Anger, Grudges, Euphoria and Memory

I am sitting here with a cup of coffee, typing on my blue tooth keyboard on my iMac (a physically pretty computer that hasn't lived up to its beauty). I'm leaning back in my chair. I usually use the wired USB keyboard because I'm usually doing numbers and it has a number pad. The blue tooth one doesn't have one. This little keyboard is light and magical. There is that great cup of coffee nearby. Maybe I'm 'just typing' but it is always a euphoric moment for me, using a computer that is working at the moment to write something to store forever (or while blogger archives it) and sipping good black coffee. My life is full of these moments. Moments of reading or visiting with friends. Completion of a task. Just walking my friend's dog this morning on a dreary, damp day felt good. Toasting with friends with some great live music playing gives me a rush of well-being.

Lately I've had lingering anger and attendant grudges to deal with. The good news is that the euphoria of moments of reading, writing, visiting with friends or listening to music stick with me. A sip of coffee takes me there and makes me happy.

But my memory for other things grows vague. Rude comments and slights, behavior that I found offensive, someone taking advantage of me? I hold onto it but then it slips away, a victim of the vagaries of memory. Perhaps because these things are inspired by the memory alone and not, like my moments of euphoria, fueled by the smell of coffee or the clink of ice cubes in a Manhattan or a sight of a red wine twinkling in candlelight.

I'm not sure how it came to be that good memories were associated with these readily available triggers, but I'm glad it's so and that my grudges and anger are more easily put aside, having to maintain themselves out of brain stuff alone.

[Today's photo is an untitled shop window reflection portrait of FFP taken with an iPhone at Let's Dish on South Lamar.]

Depressed? Happy?

I realized earlier in the month as I was doing some movie screening that movies can depress me in a lot of ways. Depressing content. Bad movies make me feel queasy at the (to me) wasted money and the time I'm wasting watching them.

Gadgets depress me. Ones I have even when they work, but mostly when they start to fail. It wears me out upgrading programs on computers. Gadgets I've thought of getting but haven't depress me because of the confusion of thinking about them: smart phones, GPS devices, a new laptop, a new digital camera. Do I even need the last ones if I get a smart enough first one? When gadgets start to have glitches in behavior or their batteries quit holding a charge? That's depressing.

Cleaning depresses me because you have to do it over and over. Ditto cooking. (You have to cook then you made a mess you have to clean, then you get hungry again.)

The newspapers depress me with news of violence and hate and economic distress. They depress me when I pay for them and they pile up, unread.

And yet. I love newspapers. I like sitting down, folding one over and reading entire articles. Newspapers make me happy in a way nothing else does. Reading news and blogs online? I like it but it makes me nervous in a way and may depress me more and it is so hard to fall asleep at the keyboard. But in your chair with a newspaper? Yeah! Yep, a newspaper, a cup of coffee. Heaven. Add a notebook and pen and some interesting surroundings. Very cool.

I like walking around and taking pictures. I get depressed about organizing all my photos or finding something fresh for Austin, Texas Daily Photo after almost 800 posts. Plus tomorrow is a theme day. The theme? Empty? I'm kind of empty of ideas for it, too. I love my shop window pictures. They make me happy in a way that isn't even sensible.

It makes me happy to watch Wimbledon on my big plasma TV in an air-conditioned room. But a little depressed that I didn't get to play myself today (rain). But I'm happy it rained. We are in a long, long drought. That's a little depressing. When temps soar over a hundred? That depressing, too. Today the high was supposed to be 93. Depressing to think that it "doesn't sound too bad." And it actually, um, felt kind of cool when we walked to a restaurant to meet friends.

It makes me happy that we made a trip to NYC. It was so fun. More on that later. It depresses me that due to some watchful waiting on a parent's health and other duties we can't get away for another trip next month. It makes me happy that we might find time to do some of our volunteer work and maybe some Central Texas getaways.

Crossword puzzle and the new Ken-Ken make me happy. The time wasted on them? A little depressed.

