the beginnings and endings of everything.

Sometimes I wish things would be static for just a moment. Just hold up and let me catch up. I could get through the newspapers and the bills and the duties if more didn't show up each day. But every bit of life is a fleeting moment, a picture you can never take again. Whenever you stand over a dying person or try to help someone who has just been through surgery or just smile or frown at a stranger on the street? That is that moment and it is complete even as it flees across time like the contrail. It fades but it is that dot on the time line and it's irretrievable.

Knowing how ephemeral life is can give us a calm respect for how time towers over us. Or it can weigh us down as we try to do everything at once as we pursue a static place that doesn't exist. I'm trying to grab the calm this morning. To find some peace with the reality of life. To revel in the fact that this moment and its discomforts are soon gone. That things change and that's the good part.

Life's Rubber Bumpers

I used to love leaning into a six-foot-long tilted board lighted garishly and covered with lots of lights and rubber bumpers and roll overs and flippers you controlled, trying to guide a silver ball to defy gravity and rack up points...to win a free game or beat an opponent or just to listen to the score being counted with dings and clicks, the thunk of the free game counter. No video game ever gave me this feeling. Also, the Atomic Fireball which featured Norse gods was where I learned the names Odin and Wotan. The former is often useful in crossword puzzles.

Life isn't unlike an old school pinball experience. There is the inevitable decline, the lights and color and score-keeping. And the random way the rubber bumpers and roll over poppers send the arc of things careening here and there.

Last night a couple at a party we attended told the story of their meeting, how they both went to a dance club on a certain evening. How she asked him to dance, he refused her because he was in the process of buying someone else a drink, how he found her later and danced. Our lives are like that. FFP and I once wrote a version of our paths through life that improbably brought us together and packaged it up as our holiday card, masquerading as a board game called 'IF' I believe.

All those moving parts of our lives, the world, everything mattering in ways we never expected. All the little accidents, the happy ones and the tragic ones. And you with just the tiny control of a bit of table English (not too much or TILT!) and the flippers (relax, use them separately, careful, timing is everything).

Holidays is drawing to a close...ends Wednesday. Maybe I'll keep writing in this particular space. Or not. Put another couple of quarters in and see.

What I Wish For

I wish I were out taking a walk on a bright, cool day. I took this from the Pfluger Pedestrian bridge last Sunday. I was walking back from Zach Scott theater and I was going to meet FFP at the condo and we were going to a party that promised to be wonderful (and was). The "kids" (my 39-year-old niece and her husband and their three-year-old daughter) were still with my dad so I wasn't worried about him as much. Life felt right.

As I type this I'm sitting at my dad's. Just goofing off on the Internet at the moment. We've been sitting here discussing what help he is going to ultimately need when he finishes recovering from this illness and when/if home health is stopped. There were no big duties when I got here today. I got his paper in and that pleased him. "You get addicted to things," he said. He told the OT evaluator yesterday he didn't read much anymore. He doesn't in the way that I don't read much anymore: he reads papers and magazines but hasn't gotten around to any books lately.

My life hasn't been the way I've wanted it lately. Too much hospital and sick room. Too much worry and unknown stuff with Dad. Heck, with myself as well. Not enough exercise, not enough walks (like the one from the picture), not enough tennis. Not even enough cleaning my own apartment and doing other chores there and computer stuff. (I always long to do that stuff when I don't have the time for it.)

I've gotten away to holiday parties and some adventures with FFP in the evenings and it's been good some nights, great even. Other times I was down a little, feeling sorry for dad, angry at dad, angry at myself, feeling like a failure. Mostly, though, it's been delicious getting away, going to parties and out to eat.

I used to have a little writing exercise I did when I felt my life wasn't going my way. I would write down a perfectly imagined future, what I'd do day in/day out and week in/week out. There would be descriptions of exercise, dining, travel, shopping, creating. Then I would ask myself what parts of the life described I could have in spite of my current situation. In other words, I'd try to find time inside the real life limitations of my existence (work, chores, taking care of others, limited resources like money and time) to do things that I'd do if there were no limitations. This made me really realize how much I enjoyed, say, exercise or playing tennis or even some chores. It made me realize that if limitations were cast aside, I'd still love a fine meal and a glass or two of wine or reading the newspaper with a good cup of coffee.

Digging deeper in your desires will make you realize how much you really have already of your 'perfect' life. And it will make you make a few changes, too, because many times what you want is right there. You just have to do the things you love.

The Unexamined LIfe

After you die, people write about you, sum up your life. If you are somebody, maybe someone writes a biography or you write your autobiography while you are still around. (If you are nobody, you write a memoir!) Old Plato said it.

"The life which is unexamined is not worth living."
--Plato, Dialogues

I just finished writing a little piece about a friend who died last year for another friend to use in a tribute. I have so much material about this friend that it's hard to hone in on a couple of pages of words and quotes and a few pictures. The e-mail file for this friend has almost 2000 pieces of mail. As I struggled to keep my facts straight (even the year something happened sometimes eludes me sometimes) I appreciated the scattered online journals that I kept and that e-mail file and files of paper journals and records.

I realize that I've neglected any kind of journal for some weeks except a few scattered and distant entries here that now seem full of self-absorption and self-pity and short on facts.

The other day a friend said something like 'I'm tired of the examined life.' Not me, though. The better record I have the better I feel...even when I can't locate anything in the heaps and piles of pictures and words. I wish I had a record of every bite I'd ever eaten and every movie I'd ever seen and every song I'd ever heard. So. I've got to get back on the journal bandwagon. Online and/or off.

While thinking about this entry, I tried to find the above quote by looking in my old journal entries housed on the IPOWER host. All my WEB pages on this service were out of service. Very disconcerting.

This reflection picture, by the way, is from the store VIVID although in the picture name I identified it as Uncommon Objects. You live, you lose track, you die.