life

And somehow it’s Wednesday

Standard
white and gray bird on the bag of brown and black pig swimming on the beach during daytime

I mean COME ON, it’s a pig giving a bird a ride. Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com

I’ve interrupted myself between the title and the body. That has to be a new record! I was making a list.

I have not yet checked it twice.

We’ve stumbled along into Wednesday, that day people call “hump day,” and yet I kind of see it like a well in the middle of the week, a depression. Not that kind of depression, though for a few people, no doubt it feels that way.

Some things have gotten done and others are falling by the wayside. Prioritizing. For example, I wanted a haircut this week, but it will have to wait, off in the distance of later. My stylist is in a small shop with her husband, and I haven’t been able to get hold of her. The rush is something entirely created by me, and thus can be dismissed just as easily.

Other things await on my list, some actually more fun than others, including picking out some books for my kindle. The Chicago Public Library has an amazing collection of ebooks you can check out from your couch. Feel free to leave suggestions!

Forward I go, perhaps into some serious consideration of reverting back to half-caff, and I wish you the power to dismiss the non-essentials from your list today too. It’s pretty fantastic.

Like my political side? Read my opinion pieces here.

Check out  my full-length novels: 

Aunty Ida’s Full-Service Mental Institution (by Invitation Only)   

Aunty Ida’s Holey Amazing Sleeping Preparation (Not Doctor Recommended) 

 Her Cousin Much Removed

 The Great Paradox and the Innies and Outies of Time Management.

And download Better Living Through GRAVY and Other Oddities, it’s free!

Peruse Montraps Publishing.

Advertisement

Yes or No to the Circle Game?

Standard

Well, hello Tuesday. It doesn’t much feel like a Tuesday, not that I’m totally sure what a Tuesday should feel like, but it is, according to all available sources, Tuesday.

Yippee.

I have been off managing the changing nature of life, and it’s interesting how that goes. You find a bend in the road, and you take it, and you follow it up and down and around again, and sometimes you end up somewhere entirely new, and sometimes you end up exactly where you started. If it’s that second one, would you still take the path again?

It’s a challenging question. On the one hand, there is the scenery you might not have otherwise seen, the different perspective on the landscape, the tiny clump of flowers nestled into a fallen log that otherwise would have gone on being lovely to itself and only itself. There are the birds you wouldn’t have heard chirp; the breeze that wouldn’t have smelled the same if you just stayed put where you were in the first place.

But on the other hand, there is a sense of fruitlessness when you wind up back at the beginning, no real progress made, everything the same as it was. A frustration at progress that wasn’t really progress at all; just a needless circle.

So which one is it? The path that leads back to the beginning, or never venturing out onto the path at all?

Check out  my full-length novels,  Her Cousin Much Removed,  The Great Paradox and the Innies and Outies of Time Management and Aunty Ida’s Full-Service Mental Institution (by Invitation Only), and the sequel, Aunty Ida’s Holey Amazing Sleeping Preparation (Not Doctor Recommended) which is now available!

Sign up for my spamless newsletter. And download Better Living Through GRAVY and Other Oddities, it’s free!

A Rain Cloud Isn’t Always a Rain Cloud

Standard

Yesterday, it was supposed to rain. It looked threatening, and all the weather reports warned of dire storms ahead. Flood warnings abounded, and it was supposed to be another soggy day.

And then the sun came out, shoving its way through the clouds without regard to weather forecasts or predictions. In the distance, the gray was streaked and looked waterlogged, but the distance never arrived. It stayed where it was and we stayed where we were, and Sunday wasn’t nearly so bleak after all.

It’s funny the way that things do that, the way that you are certain that they will be one way. Everyone tells you that they will be; everyone accepts it as fact. That is how it is going to be be. The sky and the weatherman say so.

But you can wait for the deluge, and hide from the deluge. And sometimes the deluge never comes.

The truth is that no matter what is happening, no matter what is above us, somewhere, way above the clouds, the sun is shining. We my not see it for a while, which is likely to happen this week around here, but even when we can’t, it’s still up there.

Clouds don’t always mean rain. And even those clouds — whether they’re big, heavy, watery ones or the kind that just take up they sky not doing much of anything at all — don’t hang around forever.

Sometimes the sun itself pushes them out of the way.

Check out  my full-length novels,  Her Cousin Much Removed,  The Great Paradox and the Innies and Outies of Time Management and Aunty Ida’s Full-Service Mental Institution (by Invitation Only), and the sequel, Aunty Ida’s Holey Amazing Sleeping Preparation (Not Doctor Recommended) which is now available!

Sign up for my spamless newsletter. And download Better Living Through GRAVY and Other Oddities, it’s free!

Try Something New and the New Keeps Coming

Standard

This weekend, one of my writing class classmates had a staged reading of her television pilot. A bunch of us went to support her and to give her feedback on her work, and then hung out afterward with her, her girlfriend, some of the cast and a few of her friends. Two of the members of our class were reading, something I didn’t realize until I saw them there.

While we were sitting outside on the patio, some with drinks, some having just had some food, people talking and laughing as a breeze swirled the humidity, I had a sharp, singular thought.

Taking one risk brought me to that spot so outside of where I would normally be, and that was good.