I'm happy I'm retired. Depressed that I haven't done more with the time. My motto "Pretending to Write but Really Just Blogging" was funnier when I actually did blog and not just tweet. My tweets don't seem to excite much interest unless I misuse grammar. Typos, grammar errors, misspelled words all depress me. A well-turned sentence makes me happy. Learning a new word or usage makes me happy. The other morning a friend directed me to an NPR deal where you can submit "Three-Minute Fiction." I quickly wrote a story of about the right number of words. I didn't submit it. It was about writer's block and the things we do to displace the writing. I was happy to write it and not submit it. I was depressed to think about all the writing projects I'm not writing.

I'm happy I'm as healthy as I am. Depressed about some injuries and things that are failing. I'm happy I can exercise as much as I do. Depressed that I'm not more diligent. I love to eat. Eating makes me happy. I'm depressed that I don't manage to eat more healthy foods. I'm depressed at what I weigh, but happy I don't weigh twenty pounds more like I used to.

I go back and forth between the happy and the depressed. Everyone does unless their life is uniformly miserable. Even then?

Ennui

Maybe I'm doing a series of essays about single words, huh?

I couldn't decide on the title. Should it be ennui:

–noun a feeling of utter weariness and discontent resulting from satiety or lack of interest; boredom.

Or malaise:

–noun

1.	a condition of general bodily weakness or discomfort, often marking the onset of a disease.

2.	a vague or unfocused feeling of mental uneasiness, lethargy, or discomfort.

Ennui seemed more like it.

I get up on a day like today, with few duties, and I just don't feel the excitement one ought to feel. Perhaps it was the continuing pressure I felt in my head. That's now been cured, I think, by 400 mg Ibuprofen.

I worked out a little. But it wasn't as exhilarating as usual. I read the papers. I dusted the closet and put sweaters away for the summer with little moth packets. I dusted here, and tidied there. Nothing seemed to give much back. We watched an episode of "Office" off the DVR, we ate slices of pizza FFP got at the Royal Blue downstairs.

Maybe it's that I haven't gotten off the tenth floor of this building all day or maybe it is just part of the process of kicking the allergens out of my body, but the world just isn't as exciting as I'd like it to be. Usually things kick up my interest. I feel like learning and doing. Not today. I feel ho-hum.

Maybe having some guests come down and visit our place and taking them out in our 'hood for dinner and entertainment will do the trick. I really have no reason for ennui (or malaise for that matter). Maybe the key is satiety. I have so much of what I could possibly want that the spark is gone. Only, usually, I pull out of this and things start to charge me up again. In fact, just looking up a couple of words has improved my mood immensely.

Not What I Expected

I expected to feel rushed and blurry about now. We went out last night and ate an old school steakhouse meal. I had promised my dad I'd pick him up after his games day at church for a late lunch. Next week (well and the weekend, too) is packed with events in the evening. But I got up without complaint around seven, having slept through the night without getting up for some Advil and/or stomach relief. (I find Aloe Vera gel caps a mild way to relief the sin of overeating and drinking and then lying down.)

Yeah, in fact, I'm not feeling rushed or anything. I called my dad, confirmed our plans. I've posted an entry to Austin Daily Photo. (I just stepped out on the balcony and took a picture of Auditorium Shores where the Star of Texas Fair and Rodeo cowboy breakfast is taking place.) I admit I'm often inordinately proud (a phrase I love) of keeping up with ADP. (I'm not into numbers or anything but my dashboard says I'm made 666 posts. The devil is in ADP today!)

I've had a couple of leisurely cups of coffee. I edited a story for FFP. I made his recalcitrant wireless USB mouse work again. Himself went across the street for Pilates at Ballet Austin. It's quiet and calm. I can hear myself think. (Did you ever wonder about that phrase? "I can't hear myself think?" Mom would say. What does that sound like?)

Yeah, I'm just sitting here riffing on my life. Wondering what I should be doing. Maybe continuing the discouraging filing I started yesterday, going over to the gym to sweat a little. Life will catch up with me soon enough and it will be time to go pick up Dad and meet a friend of ours for a deli lunch.

I have lots of things on my 'to do' list, of course. All kinds of straightening and organizing things. I need to do some of that at Dad's house, too. But there seems to be time enough for everything. Don't rush it. I wasn't expecting to feel this way today.

