Winter is in full swing, and with it, the requisite freezing temperatures. Today the mid atlantic states were averaging temperatures in the low 30s accompanied by wind chills which brought those figures down lower - the mid two high 20s. Brutal.
I don't know how much more of this I can take.
What galls me is that there are people who actually enjoy this weather (oh, hi Rashad :-P). Strange right? I mean really. Why? What is the appeal of chapped lips, broken capillaries, and frostbitten appendages? For the life of me i can't see anything of value in that. Well unless you're one of those black market organ dealers.
To be honest, i'm of the opinion that people who take pleasure in frigid temperatures are also people who get a kick out of eat disgusting foods like beets, consider potted meats a delicacy (see: spam) and enjoy all manner of things pickled. (I had a coworker who would bring in a jar of pickled eggs *retch* every monday and would snack on them throughout the week. Horrifying.) In other words, true masochists. Knowing that people like this exist, and are enjoying that which makes me so miserable, makes me even more agitated. If people weren't so judgmental, i'd go into hibernation at first frost. Kodiak bear mode. No one would see hide nor hair of me until the darling buds of may. Oh if only this world were mine...
I knew things were awful when i was afraid to put on my bra this morning. You read right. Taking it out of my dresser (located in a chilly corner in my bedroom) and putting it up against my skin was the equivalent of removing a bandaid. There's gonna be pain, so you gotta be swift. It was so cold, the metal clasps making a mockery out of my own body heat. After deliberating for a minutes, i took the plunge. Five seconds of sheer terror. No one should have to contend with that.
The bad news is that its only going to get worse. At least as far as this week is concerned. The forecast is pretty bleak: By friday a high of only 21. Awful. How many more weeks of winter? Why is this season so darned long? Can i hang? Will I? Only time will tell.
In the meantime should you see me with my eyes tightly closed, do not interrupt my reverie. I will imagining sexy people on sexy beaches eating sexy food while basking in sexy temperatures. Yeah...
Royksopp Remind Me (Whatchall know about this right here?)
Is when i see people and places and things from my past and notice how much they've changed.
I get sentimental a lot.
I've always been a bit of a bleeding heart and unredeemable nostalgic. Most things that people can easily part with, discard, or relegate to some cobweb covered corner of their memory, I cling to for dear life. Sometimes the things i hold on have actual value beyond their appearance. For instance I have a big red gum wrapper in one of my scrapbooks, and though it looks like trash, it isn't. There's actually a very sweet story behind it. (well sweet to me anyway.) I keep most of my movie/concert ticket stubs. However, many times my separation anxiety occurs with meaningful and jejune in equal measure; for instance my collection of of magazines. Not so much a collection as the fact that i can't seem to throw any of them away. Only as valuable as the season they are printed for - I am still loathe to toss them. It takes effort for me discard an Elle or W or Allure in the trash. Every issue is like a collector's edition. (even though they are not)
But its not only my personal effects that get me misty eyed.
While running a few errands with my dad over the weekend i noticed his footfall was a bit strange. As we walked across Walmart's parking lot and headed toward the automatic doors, i fell a little behind him in step to observe him further. He was limping. Now my dad has had a slight limp for a minute. This was nothing new and up until this point it had been barely noticeable. His dad had one in the same leg and i always assumed it was genetic predisposition(please don't let me inherit that gene) However as we entered Walmart it was more pronounced than ever.
"Daddy!" I said, alarmed, catching up to him and falling in step, "Why are you walking like that?"
His response?
"I'm getting old."
At 55 my dad is hardly what i consider old, but he is right. He is getting old, his body is no longer the machine it used to be. Even in the face of this reality his comment still stung. In my mind my dad is forever the spry 35 year old who could do anything and everything.
My dad, the man whose mechanically inclined mind helped me design a lever that catapulted (not literally) me to the top of my 5th grade science class. My dad who helped me build an awesome scale model set of native American dwellings f (wigwams, adobe houses, longhouses and teepees...totally banging and i got an A+) for social studies. My dad who knew cars better than anybody, and on top of that skill, could fix just about anything in the house (for ex: my parents were remodeling the kitchen, my mom wanted the stove and the sink put in opposite positions, so my dad switched the gas and water lines. We didn't blow up.) My dad who used to ride his 10 speed to work. ( i thought he was SO cool) My dad who would take us(the kids) to watch him and his friends play softball. My dad who did all those things was now walking a with an obvious limp. It disturbed me more than i cared to admit. I was forced to look at him no longer with the eyes of a child and see him as he was, an older man. It hurt.