The thing is that I wouldn’t have met any of the people in my class in the normal routine of my life. I certainly wouldn’t have spent an evening with them; I am definitely the oldest person in class, and have been since Writing 1.

And if I’m being honest, I don’t know if I would have thought I’d connect to 20-somethings in this way, enough to hang out with them on a Saturday night, but I genuinely like and respect them. Maybe the facelessness of the internet has a positive side effect in that you can see the value and essence of a person without the external trappings, and once you adjust to it virtually, you start to change your perception in the day-to-day.

Besides, they’re a talented, mature, grounded bunch. And they’re freaking hilarious.

In life, it seems that we see what what we expect. We have to fight complacency, fight routine, fight inertia before the haze parts, even for a second, and we see a glimmer of possibility.

Odds are I’m not gong to be a sketch comedy writer. But I’ve done more with this course than learn how to fill five minutes on stage, and I didn’t even have to pay extra.

Check out  my full-length novels,  Her Cousin Much Removed,  The Great Paradox and the Innies and Outies of Time Management and Aunty Ida’s Full-Service Mental Institution (by Invitation Only), and the sequel, Aunty Ida’s Holey Amazing Sleeping Preparation (Not Doctor Recommended) which is now available!

Sign up for my spamless newsletter. And download Better Living Through GRAVY and Other Oddities, it’s free!

 

 

I Can Free Blog! Uh Oh, I Have to Free Blog

Standard

On this first day of blogging after finishing the A-to-Z Blogging Challenge, it’s strange to sit down to my post without a starting point. Without a basic requirement to be met.

The world is my blogosphere.

Or my postosphere. The world is some kind of sphere and I can choose any point in it for blogging. Which leaves a lot of possibilities. And on my maiden voyage after the challenge, it almost seems like too much choice.

Which really shouldn’t be a thing. I mean, choice is good, right? Isn’t it supposed to be?

Though I have read that too many options can be as detrimental as too few. Confronted with all of those possibilities, some among us — I won’t name any names but one of them can probably be found at the sidebar of this blog — freeze. It’s a kind of perfectionism, I guess. Not only having to make a good choice, but making the ideal, most perfect choice.

Which seems silly when you are talking about a blog post, right? I mean, what is the perfect blog post? And even if this one is less than perfect, which it might be, or probably is, I get to do it again tomorrow.

Clean page, clean slate.

I will say that having a little bit of a prompt definitely helped get me started during the challenge. I can pass on the six-day-a-week blogging though. It seems a little excessive to me, but it was good for forming habits.

And look at that. I spent so much time musing about a blog post, I actually wrote a blog post. I love it when things work out that way.

Check out  my full-length novels,  Her Cousin Much Removed,  The Great Paradox and the Innies and Outies of Time Management and Aunty Ida’s Full-Service Mental Institution (by Invitation Only), and the sequel, Aunty Ida’s Holey Amazing Sleeping Preparation (Not Doctor Recommended) which is now available!

Sign up for my spamless newsletter. And download Better Living Through GRAVY and Other Oddities, it’s free!

Philosophy of Snow

Standard

So you may have heard we had a huge snowstorm here in Chicago. About 20 inches of snow fell over a day, turning cars into unrecognizable lumps, loading up the branches of trees, coating the roads nearly as quickly as they could be cleared.

I stayed in and watched it from a distance, cozy inside, the sounds of the world muffled by the snow.

But the thing I found remarkable was that there were people out in it. People jogging in the paths of the park as though it wasn’t any different than any other run; dogs frolicking with a level of glee I could see all the way from my window. People on snowshoes. Cross-country skiers.

Even one of the worst blizzards in Chicago history — officially, it is the 5th largest — didn’t stop Chicagoans who wanted to be outside. In fact, a friend sent me a pic of her very determined 4-year-old son, bundled from toe to helmet, sitting on his training-wheel-supplemented-bike on a freshly-cleared sidewalk.

It’s even in the kids.

There will always be barriers in life. There will always be snowstorms, some so heavy it seems like snowing is the new permanent weather. We can lament the snow. We can complain about it, and we certainly do. We can exchange wry smiles in the elevator, smiles that acknowledge that we know it’s there and get on with it anyway.

And sometimes, even at its darkest, even when it falls in impossible sheets, when the break comes, we can go out and play in it.

Check out  my full-length novels,  Her Cousin Much Removed,  The Great Paradox and the Innies and Outies of Time Management and Aunty Ida’s Full-Service Mental Institution (by Invitation Only), and the sequel, Aunty Ida’s Holey Amazing Sleeping Preparation (Not Doctor Recommended) which is now available!

Sign up for my spamless newsletter. And download Better Living Through GRAVY and Other Oddities, it’s free!

Imagined Promise of Organization

Standard

The Container Store gives me hope. Every time I go in, or even drive by it, I feel as though if I just find the right magical combination of items, my this time, my life will be perfectly, completely organized. This time, with this special bin and that special hanger, it will all come straight.

Of course, that’s what they want me to think.

But they’re so good at it. With the banners politely screaming in the windows, the store holds the promise that everything, absolutely everything is containable. Everything can be put neatly into a place, if only you purchase the right place to put it.

The store whispers to me about who I could be, if only I exchanged a few piddly bits of dirty paper for sleek, gleaming new opportunities. Take these things, and there you’ll be.

If only.