If you had told me back in the summer or in September that I would be looking at a Dow below 7000 and calmly figuring out how to keep the old retirement going and wondering what was going to happen to all us retired folks as the world sputtered to some possible ignomious end, I would have expected it. But I really wouldn't have expected to be so adaptable about it. I guess I'm not surprised that we just keep embracing fun. Why not when the world is in such turmoil. Oh, I know people sometimes hesitate in this environment to spend and I have, too, but mostly on things, on stuff and only because after downsizing the impact of stuff gets my attention.

You get up in the morning and things are familiar but in another way not what you would have expected or predicted. I think that's what keeps us going, going around the corner to see what's next.

I was thinking last night that I might go dark (see picture above, taken at Blackmail on South Congress for illustration, but really I mean go quiet, go dark is a theater term, but I digress) with blogging and facebook and all of it. I just sound so stupid and whiny to myself. But here I am blogging away. It's a disease.

The Trees Are Always There

One minute you are floating free, tethered only by a little string. The next you are caught on one of life's waiting limbs. So it goes.

Yeah, trying to wring metaphor out of this kite festival picture. The only surprise was that there were so few kites in trees given all the ones aloft and the ones being launched.

I'm sitting here displacing from doing one or all of the following: exercise, cleaning the kitchen, doing some personal and business accounting, reviewing information for tomorrow's board meeting of my club, taking a walk. I'd rather blog and edit pictures. And drink coffee. Oh...and I also should be processing some updates to my Apple and to my VMware XP image on it. But then I couldn't sit here using the machine to blog and look at Facebook and watch the Dow plunge, could I?

My life is either absolutely and totally the best or a mess. I'm voting for the former, really, but sometimes I don't know.

I am really pleased by the relative simplicity of living downtown in a 1200 square foot apartment. I'm doing my own cleaning and not using a service. And while this is a pain on days when I actually do cleaning, it means that strangers aren't poking about at inconvenient times and I'm not having to supervise them. There isn't a lot of area to cover. When I vacuum I don't even have to plug and unplug the old Electrolux I borrow from upstairs too many times. (I do have to go get it and return it and that's a pain. I'd get my own vacuum but I haven't figured out where to store it.) I do have a storage cage which needs to be thoroughly cleaned out since during move-in we kind of tossed things in there. Ditto the spare closet. Anyway, basically living here is charmed. I haven't started my car since Saturday. (Tennis was cancelled today. If I could walk to my country club, I would indeed have a charmed life. But it's too far.)

My parental units (my dad, FFP's parents) seem to be rocking along, doing pretty darn well in their houses in spite of their age (average=93) and our responsibilities for them are more anticipatory than any real hardship at the moment. Oh, we complain when running errands and such but it could be so much more.

Having made the move last year, we are trying to plan some trips for this year. We have plane tickets for NYC booked. We are looking longingly at France. It is good to be able to consider doing trips even in the current economic climate. (Although watching the market, who knows how long that will last? Makes one glad some of the portfolio is in Muni bonds.)

I'm not writing, only blogging. But whose fault is that. There's time enough and more. Obviously I'm doing what I want with it and I'd rather mess with finances, blog, edit pictures for a picture blog, read newspapers, read books.

Speaking of books: did I mention that I finished Joyce's Ulysses.? Yes, I laid eyes on every word, understood or not. I pulled out a book of essays on it we purchased in Paris in 2004 (the centenary of Bloomsday) and started it. My bookmark is a boarding pass stub from that trip. Woo-hoo. Cheers me somehow. In New York in June we plan to go to a reading of Ulysses at Symphony Space.

I'm not exercising enough but I'm walking a lot so if I travel I'll be up to the sort of flânerie I'd expect to do on trips. I could be exercising now but I'm blogging.

Financially, things could be better. We could have saved more and given the results lately on stocks and bonds, we could have invested more wisely. (See above about muni bonds, though.) However, we seem to still be living within our means while still reserving profligate amounts for eating and drinking, charity and, to a lesser degree, travel. So, yeah, things could be much, much worse. We don't have jobs to lose unless you could FFP's 'job' doing writing assignments through our wholly-owned Sub S. We probably bought our condo at a bad time (can't imagine it's worth what we have in it) but we also sold our house and if it wasn't the highest price we could have gotten, it was certainly reasonable. I fear that when the entire economy is in collapse it can't help but affect us (and our parents), but one is helpless to change these things. It wasn't our behavior that brought about the bubble or its bursting. So. Whatever.

