Tag: life

Click

Today, something kind of clicked into place for me.  I don’t know what it was or quite how it happened, but things kind of just worked for me.  I moved myself to various tasks throughout the day, added in details to my activities that I had wanted for so long to include (like having classical music playing in the background most of the day), and even got myself outside for a bit with an umbrella, despite the extreme heat.

I am not fully free of all of this recent stuff, but today was definitely a new day, a new experience of life – one much different from the past many weeks.

And I am grateful for it.

Post-a-day 2020

Total weep fest

I tend to think, as probably do most people, rather unconsciously that, when I am in a not-good mood, a movie of the very happy persuasion is the way to go – laughter and fun, right? However, when I actually pause to think about it, I think the weep fests are the best option.

Oftentimes, what benefits us most when we are struggling is catharsis, a release of all of the emotion and struggle that we have been carrying. A good weep fest film practically yanks the tears out of us, forcing out more emotion than we imagined we even had available to release at the present moment… over and over again. And, by the happy ending of the film, while we are exhausted and our eyes just might be burning more than a bit, life just kind of makes sense again, and we feel so much better…., we finally can breathe fully again. Which is rather ironic, given the constant crying and nose-blowing throughout the film. 😉

But that is what weep fest films can do for us… and just about every time. So, it is extra worth giving them a watch when we are down in life. Laughter may be the best medicine, but catharsis and an inspiring story and happy ending are the perfect way to move forward from struggles and pains, taking that first step back to the laughter.

Post-a-day 2020

Something’s wrong, and that’s perfect

Every so often – read “almost every day, especially when I’m not doing so well” – I have thoughts of concern around the idea that there might be or that there is something wrong with me.

As I thought about this today and last night, it started to wonder, Well, so what?  So what if something’s wrong with me?  What does that even mean, anyway?  It had me consider that the whole concept of ‘something’s wrong’ is, in a way, utterly and totally made-up.  I think about the whole moth scenario, where the white moths all thrive in the snowy place, until the factory opens up, and soot is abundant, turning most of the snow gray…. at which point, the moth population slowly but surely turns almost entirely gray – the genetic mutation allowed for improved survival in the altered times, when snow was no longer white but gray.  By our standards, we could say that something was wrong with the gray moths, back when everything was white…, but none of them has a problem with that wrongness now, with everything being gray around them.

Basically, so something about me works differently than other people, or even than most people…, and, so what?  Why must I feel inferior or inadequate or lesser of a being because of it?  If my hormonal system doesn’t understand how to function superbly, does that make me a terrible human being, or a lame one, or even a non-human?  No.

For one thing, it is 100% in our nature as living beings to have mutations – differences, changes, seemingly inexplicable alterations – in our DNA and resulting bodies.  My body not working like the rest of humanity’s bodies is totally normal, scientifically speaking.  Female hormonal systems work this way, and mine just doesn’t – it works differently than the average female hormonal system.  It is statistically abnormal…, but abnormal statistics don’t make me a lesser being.

For a second thing, perhaps this is just a way of my DNA, my body, preparing for those unexpected factories to move into town and turn all the snow gray… perhaps they are preparing me for the unknown contingencies in life.  I have no idea what those scenarios would be to have any of these alterations from the average in my body’s function make sense…, but it somehow wouldn’t surprise me if, someday, whether I’m still alive then or not, these alterations all do make sense.

I’m still a bit nervous about the fact that, well, part of my body kind of seems to be screwing the rest of my body over, by not taking care of itself…, however, I like this idea of considering that it is merely a natural genetic mutation, a gray moth among the whites.  Plus, I have found various ways to help those struggling parts of my body to function better, and, though I don’t know quite how it all will look down the line, at least for now, I know what works best so far, and I can stick with doing that.

I certainly have had many a struggle and even a good handful of breakdowns around the fact that ‘my body isn’t normal’…, so I hope that this shift in perspective proves to be a powerful one.  I want to feel and be okay and comfortable with my altered-from-average body.  Anyway, plenty of people who had altered-from-average bodies ended up being spectacular at things other people couldn’t be spectacular at doing.  A woman with no arms can use her legs and feet like most people do hands.  A blind person can hear things most people don’t even notice.  Several genius-types couldn’t function socially or in schools very well, and some not at all.  I don’t know – not yet, anyway – for what my alteration from average allows in my life, but I am going to keep an eye out for it now, now that I’m thinking about it this way.  Perhaps there is something to this idea, even with my hormonal system’s situation…  I shall observe and consider, and hopefully see.  🙂

So, going forward, I shall remember – do what I can as I get adjusted to the idea, anyway – that something is wrong with me, and that that is totally perfect.  Seriously: perfect.  🙂

Post-a-day 2020

Ugh…

What is my story right now? Well, I spend my days hanging around, only doing a workout three times a week, and living vicariously through film and shows, while completely alone in the house.

