Archive for February 2011
Willful Ignorance
It’s Girl Scout cookie season again! This year the organization has devised a wily plan. Instant gratification. They know my weakness and have modified their marketing to take full advantage. We no longer need to place our order and wait for weeks before cookies are delivered. The girls already have the cookies. This year, you pay your money, and you’ve got cookies in hand.
It wasn’t that long ago that I had an incredibly robust willpower to avoid the temptations of desserts and sweet treats. I don’t know where it went, but lately there seems to be nothing stopping my cravings, and I’m not stopping my urge to act on them. I’m practicing willful ignorance. You can be sure that I know better.
What I need is a wearable device that operates like the GPS units popular in cars. Every time I put something in my mouth it could say, “Recalculating!” In the mean time, I’m bulking up while ignoring the brutal truth about the health of my choices.
Man, those Samoas® are GREAT!
Harsh Reality
Believe it or not, I have been back on the roof again! Even with all the work I did back in December to get my roof cleaned off, this winter has delivered a maximum dose of ice dam forming weather that has forced me back up there to intervene. This time there wasn’t as much snow as before, but the ice has just grown and grown up there. If it snows much in the near future, I’ll have a real disaster on my hands.
I have resorted to the do-it-yourself ice-melt granules in one of Cyndie’s old nylons. From the ground, I could see it was getting pretty thick on the outside edge, but if I didn’t get up there yesterday, I wouldn’t have discovered that there was already standing water behind the dam. I removed the snow cover from the bottom half of the roof, to minimize the source of additional water from melting snow. After chipping away a little channel, I placed my nylon ice melters in two places. If they turn out to do the job, I’ll be begging for more nylons, because I think my problem may require more intervention than just the one spot on each edge of my roof.
Ultimately, I’m thinking this year’s problem with ice dams is a call for improving the insulation in my attic. Unfortunately, I think it’s about time for new shingles, too.
Dreaming and Thinking
This morning’s dream, before I was able to become lucid enough to realize I was dreaming it, had me discovering that my clan had showed up at an event at the dream-home* of my wife’s family. Even my deceased mother was there, except she appeared to have someone else’s haircut and was an equal mix of my mom and my wife’s aunt. But that’s beside the point.
In the dream, a feeling of great comfort coursed through me at the sight of my clan. It wasn’t a moment of being glad to be able to exclude others, it was a feeling of comfort for the familiarity and unconditional acceptance my siblings represented. The social stress I was unaware I had been tending, was revealed by the contrasting relaxation I sensed when suddenly standing among my people. It’s a powerful drug.
With the exception of outliers who try, you can’t choose to be a member of a clan to which you don’t qualify. I cannot be included in the clan of the female gender, or the clan of a different race. Groucho Marx was insightful enough to be discouraged about being in a club that would accept people like him as a member.
We can endeavor to define ourselves by the groups to which we do not belong, as well as by those we align. I am easily defined by my affinity for all things Apple®. I would be just as happy defined as not being a PC user. I am thrilled to be considered a member of the Brainstorms virtual community. I am more than satisfied with not having a Facebook page.
I live a pretty insular existence when it comes to clans that don’t suit my fancy. I don’t watch or listen to things they broadcast and I don’t read the things they write. When animosity threatens the peace and tranquility of my group, there is always the option to zoom out the perspective to the point that tribes become one. We are all members of the human race. If we suddenly found ourselves in conflict against an invading horde of giant ant creatures, our differences would be cast aside, exposed for the petty constructs they are.
Still, a feeling remains that if I was among throngs of humans, in a battle against giant ant creatures, and I came upon my brothers and sisters, I would experience that same drug of great comfort coursing through me, and I would battle just a bit harder as a result.
*(that morph of a previous house they actually lived in, and some kind of house of mirrors, which so often happens in a dream.)
New Shoes
Monday morning I was standing on the wooden floor where my regular thrice-weekly futsal matches are held, and I felt an obstruction under my foot. When a pause in play allowed, I headed back to the spot to remove the debris. Turned out to be a piece of rubber from the sole of a shoe. I made a quick check of my own shoes and satisfied myself that it wasn’t mine, and tossed it to the side, mentioning to the player next to me that someone was missing part of their shoe.
