An autobiography is a funny thing. Can you write one before you’re dead? I’ve heard of very young people writing a book about their lives. It makes me wonder how much they could possibly have to say. To paraphrase an old commercial for the Navy, perhaps they have done more before the age of twenty, than the rest of us have done before the age of forty.
While still reading Lawrence Wright’s book about Scientology, I stopped to do some checking on sources from it and ran across Hadley Freeman’s article on the Guardian about the book, in which her comments about Scientology and 20th century America gave me pause. I am probably almost finished reading this book, but I like to skip around so much, it’s hard to tell. At any rate, I find the subject fascinating, a view that is not shared by some of the people who commented on Freeman’s article on the Guardian. They feel it’s been played, and it is not a relevant subject anymore.
It’s spring again, so I am doing some spring cleaning. This translates to spending a few minutes with the mess in the back room, and then coming to write another post on my blog, or work on my manuscripts, or check my email, or post something about the mess on Facebook.
Anyway, I found a box with three handbags in the closet. I must have put them there in hopes of selling them on eBay when I was hopped up on eBay. That’s been two or three years ago.
I read recently about a woman, a new mom, in another country who had wanted to have a baby for all of her married life, which was a very long time considering her age as of this writing, but was unable to. Finally, she conceived at the tender age of seventy, or something close to assisted living age.
Every time someone tells me a story about a marital dispute someone they know is having, or some other calamitous, or even stupendous happening, in someone’s life I may or may not know, I invariably want to know the back story.
Awards are pleasant things, and are given for many things, including to adults for perfect attendance, as I found out recently. Being awarded something is a pleasant and exciting concept. It intrigued me enough that I was willing to waste some time on it with Google. I wanted to know when the first award was awarded.
Today, I hopped on my stationary bike, and while I was pedaling away, I read some of a book I had checked out a month or so ago and kept procrastinating reading, ‘The Fall of Berlin, 1945′.
Because of my regrettable habit of procrastinating, I have forgotten the reason I checked out this book. It is buried in the mists of time, but the book remains, silently reprimanding me with the legions of the dead soldiers of the Red Army, the Third Reich, and the residents of Berlin, many of whom did not vote for Hitler, and didn’t like the Nazis being in power. See? I have learned something from the regrettably few pages I have read.
Privacy was the subject in two posts in two blogs I read recently, both written from two points of view. One was decrying the lack of privacy in today’s world, though it was a reminder that privacy is, and always will be an illusion, unless we manage to live like the early trappers, and get lost in the forests somewhere.
Annoying myself should not be my main goal, despite the title of this post, which is already raising my blood pressure, thinking about the self-imposed challenge of going for thirty days without getting annoyed.
I realized this morning that I get annoyed on the average of every five minutes while driving the surface streets. If I hit the freeway at a quiet time, that’s no sweat. The idea of this challenge came to me when I found myself dawdling behind an Echo, which was driving at approximately the speed that an iceberg melts, and I swung over to change lanes and pass it.
As writers, or athletes, or painters, or anything else, we are always striving to be the best, but let’s face it, being the worst can really work for us. If they can ignore the best directors, or actors, or movies for an Oscar nod, as they have done this year, then we are in good company. ‘They’ also ignore a great many other people who are involved in actual productive and valuable work.
