Tag: family

What happened today

I got out of bed at 3:45am, and met my friend outside at about 4:10am to drive to the airport.

I flew in an airplane to Chicago, where I met my cousins and then drove to Wisconsin.

We met with my brother and his friend at Devil’s Lake, and then hiked about six miles together around the lake.

We admired willingly the spectacular and deep-breathing-inspiring colors of the Fall, and awed at a Bald Eagle who flew over the lake for a bit.

We checked into our joined suite rooms, and then dunes down the street at an all-you-can-eat Mongolian stir-fry place, each eating more than we’d intended.

We gathered in the joined living area of the suite rooms, sipped digestifs, chatted about nonsense, played ukulele, practiced/learned some yoga and some acro-yoga, talked about nerd stuff, joked about my brother’s classmates back in college who argued about some terms in calculus, cracked up when my cousins began to argue about those terms in calculus, and consciously enjoyed our collective company.

I chatted more with my brother as he prepared for bed and I, unknowingly, was locked out of my room.

We laughed, and, eventually, I gained access back into my room with my cousins.

My cousin and I listened to voicemails from our grandparents, filled with wholesome delight.

I took the first good shower I’ve had in months (since the one where I’m living has been quite the nonsensical mess since I moved in there), and reminisced about Japanese onsen while I untangled a crazy knot in my extremely long hair.

I earned another badge in my Fitbit, because I walked over 22,000 steps today.

I stayed awake and in a good mood for over 19 hours.

I breathed easily almost the entire day, for the first time in a long while (it has felt, anyway).

I was myself, and so were the others, and we were spectacular.

I and we did good today, both grammatically correctly and incorrectly. 😉

Post-a-day 2018

Babies making babies

How many 18-year-olds do you cross, where you think to yourself, ‘Yes, this person is well on his/her way to being a wonderful parent!’?

And yet, just a generation or two ago, the 18-year-olds were just about to become parents.

I haven’t even considered the fact that I don’t have children of my own, though I’m very post-college-aged, and yet my mother started having children when she was college-aged, and then she had already finished having her children long before the time when she was the age I am now.

I mean, sure, our bodies are primed for making babies when we’re around 20, but our brains seem to be on a different planet at that age.

Just about every male aged eighteen years is a total idiot so far as I’ve experienced… (Remember that I teach high school)… and, while the girls aren’t total idiots, they definitely don’t strike me as the motherly type.

Just a thought.

Post-a-day 2018

Crazy lady travels free

I was just thinking about when my coworker and I took a group of kids to England and France a few summers ago, and things associated with that.  At the end of the trip, I stayed in France to go visit my old stomping grounds down south, and so I left the group to go home on a flight with my coworker (per our own full agreement and arrangement ahead of time).  I waited too long to decide to do that, so I had to pay $350 for the flight change (Ugh).  We also each had to pay $937.50 for the trip in the first place (Meh).  Therefore, I had to pay a total of $1287.50 for a 10-day trip that included all accommodations, food, tours, and transport, and another ten days on location at my own expense, which is really not bad at all.  At all.

However – and this is a BIG however – as part of our arranging and hosting this trip in the first place, the tour company gave us each a training trip.

Mine, as I selected it, was a long weekend trip, with food, housing, tours, and transportation included, to downtown Rome, Italy.  Therefore, my just-under 1300 dollars actually got me two separate trips to Europe, with almost all expenses paid for most of the time on the trips.

I really do come up with the craziest stuff to have happen in my life.  And – what is possibly the best part of this all – I don’t even seem to notice how absurd it all is, until I find myself ruminating on this and thats one afternoon, years later, and it suddenly hits me that, say, taking a free trip to Europe is not a normal thing in life.  I take this moment to nod my head to my cousin for the question she exasperatedly declared one evening at my apartment a few years ago: “Hannah, do you even know what real life is like?”