Not long after that, I felt something amiss beneath my foot again. Closer inspection revealed a portion of the sole was torn, and a portion was missing. Oops! So much for my initial quick check. Have I mentioned that my eyesight is showing signs of degradation? I went back and retrieved that piece I had tossed aside earlier. It was a perfect fit.
D’oh! There I was, standing on the court, saying, “Someone lost a part of their shoe!” after I noticed it under my foot. Geez, John.
After I got home in the evening, I searched online for replacement shoes and easily found just what I wanted at a nicely discounted price, and on a site boasting free 2-day shipping! If that were to work, I would have them just in time for Wednesday night Floorball. Too good to be true?
Just in case, I went to the utility cupboard and fished out a tube of Liquid Nails adhesive. I plied the fine art of rubber shoe sole repair and smeared the adhesive all over the shoe, my hands, and the kitchen counter. It is a good thing I acted so proactively. Turns out there was a nation-sized blizzard that comes along once every 50 years or so and just such a thing wreaks havoc on the 2-day shipping promise. I arrived home Wednesday evening to find no new shoes in sight.
I am happy to report, Liquid Nails prevailed over the maximum abuse I could dish out in my floor ‘hockey’ game. And my new shoes showed up last night in time for this morning’s futsal. I will be keeping the old pair as a backup, in case I find myself tripping over more pieces of my soles and neglect to recognize it belongs to my own shoe.
Relative Calm
In the flitter of fleeting moments that are passing lately, as storms the size of nations rage, both in relation to U.S. weather and to the citizens of Egypt, my immediate surroundings appear calm. It is such a stark contrast, yet in my moment, no contrast at all. The calmness here just is. My calmness stands alone, regardless cyclones in Australia or protests or blizzards.
But amid the calmness, closer inspection reveals there is a person not getting enough sleep at night. Someone was involved in a collision playing sports and temporarily dislocated his jaw. Someone’s work yesterday was particularly stressful. Ice dams are developing on the eaves again. Children are sick with a fever. A car was rear-ended on the way to work. To the people experiencing these things, it doesn’t seem calm at all.
There’s that relativity thing again. When we begin to feel overwhelmed by our own situation, it’s worth a shot to consider the more serious challenges other people are facing at the very same time. Sometimes, it helps. Sometimes, it doesn’t make our feeling of being overwhelmed change one damn bit, but it’s worth a try.
I’m glad my electrical power didn’t fail and I didn’t need to remove 2 feet of snow off my driveway yesterday. I only needed to remove 5 inches off of it on Monday. Now the state of my drive way is total calm. I noticed last night, with the temperature dropping below zero Fahrenheit, that my driveway was much more clean than when I shoveled it 2 days ago. The air is so dry and cold that the straggling amounts of snow that remain after shoveling, sublime directly from solid to vapor without melting to a liquid first. It would be fascinating to see a time-lapse video of that process, my driveway losing snow and getting cleaner all by itself.
Even amid the apparent calm, many different dramas are playing out in the flitter of fleeting moments.
What is it…
What is it about me that leads me to interrupt the thought I am typing to go back to the first word of the sentence and correct the capitalization, instead of forging ahead with the thought and returning later to make such corrections? Probably the same thing that causes me to want to clean the driveway of snow with finishing caliber cleanliness on each pass as I go, instead of not bothering over the scattering of missed spots until after the bulk of the snow has been removed in a first pass.
What is it that prevents me from shutting down applications and rebooting my computer, even though my practice of leaving my 3 primary tabs open and the internet browser application running for days on end eventually leads to an increasingly inconvenient lag time with repeated pauses of the classic Mac spinning beach ball icon? Probably the same thing that leads me to continue to wander the upstairs hallway in complete darkness at night even after I have written about the practice and revealed the lack of any reason not to turn on a light.
What is it that would cause me to, out of the blue, after years of never missing, file a monthly bill without taking any action to actually pay it? Probably the same thing that led me to the practice of placing my daily vitamin on the counter in the morning and purposely taking notice of it once or twice before finally picking it up and swallowing it.
I don’t mind that my mind is wasting away in a terrible way, but it is something of a waste to have a terrible mind that undermines things my mind is trying to mind.
Relative Something 