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.
In pursuit of my ongoing quest to ‘get rid of things’, I came across, once again, one of my favorite shirts. It is camp style, with nice pockets. It is made of linen, so that when you wear it you are suddenly transported to Gatsby’s backyard, if it could be called that, instead of perhaps the lower forty, where you are having afternoon Bloody Marys in your tennis whites. Except my shirt is beige. Which is where my life diverges from Daisy’s in more than one way; she only wore dresses, and she would never buy anything in a color simply because it ‘goes with almost anything’, the reason I own so much black.
I have a slew of titles saved which have no stories. These titles look so forlorn, so homeless, like unmoored dinghies bobbing on choppy literary waters, waiting for a safe plot in which to berth.
Handwriting was very normal at one time. Typing was the only subject in school in which I received a ‘D’, but I seem to remember we had to take it. Some people will laugh at that, I’m sure. Especially those people who type 95 wpm with no errors. Those people are what I like to call over-achieving braggarts. I never could break the 45 wpm typing barrier, but where my handwriting used to be clear as a bell, now I can barely read it.
