Blue-Footed Musings

My husband brought home a big daisy for me yesterday. A couple of weeks ago he brought me some roses. I seem to have lost my midsize vase, so I’ve had to put the flowers in a small vase. Were it an ordinary small vase, the large blooms would have looked silly in it. But this is no ordinary vase. It’s roughly the size and shape of a large orange. It has no neck, but it does have lots of little spikes. The spikes act as legs, and you can change the angle at which the flowers emerge from the vase, but they can never go straight up. Arranging the flowers so that they don’t droop can be challenging, but when it works, it’s a unique and dramatic look.

I hate my “new” job.

It’s making me unhappy.

But it’s not just the job bringing me down. It’s a lot of things, and there’s not much I can do about that. I can only hope to find some good things to help balance out the bad things a little better.

So what’s been good lately?

• A tiny bit of justness crept back into the world when a certain someone suffered a “takedown of monumental proportions” (ha-ha).
• I’m reading David Sedaris’s new book and parts of it are laugh-out-loud funny.
• My husband and I went outside the other night to check for the Northern Lights. It’s unlikely we’d ever see them here, even when the sun’s been hyperactive and the sky miraculously happens to be clear, because trees block the horizon all around us. Still, it never hurts to look, and though the aurora was absent, we saw a falling star!
• I recently finished a musical composition, my first since quitting lessons. The night I finished it, I played it for my husband, and then I played it for Livia the next day. I’m shocked at my own willingness to play the piano in front of people who are actively listening, especially when it’s a piece that I composed. Could it be that I’ve grown as a person?

I saw the shoulder surgeon last week. Given that my range of motion is improved and that the pain is both less frequent and less extreme, he recommends that I give my shoulder a few more months to settle down. He says that usually in a situation such as mine the shoulder either continues to get better or it relapses. Should it relapse, surgery would most likely fix the problem. Should it continue to get better, then probably nothing needs to be done, as the tear is not severe (but, being an excellent doctor, he told me repeatedly that only I can judge how much the injury is affecting my life).

Though I had resolved beforehand to get the surgery, I see the wisdom of his advice. Certainly my shoulder has been improving. Just the other day I realized that I’d gotten back the ability to raise my arm to the side. It hurts to move it that way, but at least I can. So, I’ll see how things go and revisit the surgery option in September/October. In the meantime, I feel like I ought to start exercising the shoulder again, and he says that’s fine to do, but that I should keep all exercises at chest level or below, because it’s the overhead motions that are most likely to aggravate the injury. Good to know.

From a CNBC article: “More than half, 56%, of full-time workers in their early 50s get pushed out of their jobs due to circumstances like a layoff before they’re ready to retire, according to a 2018 paper published by the Urban Institute, a think tank. The researchers analyzed data spanning 1998 to 2014.” Those would be unpleasant odds to hear at any time, but they sound especially bad considering my current situation.

I recently read an article about a woman who says she faithfully writes down every nice thing that happens to her. Every one. And she says that as a result more nice things tend to happen to her. This makes sense to me. I believe that noticing the good things not only makes them more noticeable, but it also “draws” more nice things to you (i.e., positive energy begets positive energy).

This is not some crazy woo-woo concept. It’s cause and effect. When you deliberately note the positive things in your life, you put yourself in a positive mindset. You are more likely then to act in a positive manner. If you are positive toward other people, they are more likely to be positive toward you, and some of them may have the power to bring good things into your life. And if you do positive things, then you are more likely to be rewarded with positive outcomes.

I have come to realize, though, that being at home all the time limits the number of nice things that can happen to me. Here at home, it’s almost impossible to find new favorite places or meet new friends, for example. The odds of random nice things happening are also lower. Out there in the world, where there are all these other people and different energies swirling around and interacting in various ways, so many more things are going to happen. I’m not sorry to miss out on the random bad ones–traffic jams and such–but wonder how many good ones I’m losing out on.