It’s kind of a weird place to be, really – I feel like so much is close to happening in my life, but it also feels so difficult to do anything these days, with nothing really happening already, and no one even to see on any given day…

Ugh… and Benedict Cumberbatch does a spectacular job of making me want a partner in my life – he plays the adorable, slightly crazy, genius smart-ass quite well, and it really makes me want to have my own. 😀

Anyway… the show actually kind of gives me nightmares, so I can’t watch it after dark, and must pointedly watch something happy before bed, so the Sherlock stories don’t get to me too much at bedtime…. As I said before, I think I might be able five years old, sometimes. 😛

Post-a-day 2020

Late-night calls

For the second night in a row, instead of going to bed when I was feeling like doing so, I ended up on the phone with a good friend of mine in and from Australia.

And, because it was early afternoon for him, he wasn’t in much of any hurry to get off the call…, so we talked for a good while.

However, both times we ended up spending some good, dedicated time to my playing around on the piano, singing songs for him (and for me) to enjoy. It was actually quite funny yesterday, because he was just on his way home from a tough day of work, end of the workweek, and had been thinking about a nap… so, once again, we came very close to his falling asleep while I sang to him. How adorable, right? Haha

Anyway, I love it, and I love this friend. As we discussed tonight, we both really would like for scientists to get their acts together around the world, and figure out this teleportation thing already. 😛 We miss seeing one another (and I don’t just mean because of the current state of affairs, but because of our being all the way around the world from one another$.

By the way, did you know that Australia is approximately 77% the size of the USA? I had absolutely no idea that Australia was that large – not a clue. And I have definitely looked at it on many a map and many a digital map… nonetheless, I was utterly unaware of this fact… approximately 7.6 million km squared to 9.8 million km squared. Crazy, right? But, yet, also not… also, they have a huge dessert in the middle, in which no one lives, so they don’t have as much habitable land, but still… Alaska has a bunch of uninhabitable land, too… hmm… I’ll have to check what the habitable land of each country is, because the population of Australia is ridiculously low for its land size.

Anyway, I’m exhausted… goodnight!

Post-a-day 2020

Perspective

Today, one of my best friends from college told me that, though it is a vague idea, she knows what kind of book she would want to read if I had written it. She told me that I am the only person she knows who lives for the journey, and not the destination. Most people plan out their lives based on where they want to be down the road…, But then, as she mentioned, I take a two-hour detour on a 14-hour drive, simply because I saw something that interested me…, And it doesn’t bother me one bit that it added so much time to the already long drive. She gave other examples, too, that illustrated her point quite well.

What stuck out the most for me, though, is that I have never considered my life with these words…, Yet they seemed absolutely true. In the past six months, I have been struggling with a regular question of whether I am living my life all wrongly, if I’m messing everything up by doing things the way I am doing them. And I see now: the whole reason I’ve been feeling that way lately, is because I have been comparing my life to everyone else’s lives… But that is like comparing bananas to chairs – they are not comparable, not in the least.

I am not playing the same game as everyone else, and when I compare where I am to where they are, I am certainly failing their game…, But, as I said, I am not playing their game.

Some might say that I take the road less traveled, but I really think that I often don’t take the road at all… I explore the detours, and end up somewhere completely unexpected.

(This point can be quite literally illustrated by a recent hike I took with a friend of mine… She wanted to stay on the main path, and I was curious as to what this possible detour path would show us… Where we ended up was spectacular, and completely unexpected… And then I found another semi-path back to the main road, way up ahead, while my friend went all the way back the way we had come…)

I’m beginning to think that this is a huge part of why, whenever I have been asked the question of where I see myself in five or ten or 15 or 50 years, I could never quite provide an answer… It’s not that my imagination isn’t great enough, but that I genuinely have no clue as to where I will end up and what I will be doing. I know the person I will be, I know that I will love and I will be loved. Beyond that, though, there’s a world of possibilities, and each one has an innumerable set of detours I might explore. It is likely that, in this moment, my wildest dreams couldn’t tell me where I will be in five or ten years… Or even in one…

When I considered jobs growing up and throughout college, and even now, I’ve always kind of had the feeling of, ‘Why pick one? Let’s give them all a try,’ though, without actually putting it into those words.

It’s funny to me how much sense this all makes, simply because of two sentences that a friend of mine said to me today… Let us remember that I words carry so much power – whether we realize it or not, whether we feel it or not, someone feels it more than we likely ever will know.

You know, for the first time in several months, I think I can breathe fully easily now… I was right that I am failing at this life…, But I had forgotten that that life was not the one I ever wanted to live…

Now, I am free to live my life…

And that is just about the most exciting thing I have ever considered or said… 😀

P.S. Early, early this morning, the world lost the physical presence of one of the greatest people I have ever known, and possibly ever will know… I haven’t talked about it with anyone, and I don’t want to yet – I’m not ready for that. However, I feel like she was with me today in this whole realization… She has been a huge part of almost every major moment in my life since I began college, and I swear she was here this evening. 🙂 I have a feeling she will continue to be here in my life.