Indeed, fair cousin, it seems I do not know that most of the time – reality bites, so I live somewhere else, and I love it.  🙂

Post-a-day 2018

My oldest brother, the eldest nerd of us

Another of my most beloved memories is the time my eldest brother and I went through the top ten logical fallacies together.  He’s a total skeptic – not just in life in general, but he actually identifies as “a skeptic” – and we’re both total nerds, so, out of some conversation one day came the discussion of what a logical fallacy was.  Utterly intrigued at how he explained them, I wanted to know more than just an example or two.  And so, we printed out a list of the top ten most common logical fallacies people use in arguments, each with a brief description with the name of it, and he and I went through the list, one by one.

I would read the name of the fallacy and the brief description, and then I would see if I could come up with another way of saying it and with an example.  He would help me whenever I was unsure or stuck in my understanding.  It was a fun activity for the two of us, he getting to be the teacher of something he loved and I getting to learn something I found fascinating, and both of us getting to bond further with the other, not just in spending time with one another, but also getting to be nerdy together.

What I find most silly about this was that, as I recall, this was around my brother’s second or third year in college.  That’s silly, you see, because that made me 12 or 13 years old.  What 13-year-old do you know who references logical fallacies in the middle of discussions, kindly informing the user of the fallacy that his or her point was, due to the use of the fallacy, invalid?  Indeed, I don’t know any children at all who do that, and I teach high school.  However, I believe that also was right around the time that I started reading a book on quantum physics (because I found what I had learned about it in a documentary to be fascinating, and so I’d bought one of the most popular books by one of the speakers in the documentary [whose name and book title I’d had to memorize carefully when I saw them at the end of the film, because the Internet wasn’t quite a thing yet then, let alone IMDb]).

So, to this day, I still love nerding out with my brother (though it happens with more family members than just with him, he’s the point of this brief trip down Memory Lane). I’m preparing to go visit him in just a few weeks, and I’m looking forward especially just to sitting around and hanging out with him, because the enthusiasm and excitement that arises in our conversations is always spectacular.  Nonsense shared is never just a nonsense with us – something nerdy and smart inevitably arises from the stupidest and silliest of comments, making the nonsense oddly sensible and, usually, quite comical in the utter dorki-/nerdiness of it.

Post-a-day 2018

Today’s list

Oktoberfest…

semi-unplanned friend visit…

Mid-Autumn Festival…

car accident…

Earthdance….

… with origami and Braille, both taught by a blind man with a blind man’s wristwatch…

stopping for toilet paper…

and a house gathering…

all with a rain storm pouring over us off and on…

How was this only one day?

Post-a-day 2018

And a dash of Indian

I have an organized (-ish), color-filled explosion of Indian outfits on my bed and desk chair right now, and it feels, somehow, really, really good.

I’ve never even been to India, but I feel this strong connection to many parts of its culture…, my mom was Indian in her previous life, so perhaps I was, too…, or perhaps she merely passed the culture down to me in this life… ;D

Whatever the case, I’m entirely delighted about these clothes, which is why I still haven’t started putting them away, since I pulled them all out to see for the first time this afternoon. 😛

Post-a-day 2018

Writing

I’m beginning to feel, after someone asked me about my writing this morning, that the main reason I like and am drawn to writing so much, is that it is an opportunity for me to express myself without being interrupted, put down (directly), or even ignored (noticeably)… I get to be myself and to express myself, no matter who might be nearby.

I’m not sure if I like that or not, though…

I’ll ponder for another day or month or so, and see where it gets me… perhaps it’ll be breathtakingly phenomenal, when I have a breakthrough out of what I find in that pondering.

Post-a-day 2018

Never settle…?

My family is so amazing, I wish they lived closer together and to me… no one compares to them and to our relationships with one another.

It’s no wonder I always feel like I have almost no friends – none are the kind of friendships I really seek, ones like the bonds with my family members… and the few who are close like family, mostly live extremely far away, not even in a neighboring state (let alone country for some).

It seems I’ve really taken the whole ‘never settle in life’ concept seriously – it’s either spectacular friends or no friends.

But is that really best?

Post-a-day 2018