Like a Jar of Candy

Friday afternoons hold the promise of happiness in the making. Like candy in a jar, weekends have a way to make me feel tingly with anticipation, wishing that I could consume them at once. And yet, the promise is almost the sweetest part. Already, when Thursday night rolls around, I feel a gentle wave of dopamine engulf my frontal lobe and for a moment I am eight years old and life is truly good.

Growing up, summer was just that. A seemingly endless row of Fridays with Sunday night light-years away. I loved the gentle pulse of the days as they glided by. The air laden with whispers from summers past. Leaves rustling, sparrows whistling, the lingering heat of a summer day still in the air. I no longer live anywhere near where I used to spend my childhood summers, but I carry the essence of those serene months with me.

Funny, though, that when we lived in Costa Rica, I struggled with the reality of an endless summer. It actually annoyed me. Just like an all-you-can-eat deal, everything soon tasted the same. Gone was the exhilaration of the first bees buzzing through my room and bouncing off the windows, the first morning warm enough to put on a sleeveless dress, the suddenly long days, and short, balmy nights.

And in a way, the further away from the equator one ventures, the more intense summer tends to get. It is the all consuming feeling of being alive again, after a time of reclusive hibernation, that seems to resurface like a whale out of the depth of the sea.

I make it a point, these days, to spend at least part of the summer as far North as possible, without having gnats and other blood suckers get the best of me.

Psychotic

Compulsive, bi-polar, paranoid, neurotic, manic and obsessive are handy terms to describe the behavior of people around us we don’t really like.

Sometimes, they are also used to describe tendencies in our own behavior. I have a friend who insists that she is “completely anal-retentive” and from the way her eyes gleam, when she says it, I know she takes considerable pride in it. After all, her house is immaculately tidy - always - and mine is not.

Another favorite term is co-dependent. I never quite understood what the co- stands for, like as if you are not really dependent, just kinda, but less than the one who really is. Dependent on what anyway?

As far as I understand, however, co-dependency describes a whole array of behaviors which all have one aspect in common: they are too much of one thing. People are categorized as co-dependent, because they are either too nice, or too withdrawn, too forgetful, or even too perfect. Pleasers, pouters, ranters, and perfectionists they all display sub-optimal behavioral patterns, that were adopted somewhere along the way, usually during childhood.

It’s an interesting concept, because it tends to describe a person, who has seemingly adapted to a given situation. It refers to the copers of the world. And by doing so, it comprises of all those individuals who cannot be thrown into the one or other box together with all the other lunatics.

This, however, begs the question, who is left?

When looking into the distance...

I see a cloud
ever so lightly dusting
the sky

It seems far
never to be addressed
on any unkind terms

Instead I steady my
eyes on the matters
at hand

Prince of Hearts

I have often wondered about the choices we make in life. Especially the choice in partners. Even though in the best case it hardly can be called a rational choice, there is something that we search for and seemingly find in that one person.

Again, as so often, it is the subconscious at work. Love for the one is as much a subconscious consideration of the best odds to maintain our own gene pool, and even improve upon it, as also a gut feeling about what is good for ourselves.

However, what we think is good for ourselves has to do as much with who we are as with how we were raised and, importantly, by whom.

There are several schools of thought on this, but generally the tenor is that we pick someone who best complements who we are and who, at the same time, helps us fill the voids left by our parents.

But again this decision relies heavily on our subconscious awareness of ourselves and our needs. Few people, if any, can claim to ever really know who they are. Our emotions more often than not surprise us and make us wonder, or even uncomfortable, because they reach deep down into corners of ourselves that have been stored away - at times for a good reason.

So how do we choose someone to complement the one we don’t fully know? To answer this, it is worth taking a close look at that one.

Apart from many, hopefully, endearing qualities, there will be many quirks that have lead to the same struggles over time along the lines of why-don’t-you... So, why did you pick that one? Why didn’t you see the trouble lying ahead?

In the beauty of that answer lies the secret to who we are and where we are headed.

I am in year eighteen and I am just beginning to touch the outer fringes of the blanket that holds the basket with the sachet containing the thread that wove the blanket.

Taking it down a notch

It's not easy to scale down, just like it's not easy to forgive or to be honest, and yet it feels so good once you do it. Letting go of those residual needs for ownership, status, pride...is a marvelous thing!!

Can't buy me Bliss

As I see people hauling the contents of entire two-car garrages down to the beach shore, because they think they will need all the junk they got on sale at Walmart, I also see something else: desperation.

We tend to think that the next product will make us happy, safe, fulfilled. And yet, after pumping, schlepping, and arranging inner tubes, coolers, sun umbrellas, air mattrasses, beach chairs, canoes and paddles around them, these suburbanites rarely look happy.

Bringing it home...again

Every time Fred comes up for breathing, I shoot him down. It's not nice, but I can't help it.

This time he was bemoaning the effects of outlawing DDT in the 1970s. Decades later Malaria is on the rise, people are dying. That awful Ms Carson and her ridiculous egg shells!!

True.

Maybe Rachel and Fred should rather team up and advocate outlawing patriarchy.
In the end, if you put two and two together, that's the leading cause of death in women in underdeveloped and/or muslim countries.

Think about it, if given a choice, which woman would want to subject herself to pregnancy and childbirth in unsanitary and often unsafe circumstances?

Childbirth is the leading cause of death of women.

Good luck with that book!

It's a funny thing...

...sitting in an oversized seat at the CINEPLEX diving into my oversized bucket of popcorn w/ extra butter while balancing a transpiring super-sized diet coke cup between my thunder thighs, anticipating yet another Holiwood flic, I do not want to think this, but here it is anyway: only because we can super-size anything, from popcorn, to cars, breast, houses, bonuses...we shouldn't.

Super, super-sized, super-fast, super-latives, it has become our culture, but it is a concept in need of review.