Life is good, right? Until you tangle with a tree limb.

Is anyone else bored with my whiny blogs? Oh. Well. Off to exercise. Or clean the kitchen. Or, you know, do something useful.

I Love a Monday

When I worked, I dreaded Mondays and yet, once my butt was in my chair at work, I felt that life was full of hope and possibility. Maybe I'd accomplish a lot during the week. Also, as I drove to work, I usually thought of just how I was going to take care of things on the home front. I'd organize things, I'd clean this, discard that, conquer the other.

Today was a clean calendar. No external obligations. A call to Dad revealed that he didn't need anything either. "I have bananas. I'm just like a monkey...I'm happy as long as I have bananas." I will take him to a memorial service for one of his Sunday School friends on Wednesday, but, until then, he doesn't need my assistance.

I had been plugging away at my taxes, gathering info for the CPA, organizing. It was time (even though I was shy a couple of K1 forms) to put it in her hands. Her office is on South Congress, the day was lovely. So I talked FFP into walking down there. Then we came back and had a drink and snack at Jo's on Second. (Note to self: don't get veggie barbecue again. Indigestion and it wasn't as good as the stuff White Mountain makes.)

Anyway...when we got home I decided that I wanted to sit in front of my computer and do finances and blog. That I wanted to work the crossword in the Times. (It's a gimme on Monday but usually still interesting. I love Monday because the crossword goes back to being easy.) But, I decided, before I did any of these things, I was going to clean. I did the main bathroom yesterday. So...I borrowed a vacuum and did major dusting and vacuuming in the main areas. Only when I finished that and felt all accomplished and returned the vacuum did I allow myself to sit at the computer. Then I made myself do some accounting for bond interest and called bonds and stuff. I noted the declining value of, well, everything. Only then did I allow myself to do the puzzle. (I did that damned KenKen, too. How dare they put another puzzle in the Times? It's better than Sudoku but not much.) And now I'm letting myself blog. About Mondays. I love Mondays because sometimes I get things done. The Sunday dread that builds up from goofing off too much is gone.

So, now, I'm going to shower and go out. FFP is off at a meeting. I may find someone else to go out with. But if not? Going out by myself. Hey bartender! It's Monday. I'm not blue. Set 'em up.

[Shop window reflection portrait at Blackmail today on South Congress.]

Disoriented

I took this picture in a portrait mode, trimmed it and just didn't hit 'rotate 90 degrees clockwise.' [Ed. Note: Have you ever noticed that FFP always orients the camera so that photos have to be rotated counter-clockwise? LB: Yes, Yin and Yang and all that. If a photo is taken portrait-style on one of our cameras, there is a marker about who took it. Assuming, you know, we didn't hand the camera to someone else.]

It's disorienting not to rotate a photo before presenting it, isn't it?

I have a 'day off' today. Which means there is nothing on the calendar. FFP has a cold or allergies so he might not feel like a walk or a movie which sound like good ideas to me. I can go to the gym, read the papers, drink coffee (wait, already been doing the last two). There are a few chores I probably should do. (FFP already started doing some laundry. He also removed the recycling from the condo yesterday and did some dishes.)

Not having anything scheduled is delicious and yet disorienting. Too many choices!

I guess that's why working is sometimes the best thing for the attention-deficit wracked mind. When I worked, I would often have a confusing set of goals and ideas rattling around in my head. Things I needed to do for work and for my own life would seem like a wave about the swamp me. I often felt, when my rear end hit my chair and I logged on to work mail and incident reports for my products, an incredible easing of my mind. There was my 'to do' list: answer these mails, work on these problems and questions and then pull up the real 'to do' list and work on designs and code and reviews I'd noted there. There were meetings scheduled to get through or embrace (in the case of the rare ones that moved things forward). People came in and asked for assistance or pointed out some flaw in my thinking. It was structured and it was a relief.