I instantly recalled the time when i was talking to my mother and she was telling me that he was taking his car to the shop to get an oil change. "What?" I was confused. My dad would NEVER take his car in to get something as simple as that done. It was unheard of. My dad kept jars of gojo pumice handwash around the house because when he wasn't at his job, he was underneath a car, changing the oil, putting in spark plugs, installing an alternator...etc. etc. He was getting his hands dirty and he loved it. But he needed something more heavy duty than dove to remove the oil and dirt - or else my mom would put a hurting on him. How could he be the same man? He was now taking his car in and paying someone to do a job he used to enjoy doing on his own.
Change is the only constant - Heraclitus
Change has always been difficult for me to accept. My comfort zone has always been with that which is known, or if not known in the truest sense, feels familiar. Change for me has always been the hot new dress you buy because it looks good, but when its time to break it out you don't because aren't sure if you're really going to like how it fits. So you dig deep in your closet and put on old faithful, because it does justice to your curves and hides all of the trouble spots. Comfort.
I driving around in the old neighborhood a few weeks back and i was aghast at how different things were, certain landmarks that i figured would always be there were gone, or, if they were still there, had been altered beyond recognition. It was weird and disheartening. I found myself missing those places and the people that were associated with them terribly. Certain part of my life were no longer tangible, and it bothered me.
When i visit my grandparents i often beg them to take me to go see places from when they were young. We drive through backwoods, dirt roads, and they point out locations that are now overgrown with trees and grasses and teeming with wildlife -
"this is where i went to school"
"this is where your grandpop used to live"
"a small shop used to be right here..."
"there used to be a road here that we would take to get to town - long before I95 was built"
And i stare in amazement because there is nothing there that indicates that this was anything other than woodland. Occasionally there will be the remains of buildings, or an indentation indicating that there once was a road. But really, all that remains of those places/things is their memory.
Sometimes they'd recount stories i'd hear a wistfullness in their voices as they talked people and places that are long gone. It never occurred to me that I might experience the same thing at some point. Now that i am, i find myself balking at it, resisting the change. To be sure, there is much that remains from my youth. Its not as bleak and depressing as i'm sure this entry reads. I just marvel at how much is different from then til now - and i'm not looking forward to see how much it will change in the future. Still i know that no matter how much i may not want it, things will change, and its up to me to accept it, and successfully be able to experience sentiment without wallowing in the past.
I guess this is what they call growing up.
The Jacksons - Blues Away (a gem not heard often enough)
I've been intermittently staring at this page for the past half hour, trying to conjure up words about something, anything. Nothing is coming. Nothing meaningful, nothing mundane. In the reserves of my mind there is usually some bagatelle of information that i can pull out and build upon. A little anecdote about my life, or perhaps something i've observed that will serve as a stimulant and get the writing juices flowing. Apparently my mental coffers have been emptied of all their goodies, so that even my ephemera has become ephemeral. When did blogging become a chore?
Honestly i think the hair thing may be symptomatic of something else - a need for change in my life in general. (Here i go deepak chopra-ing again) Sometimes i feel i'm way too complacent with myself. When a challenge comes my way, i always rise to the occasion - but those are external challenges. Rarely do i challenge myself. U. N. Owen (get that reference and i'll marry you...well if you're a dude) has never been a friend of mine. Maybe a change in hairstyle will kick things off? Of course there is always the chance that cutting my hair will merely send me spiraling down into a morass of pyscho impulse based behaviors, which will undermine any goal i'm trying to achieve.
All this sturm und drang could be caused by the fact that my Seasonal Affective Disorder is in full effect. (self diagnosed. reading a magazine a few years ago where they described it, and i went hey! that's me! lol) Don't you love how there's an official disease for everything? Gives my bad moods an air of respectability. lol. Yesterday was a rainy miserable mess, and today, although not rainy - is a mixture of clouds and sun, and for the past hour it has been more clouds than anything else. Combine the clouds with the the cold temperatures, et voila! You have a cauldron full of double double toil and trouble.
Any of my fellow bloggers taken a solo vacation? I don't mean business trip or a weekend of solitude. I mean like three days or more of you, by your lonesome. Is that the equivalent of dining alone? I haven't done either. I'll go to lunch by myself in a heartbeat, but dining in the formal sense? Never. I always chicken out. According to glamour(or was it cosmo?) dining alone is one of the things every woman should have done by the time she is forty. How is that for a goal? Anyway, they didn't say anything about vacationing. Is that just too lame? Would planning a trip for one to the _____ (insert location here) showcase my pluck, or be a sad commentary on my existence?
So today is the first day of Two Thousand and Nine. Can you believe it? I can't. Two thousand and nine. My tongue is forming the letters but my brain still is having trouble computing. It was a DECADE ago that everyone was running around like chickens with their heads cut off as the spectre of 2000 loomed ever nearer. Remember that? Everything had to be Y2K compliant. Even watches. I kid you not - i saw a timex that had a"y2k ready" label on the box. I think i saw it at one of those discount clothing stores my mom shops at on occasion. You know, you can find all the designers you love - for like close out prices. I like the idea of those stores, but my problem is you have to LOOK. Yeah, i'm not scrounging around on some over stuffed rack to find that one magical dress that was 1500 at saks, but because of a messed up seam, i can buy for fifty dollars. I like my clothing pretty and arranged, mannequins dressed to impressed, and the warehouse with clothing tossed hither and thither just doesn't work for me. Of course if you happen to be out shopping and run across something you'd think i'd like, then by all means...
