Stuff

I am going to ramble a bit in this post...
I couldn't marshal all my thoughts together...into one cohesive theme.

Perhaps Annie Lennox said it best in my favorite of all her songs, "Why".

"This is the book I never read
These are the words I never said
This is the path I'll never tread
These are the dreams I'll dream instead
This is the joy that's seldom spread
These are the tears...
The tears we shed
This is the fear
This is the dread
These are the contents of my head"

So here are the contents of my head....

1. Feeling bad about the way that I snapped at a grocery store clerk earlier this evening. I stopped off to pick up a few things at the store and when I was in produce, she (the grocery store clerk) offered me a flower saying "Happy Mother's Day!". I snarled back a graceless "No Thanks!" and then I snapped, "I'm not a mother!" It wasn't her fault, but I am so tired, so...so tired of 'getting through' Mothers' Day. Why is it that just because you are a female on Mothers' Day, everyone assumes you must therefore be a mother? It just needs to stop. Don't we inflict enough pain on people through taxes, reality shows and this current political election without reminding them of other pain?  Not everyone is a strong empowered female who is okay with the life she's been handed. Don't make them feel worse because corporate America needs to find another way to guilt the public into buying more 'stuff'. I just want to get my groceries in peace; if I really wanted to be accosted by people giving away 'free carnations', I could hang out at the airport in search of a Hare Krishna. (although do they still do that?)

2. Last weekend, I decided that I had the time to go and while away some hours at my local Books-A-Million, so you can imagine my dismay when I pulled up to the shop and it was no longer there! Just a darkened storefront with empty shelves and a sign taped to the door telling me not to despair, that I could still find them online. Don't Despair! My stomach felt like it had been dropped into my shoes. You can't smell freshly ground coffee and cinnamon snickerdoodles when you shop online. Nor can you find inner peace and tranquility in the quiet hush of a shop with thousands of tantalizing titles right at your fingertips where you can read the blurb on the back, take a few pages for a test drive, or much like Billy Crystal in "When Harry Met Sally" read the ending in case you die before you finish the book. You can't make discreet eye contact with some hipster guy in really cool glasses and skinny jeans while inwardly rejoicing in the fact that he too is mildly obsessed with Outlander. No Books a Million, I can't...not despair! Sometimes it feels like I am the only human being on the planet that still likes to read actual books. I felt less alone in bookstores. So now I am not only in despair, but alone in a weird alien world of non-readers. It is constantly held up to us that United States is consistently lagging behind the rest of the world in test scores. Maybe statisticians would not completely agree, but I bet you could draw a pretty significant corollary between the drop in test scores to the amount of books stores closed in the last 10 years. Please don't comment to me about your Godless Kindles. True reading is done curled up in an armchair or sofa with a paperbound volume in your hands, perhaps a cat in your lap, or a faithful dog at your feet, a glass of red or a cup of chamomile at your side as God intended. Anything else is just- soul-crushing.

3. Whenever I go visit my Mom, after I've crossed over the bridge which always makes me feel as if I'm on a long journey, instead of a mere 20 or so miles, there is a little, what I believe to be auto-repair or some sort of industrial site that has out in front of it a large 30 foot or so T-Rex figure. They always dress the T-Rex in season-appropriate clothing. For instance, at Christmas he might wear a Santa hat and hold a wreath in his massive claws. For Easter, he'll have a basket in his claws and a stuffed rabbit dangling from his teeth, an Uncle Sam hat at the 4th of July...you get the picture. I always want to go and pull off the road, knock on the door of their warehouse, etc., and tell them how much I look forward to seeing the Rex every time I cross over the bridge and into their city. That I appreciate their whimsy and the trouble that it must take in order to get a crane out there to lift off the various attire and re-dress him, the expense of it, etc. That it always just makes my day and I always chuckle at what they dress him in. I should do that some day... really I should!

4. Being a very doting pet parent, there is almost nothing that I like better than going to a pet shop in order to buy treats and 'stuff' for my boys. I am almost as at-home in pet stores and the vet as I am in book stores. I am one of those types for which the great impresario PT Barnum once famously remarked (or not depending on which side of the conjecture you come down on) 'there's a sucker born every minute'.  I think that Pet Smart, or Supermarket or Petco or wherever probably gleefully rub  their hands together when they see me, 'It's okay guys, she's here, we'll definitely be able to make payroll this month!" In any case, the Go Cat company certainly must have had dupes like me in mind when they came up with their As-Seen-On-TV video "Cat Dreams". In my defense, it was sold as a freebie tacked on to the purchase of a large pouch of "Tiger Grass" Gold Standard catnip. 'Cat Dreams' is a DVD of what purports to be 'Natural Sights and Sounds Cats Love'. It's basically images of birds moving slowly, cheeping merrily while squirrels cavort chasing each other's bushy tails. On the same day that I purchased this visual feast for the feline eye, in the interest of trying to decrease stress and stay hip and current at the same time, I purchased an 'adult coloring book' for myself complete with special markers. After coming home and treating my two moggies to a catnip infused mouse play session, I attempted to get them to come down off their 'kitty high' by running the 'Cat Dreams' DVD. At the same time, I was attempting to try and de-stress with my coloring book. The only thing is...I am not actually very good at...how shall we say...coloring. I was attempting to fill in something called a mandala. I don't even know (or particularly care) what a mandala is! But the book promised hours of relaxing color therapy, so I gamely continued, certain that at any moment, stress would fall from me like water from a colander. The opposite occurred, the more I colored the tighter my shoulders got, I couldn't seem to stay completely immersed in the center of the image and occasionally, mortifyingly strayed outside the lines. The color didn't seem to be spreading evenly, one of my markers dried up, and I found myself ranting, "Damn it, now I'm out of green, I'm going to have to double up on orange and the whole design will be off!  The whole mandala is ruined, just ruined!' Reduce stress, I think I tripled it...After throwing my markers down and tossing the coloring book to the side, I caught sight of 'Cat Dreams'. Gordon and Jamie my now manic catnip-laced cats were nowhere to be found, having decided that watching 'Cat Dreams' was lame, they engaged in a game of racing each other up and down the stairs. As for me however, after just 15 minutes or so of watching birds and squirrels and the restful sounds of their chirping, I was fast asleep, completely stress-free!

5. I attended my 3rd funeral of one calendar year last Wednesday, I am not going to blog about this one however out of my deep respect for the family other than to say that life is short and finite and you need to hug your love ones often and tell them why they are special. I work in an industry that is all about estate planning and is very tied into life and death. It has felt so much lately like I have been surrounded by death and yet something that has very much surprised me is that when I came into this line of work, I was impressed with the vast amounts of resources and money I worked with, but the longer I am in this business, the more I see the folly of running after the accumulation of money. Yes, you need to have the necessities of life, people need homes to make memories in, but do you really need to have subway tile, quartz countertops or an outdoor kitchen to be complete? At last, I see that it is the people, the relationships that really matter. I believe it was Thoreau who said "Friends they cherish each other’s hopes. They are kind to each other’s dreams.” Care about your friends and family, build up their hopes and dream with them.

I am going to close this out Oliver Wendell Holmes...

"Alas for those that never sing,
But die with all their music in them"

Whatever you do in this life, don't die with your music in you, sing your song, dream your dreams and love even when it's easier not to.