I can achieve this same scattered peace in retirement by forcing myself to go through a routine of some chore. Clean the bathroom. Go through the various accounts and verify balances and update my bookkeeping and spreadsheet system. But nothing really comes close to the feeling of having a job and getting the butt in the chair to start a day. Especially a Monday when I took Sunday off. Because Sundays, especially Sunday nights, were sometimes agonizing. Even if I worked on work or other things I needed to do but especially if I relaxed and read the Sunday papers and watched TV, I felt like a jockey on a horse at a race in one of those narrow cages waiting for the gate to open and the race to be on.

All my time now is in Sunday night mode, waiting for the starting gun. I have appointments, sure, but nothing like putting in a work day. And like those waning hours of the weekend I find myself bouncing from activity to activity. Like today, which happens to be Sunday.

I got up a little before eight. I think I would have slept longer, but I wanted to call my dad and see if he'd located a ride to church. Because while I wouldn't go with him I would have gone to take him if he wanted. I was getting the best sleep of the night right then. But I felt OK after getting up. FFP had fired up the coffee machine, gotten the papers in (they are right in the hallway here, that's so cool) and was telling me about an article in the Statesman about arts organizations I should read. I made my call to Dad. (He found someone who lives near by to give him a ride and says this morning that he plans to live to be 102 which is an adjustment from the 112 he asserted the other morning). I pushed a picture to Austin, Texas Daily Photo. I edited a picture for this blog and started thinking about what to write. I read the article FFP suggested and on a trip to the kitchen for more coffee I thought of eating a banana. There were two apples in the fruit bowl. I decided to make tuna salad and started boiling eggs, chopped the apples opened some tuna, found mayo and relish. The eggs are in the final (sit for fifteen minutes after water boils) phase of my egg boiling technique. The rest is mixed and in the frig, ready for the eggs to be chopped and added and the result refrigerated again to chill.

Well, I wandered off to finish the tuna salad. I rued the fact that I didn't have an onion so I could pep it up with a little finely chopped onion. I did eat a banana (my breakfast). It's chilling in the frig for later snacking. I looked at some newspaper articles, poked around the puzzle page in The New York Times Magazine. (The 'standard' crossword looks hard today.) I read something about the CIA.

And so it goes. Left to my own devices, I'm a little erratic and random and, at best, productive but slightly disoriented.

What Were Those Reasons Again?

Pictures was one thing, huh? Well, um, I'm not all that thrilled with this one except that I like the way my hair was spiked up. I'm reflected in a shop window on West Fifth. The shop sells and repairs lamps.

I was walking down West Fifth yesterday (even though it is pedestrian unfriendly) partly to see what was going on and get some exercise, partly to take some pictures for Austin Daily Photo. I had some 'free' time. I spent some on finances and taxes yesterday and did a tiny bit of proofreading and computer fixes for FFP, but mostly I did whatever I felt like. I had a long walk. I say 'long' but it was only a couple of miles. Maybe 2.5 after I detoured to the post office and through Whole Foods. I walked all the way to El Arroyo on Fifth and back on Sixth. and stopped for a late lunch/snack and read while I ate.

I heard some great conversations while sitting there, eating and drinking my water. There was a table with three blonds. They were celebrating a birthday and there were pretty gift sacks involved. These conversational fragments seemed like they were out of a movie:

“I don’t wear anything when I run. I take everything off. I can’t believe you run in your wedding ring.”

“Skinny girl margaritas…tequila on ice with lime juice.”

“What happens when you eat ice cream?”

“Sick to your stomach? Yeah, I’m curious because that is starting to happen to me.”

I enjoy going out and watching and listening to people. I checked out a lot of construction and wandered through two shops. (I had a vague mission to find one perfect little accessory for the condo, but really I was just enjoying goofing off.)

I have some things on my mind today but I mostly want them off my mind. I don't want to even think about them, much less blog about them. One of my friends and I talk about letting things go. I'm trying to embrace my happiness with the way my life is going and not concentrate on things I could (and did you might say) rant about. I played tennis today and I enjoyed it, wind and chill notwithstanding. I am going to have a few drinks and some good food tonight.

Oh...the other thing is...I'm thinking it may be time to get a Smart Phone. Or at least a Smart(er) phone. Any opinions? Maybe I could buy Obama's Blackberry after they cleansed it?

In the Yellow

I shot FFP the other day at UT 'inside' a sculpture that invites walking into.