To be clear, I don’t mind being a homebody. It’s my vibe. But I think it would be good to leave the house a little more often, if only for the sake of inviting more serendipity into my life.

For a while it seemed like book critics everywhere were talking about On the Calculation of Volume by Solvej Balle. I am a sci-fi fan, and I never met a time-travel story that didn’t entertain me in some way, so I was an easy sell.

In this story, bookseller Tara Selter suddenly finds herself repeating a day over and over again, a la Groundhog Day, except that it’s November 18th and she is not Bill Murray. She doesn’t know how she became stuck in this day or how to escape. She is away from home when it happens. When she returns home and tells her husband, he believes her. Every day when she awakes, she has to explain it to him again, because only she remembers the events from the day before. Imagine being to so fortunate as to be married to someone who believes you without question, only to feel them slipping farther and farther away from you as your days and theirs do not align. She explores the day as if it were a place. She learns the weather’s daily patterns, the day’s sounds and its silences. It is all intensely, hypnotically repetitive.

Why does does this lonely, introspective book feel so suited to the present time? Perhaps for some of us it’s feeling like we are quietly trying to exist in the spaces between crises, unsure how we got into this predicament, desperately struggling to get back to normalcy but unable to, and ultimately focusing on whatever joy we might be able to salvage from the situation. We may not have Tara’s specific problem, but we understand what she’s going through.

Currently Reading: I’ve finished volumes 1-3 of On the Calculation of Volume and have started on the 4th. I think I might take a break from the series and read something else for a while, but I’m not sure what. It’s so hard to find books that keep my attention, and these days I tend to bail on a book if it heads in a direction that I don’t like. My emotional state is such that I dare not to read anything disturbing. Even fictional trauma is too much to manage now.

This week I started my first work project composed primarily of recycled material. It’s a big change, and not a good one. To be clear, I don’t entirely disagree with the premise of using old copy. Some parts of the projects are suited to that, and if I’d had my way we would have switched to recycled material for those sections eons ago. I wasn’t allowed to make that call because a certain someone always stood in the way. I believe his many bad decisions over the last three decades are part of why were are where we are now. This adds a dash of resentment to the stew of sadness, frustration, and worry roiling in my stomach.

It was an unpleasant week, and it doesn’t bode well for my long-term job satisfaction. I’m being severely restricted in what I’m allowed to edit, and the new rules are in many cases the opposite of the old. I’m not always sure when I’m allowed to intervene, so I’ve been running everything past my boss. I feel like I’m asking her, “Please, may I do my job?” It’s ridiculous. But all of my coworkers have done the same, so at least I’m in good company.

Another thing my coworkers have all done is to choose pseudonyms for themselves. I get it now. I’ll be choosing one, too. If I’m not allowed to edit the work to my standards then it isn’t worthy of my name.

Everything in this country has gotten extremely expensive: housing, food, childcare, home and auto insurance, health insurance, healthcare, electricity, education, cars, etc. Each of these things has come to feel like a burden, and this has been going on for a long time. But it’s only now that gasoline prices are high that people are like, “Hey, this is too much!” Americans are content, it seems, to live in a totally rigged system and suffer the continuous depredations of the uber wealthy as long as gas is cheap. They probably wouldn’t even care about the war in Iran if it weren’t making gas prices rise. Their single-mindedness is baffling. I have read articles that attempt to explain it, and I still don’t really understand. I doubt I ever will.

I read a piece of advice the other day. It said, “Don’t share your despair.” Once upon a time I might have agreed, but I don’t know how to keep the despair inside anymore. It is too massive to be contained. And I don’t know how anyone can look upon the world as it is now and not feel despair.

So let us all share our despair, and if it’s true that misery loves company, then we shall all be good company.

But let us also share the bits of joy that we have gleaned, the tiny rays of hope, the flashes of beauty. The despair must be acknowledged, but the joy sustains us.