Post-a-day 2020

Achy Faith

My body has been sore the past several days, and I am extremely grateful for it.

I have finally begun to do exercises again, thanks to my having reached out to a friend for help with accountability and support, and her acceptance of the request… It seems only fitting, because we used to go to the gym together in the first place, before everything closed, and then she moved.

Now, for the time being, anyway, neither of us is in Houston.

But we work out st the same time together, she at 5:30pm after work, and I at 4:30pm, the time I used to attend in-person classes…, and it works, because she is on the East coast now, so we actually exercise at the exact same time.

It still sucks to be paying for a gym membership to a gym that medicine and society tell me not to attend, but I would rather be safe than yelled at or blamed or sorry (or, even, sick)…, so, I stay away from the one place I ever really feel called to be on a daily basis, the one place I miss most…

But I am, at last, doing workouts at home again, using the workouts the owner originally made for us back when the gym closed for a while, and everyone had to work out at home together.

So, I could technically just cancel my membership, and do these workouts on repeat for the rest of my life, if I wanted… but I don’t want to do that.

I am using this gym’s workouts, even if they are old, and so I will maintain my membership.

It feels absurd, but right – I have thought on it many times, and I feel incredibly uncomfortable at the idea of canceling my membership…, so, I have let it go – I’ll stay a member and just suck it up… something about this will balance out, and it all will be beautiful and perfect.

I have faith in this.

P.S. A family friend – he’s our personal car and motorcycle expert – wants me to buy this great quality vehicle off of him, since they never use it anymore… it’s a Porsche Cayenne… what on Earth???… So, I might be upgrading from an old, crank window, semi-falling-apart Hyundai Accent, that was ranked as being worth $245 two and a half years ago on Kelley Blue Book, and that is not very reliable beyond an easy ten- or fifteen-minute drive… to a Porsche… Woah…

Post-a-day 2020

The best way to move

Japanese moving companies…?

Baller.

Need I say more?

Just watch this video.

I’ve been in the receiving end before, though without knowing the standard of how they worked, and so I was quite confused as to why they kept asking me where specifically I wanted everything placed in the apartment, and how they set up the furniture that had shown up in pieces for moving…

I wasn’t planning to keep most of what my predecessor was giving me, so I didn’t really care where most of it went…, proving for an extra-odd interaction about where to place everything… It was kind of great, due to the fact that it was so comical.

Anyway, the US would do well to learn from Japanese moving companies… very well.

Just saying.

Post-a-day 2020

Good night; goodnight

Watching the film “Pretty Woman” tonight with my mom and uncle – one of my favorite films – I found myself saying, either aloud or merely within my thoughts, “This is one of my favorite lines,” an absurd* number of times.

I knew what was coming up next, and my brain grew extremely excited – I was even giddy – at the prospect of the upcoming line or exchange in the film… it just has so many good lines in it, my list of favorites comprises half the film!

Anyway, it was a lovely night together with my mom and uncle, despite his annoying what felt like pestering about managing yet another file transfer for him, simply because he refuses to move himself into the digital age…, so we have to handle things for him… (He wants to give files and photos to my grandparents, his parents, for them to put on their iPad… they are 89 and 90 years old and have and successfully use an iPad…, yet their child, my uncle, will not get himself an e-mail account or computer or an answering machine/voicemail, or use a cell phone of any kind…. and it isn’t about money…. If you don’t want to do that, I get it – I didn’t have internet at home on purpose…, but live life in agreement with that determination… don’t constantly burden other people for the use of their digital tools, because you won’t get your own… if you don’t want it, don’t make other people do it all on your behalf… it would be different if we were wanting to give him digital photos or something of the sort…., but he’s the one wanting to do these transfers and such all the time… do it yourself, man…. stop bringing us into it.

Anyway, that’s my stress express for tonight… haha

We had an interesting yet entertaining time doing a Monday crossword puzzle on my laptop before watching the film tonight… they both were intrigued and surprised at the opportunity, and it was a cool little mental activity for us all… usually, a puzzle is too small for three people to huddle around it and complete it together, and my mom always complains about my handwriting or the darkness of my letters…, but, on the computer, it was practically full-screen, and each clue was lit up while we were on it, and it simultaneously lit up the relevant squares on the board at the same time, so it was even easier than a regular paper puzzle is visually…, and the three of us got to do it together, all at once…

It was cool.

Annoying at times, but cool overall. 🙂

So, yeah… it was a good night together. 🙂

*I notice that I use the word absurd rather often when describing things within my life… I wonder if I am being overly dramatic, or if my life, in fact, is rather full of absurdities… at the very least, we know it is not normal, as made clear my cousin those several years ago during the acrobats conversation over dinner. 😛

Post-a-day 2020