I was in a funk all day. It rained. I felt powerless to do anything positive in several arenas. I wanted to be excited about going to the film festival, but it didn't really feel right.

Then I had a computer problem with connecting printers on my VMware Windows. I hate it when something quits working. Particularly when it quits workig by hanging tasks all over the place. I dreaded trying to boot to fix it because I've had some issues restarting with VMware and I'm wary. So I backed up stuff all over the place so I could go back to a Snapshot and restore data. Then the restart worked and fixed the problem. It's funny how something working for a change makes one feel better. I hate that it matters that much to me, though.

We had a pretty good time this evening. We started over at the Butler Dance Education Center by going to a presentation about the ballet performance next week. There were dance demonstrations, portions of the show presented and lots of good educational stuff to help you appreciate it more. After that we walked over to the Driskill for the Film and Food benefit for the Young Film Makers Program of Austin Film Festival. They had a couple of dozen restaurants passing out great food and lots of Tito's Vodka martinis and Dos Equis Beer. We saw people we knew, met some new ones and except for it being too loud to talk here and there we had a great time. Still I was a little miffed at the computer until I got it working again the way I wanted.

I thought of two other books I didn't write (or four depending on how you count). I was going to write a book or a screenplay (or maybe a documentary) called The Nancys. And, long, long ago I was going to write a set of three novels that would have references among themselves. There would be a novelist in one who wrote a novel that would actually be one of the other novels. Stuff like that. Yes, I actually thought it was clever. I set one of these novels in a future where everything was run smoothly with technology, but some people still choose to live 'outside.' Yeah, I believe I thought that was clever and original, too.

And so it goes. I'm going to go to the film festival and the ballet in the next ten days and I'm going to see the result of other people's artistic efforts and visions. And I will continue to be 'pretending to write but really just blogging.'

Lost and Found

The black mood lifted. I'm not sure when. I kept thinking "I've lost my sense of humor." I was cataloging physical things I'd lost. But I knew they didn't really matter. They weren't irreplaceable.

But that wasn't it. It wasn't physical stuff and it wasn't my sense of humor. I'd lost my sense of wonder. And with it the world's power to entertain me had faded.

When it came back, I suddenly found weeds and trash interesting and was, as usual, intrigued by how different each person is from all the rest of us and yet how many things we share.

So I escaped the black cave once again. By Friday morning I could smile at one of my brokerage pages that couldn't handle the four digit drop in the Dow. I laughed after considering putting some money into a stock and not pulling the trigger to see it up two and a half points on the day, a down day for the Dow with volatility that made ending down 128 seem like a victory.

Today some guys walked by the tennis court where I was playing and in spite of wearing a cap and having his head turned some little mannerism assured me that one of them was a certain acquaintance of mine. Voices drifted over from a Men's Saturday workout and I recognized the head pro and other friends. This gave me pleasure for some reason. As did the hits and misses of the tennis balls.

It's a wonderful world. You never know what's going to happen and that's the beauty of the journey. Everyone is watching the UT/OU game just now. UT will probably succumb to the Number One team, but then, you never know. Yeah, that's the best part.

Under Cover

Sometimes I feel like being undercover, just out of range, involved in the world without the risk of being asked too many questions about how we got here. Lots of people have lots of answers. I don't. But I want to know what's going on and hear a little of what other people have to say even though I always take things with a 'grain of salt.' I guess that's what I like about being online with my blogs on the one hand and peeking into other people's lives through their blogs. Connect, yet don't. Converse, but only sort of. Appeals to my innate shyness. My life is led mostly in an 'overcome shyness' mode. A lot of people don't realize that because I battle hard against it. But I'm really happy when I'm mostly missing from the picture yet there. Maybe that's why I take all these reflection pictures like this one of a fancy Second Street clothing store with a stranger caught peering across the street.

Taking Time to Notice

One really needs to take time to notice one's luck. To remind oneself that even when a day seems filled with things that don't work and make one angry that those things are trivial. One also needs to observe how one's fortune far exceeds that of most everyone else. Most of our friends have faced or are facing much more serious health problems or they are struggling more for money. A lot of people still have to work. (How does anyone find time for that?)