But where was i? Ah yes. The whole Y2K brouhaha. Alarmists horded food in their basements, while chicken littles went as far as building/refurbishing fallout shelters. Fun times.
We are now ten years past that, and though our fears of exploding URLs never materialized, things did happen that did have far reaching effects on the world at large. 9/11, the war in Iraq, Michael Jackson calling Tommy Mottola devilish...
Its certainly been a time of upheaval.
But I didn't intend for this entry to go down a solemn path so i'll steer a little to the left...
I've never been a big "New Years" person. When i was a kid, it held a quaint charm because i was allowed to stay up and watch the ball drop, as dick clark narrated the waning moments of the exiting year. I could make phone calls (past midnight!) to certain of my friends(if their parents allowed) to wish them a happy new year. Those days of childish excitement are long gone. Dick Clark has been supplanted by the unctuous Ryan Seacrest, and my dreams of a New Year filled with gumdrops and bubble gum have died in the reality of bills, aging, and other sorrows to horrific to put into writing.
I know. Great way to approach a new year right? Perhaps i need to turn to the left a little more..
So do my fellow bloggers do the whole resolution thing? I'm not a big resolution maker because part of the whole resolution process is having resolve and i have none of that.
I have resolution anxiety.
So many things wrong...where to start? Ahhhhhh forget it!
I mean really. The new year approaches people get all "you have any resolutions?" Because suddenly everyone wants to discuss all their embarrassing faults in lurid itemized detail, and by asking you to elaborate on all the things that suck in your life and need fixing, its reassures them that they are not alone in their inadequacies because your life could use as much improvement as theirs. It provides a schadenfreude-ish pleasure.
So, I don't really make resolutions. Not that i don't have a plethora of things that need re-tooling (and when i say plethora i MEAN plethora) but its because i have so much to work on that i shy away from enumerating them. I really don't want to ring in the new year with a grand total of all the ways i suck. I believe that in some circles that method is labeled as "avoiding the issue(s)."
That said there are a few things i plan to work on in earnest, in the spirit of self improvement - and they are:
1. Getting Mo' Fit.
I go through fits and starts with my exercise routine, and unless i want to go the way of "The Oprah" (yes she gets a definite article now) i better get with the program and stick to it.
2. Get Organized.
You ever miss a day of school when they were teaching you something that would serve as a foundation for the rest of that course? In Spanish 1 i missed the day we learned how to tell time. A small detail (so it seemed) but apparently spanish speaking peoples like telling the time as much as english speaking peoples. (I know i check my watch fiftly lemn times a day.) That day of absence still haunts me because i still struggle with telling the time in Spanish. Not that i need to, but dangit i should be able to. cuarto...menos... How is it I can say and read relatively complex sentences(for ex: hi how are you?), but can't say the time of day? What part of the game...? Well in that same manner, i think i missed the part of life where you learn how to be organized. In my early twenties life was handled in a slapdash devil-may-care fashion. It was shameful. I've since grown way better, but old habits die hard.
3. Appreciate the Moment.
A friend and I were discussing this and we came to the conclusion that we don't do this enough. But i don't mean Epicurean way of enjoying the moment. I don't want the morbid to be a motivating factor in my enjoying what i'm doing when i'm doing it. Its just too many times i've been doing something, and instead of appreciating it - i was ruing the fact that soon whatever it was that i was doing would be done. Sad. For example - the day i turned 21 i near had a nervous breakdown. I was freaked because i was an official official adult. 21. I was old ( or at least i thought) and instead of appreciating the fact i was 21 i kept mourning the fact that i wasn't 20. And now...i'd give my eyeteeth to be 21 again. But since i'm not, i'm going to enjoy the fact that i'm...well you don't need to know that. And, that was a terrible example, but you follow the general idea. I hope.
4. Getting this blog to suck...less.
This blog has been at ebb tide for a while now, and for the life of me i cannot figure out why. My knack for prattle - the concrete slab this blog is built upon - has failed me. Is it possible that the minutiae has become so minute that its rendered nil? Perhaps i just have a bad case of block. I don't know. Whatever it is, i want it to get fixed stat. This joint is bleak.
All said and done though? I'm generally optimistic for 2009. I'm going to work on making me the best me i can be. I figure if i do that...all the rest will fall into place. I wish all of you happiness, good times and the ability to weather whatever storms come your way. *Treacle alert*
Posts