It's also important to take note of what's going on around one's own little nest. Sometimes I think I notice TOO much around here and not enough outside. I've been fretting over some cosmetic things FFP says don't matter much, that he wouldn't notice if I didn't notice.

I took this picture from the Long Center Terrace. I photographed the 360 from over there plenty of times. Our building really wants to be noticed from other there, set apart from the tall buildings on Congress.

Most of all one needs to notice when one is happy, take heed of what one is doing when there is that sought-after peaceful, satisfied feeling. Then repeat those moments. I spent a few hours at my club on Tuesday. I thought I was going to play tennis but there weren't enough folks for doubles and the one other lady didn't want to play singles. I went to the gym and had a long ride on the bike to nowhere finishing up a book I'd wanted to finish reading for a while. Then I had a coffee/yogurt smoothie and a breakfast taco and then I lifted weights and did sit-ups and stuff. Very slow and leisurely. Then I went to the locker room in the pro shop which I had completely to myself for a shower and grooming. I took my laptop to the club house to wait for a meeting and popped it open and read my e-mail. Someone came by and said the meeting would be in the pro shop so I went over there and ordered some food. I met with a sub-committee I'm on and then we walked the construction site. I felt peaceful and unstressed. (In spite of the worries about the construction project.) I realized that I really enjoy exercising, reading, relaxing. Yeah, of course. But sometimes I do forget.

This morning (which started off cool and sunny, almost but not quite fall) I played tennis and while I was playing I so enjoyed it. I even enjoyed the feeling when I got back to the condo and I was moving stuff around and cleaning up the place a little and then taking a shower. I felt I should go visit with my sister, but when I called Dad he said my sister and my brother-in-law were not back from going off somewhere to visit friends. I felt I had a little reprieve from trying to go out and compete with traffic for the ACL festival and the UT game. I like it when people entertain themselves.

Yesterday was a bad day, mostly, although I made myself stop, breathe and appreciate more than once to get through it. I must remember to repeat the things I love, over and over, as long as they give me that pleasurable feeling.

It's Not the End of the World

Last night we went to Taste Select Wines. When other places are crowded, this spot always seems to have a table or seats at the bar, even if it's buzzing. We'd had some people come by in the late afternoon and I'd had a couple of glasses of wine. But I had ordered bacon-wrapped alligator with homemade sauerkraut. And so, of course, I had to order a beer. They don't have beers on tap, but one of the owners had told me that this bottled beer they sold was very good.

Yes, La Fin du Monde means 'The End of the World' and I'm guessing that is fire and brimstone on the label. It fit my mood. FFP drank a bottle of Sweet Leaf tea. But he ordered a beet salad to start.

Today was a lovely day on the tennis court, especially at first when it was still cool and shady where we were playing. I didn't play that well, but I did have fun. We don't have a 'schedule' the rest of the afternoon (except that FFP is planning to watch football this evening) so it's hard to figure out what to do. We tentatively decide on a movie at the Alamo Ritz. I shower and we walk over there. The Pecan Street Festival is going on. It looks like a seedy State Fair. We see a booth for an artist we knew long ago. "It's a long, sad way down," I say. But maybe it isn't true. Maybe he's making lots of coin.

We are the first ones in the theater to see "Burn After Reading." All the trailers show Brad Pitt acting like an empty-headed gym dork but the movie is so much more than that. George Clooney is a character with a partially furnished head who is a sex addict. John Malkovich is a character who is intelligent enough, too intelligent maybe, and can't get over himself. Frances McDormand is a very empty-headed character who does probably the stupidest things and is, in the end, rewarded by getting what she wants. (Although one suspects it doesn't get her what she wants.) It is so Coen Brothers. High intrigue with simple explanations and disastrous results. I like it. There was so much physical acting and spot on action that all the characters, major and minor, were revealed and then their hilarious (yet explosive and dark) interactions made tons of sense.

We walk back through the tawdry festival and stop at CVS. I broke a shoelace in my hiking boot on the way over. I buy some that turn out to be almost long enough, usable. FFP buys some shaving balm that turns out to have a broken cap. The elevators don't seem to be working when we return. He goes out to return the shaving stuff. I have to walk my friend's dog at five or so. (Which will involve four elevator rides.)

My good cheer is evaporating. Sigh.

But...it's not the end of the world.