![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
I turn 44 today. I like the symmetry of this number a lot. In Mandarin, "four" and "death" are the same word and so four is considered an unlucky number... but I'm not Chinese. Double Death!
I don't find myself as freaked by death at the moment as I have at other moments (like a year ago). Then I was having a cascading series of linked physical and emotional problems which I now like to think of as my MID-LIFE CRISIS. So, despite the fact that I can't shake the cold I've had since last Friday and I pulled a muscle in my back last night, I feel all kinds off content and hopeful.
I was mentioning Michael Apted's "Up" series last week. Snake and I have watched up to "42 Up" and it has made both of us think of the arc of life more. I realize that my perspective is changing. In the past few years, I've been seeing life as a highway and me as a rabbit running headlong down the dotted white line. Whatever I was heading for was always in the future and always receding. My desperation to get to this unspecified destination was matched by my growing certainty that I was going to get flattened by a truck at any second.
The "Up" series, which revisits the same group of people every seven years, is making me rise above the arc of my own time on earth and see it from outside (at least as high as one can rise; let's not overstate my godly powers of objectivity). There is a great sense of calm in this perspective. There is also a kind of resignation. Not that I don't have dreams that I wish to fulfill, but I resign myself to the fact that the attempt to make those dreams concrete is the important part, not the result.
I am learning to forgive myself for the sins I'm not actually guilty of.
Today's plans are not earth-shaking. They include some work I have to do at home, writing DOB, reading Jitterbug Perfume and "Runaways" torrents, buying the second trade of Exterminators, taking the dog for a walk after Snake gets home (while he heads for the kitchen to finish preparing something sweet and mysterious) and going out for dinner at the Biryani House.
I have a gift-certificate from HMV but I'm damned if I know what to buy with it. Also a leftover one from Chanukah for Chapters bookstore. Maybe I'll go spend those tomorrow.
I don't find myself as freaked by death at the moment as I have at other moments (like a year ago). Then I was having a cascading series of linked physical and emotional problems which I now like to think of as my MID-LIFE CRISIS. So, despite the fact that I can't shake the cold I've had since last Friday and I pulled a muscle in my back last night, I feel all kinds off content and hopeful.
I was mentioning Michael Apted's "Up" series last week. Snake and I have watched up to "42 Up" and it has made both of us think of the arc of life more. I realize that my perspective is changing. In the past few years, I've been seeing life as a highway and me as a rabbit running headlong down the dotted white line. Whatever I was heading for was always in the future and always receding. My desperation to get to this unspecified destination was matched by my growing certainty that I was going to get flattened by a truck at any second.
The "Up" series, which revisits the same group of people every seven years, is making me rise above the arc of my own time on earth and see it from outside (at least as high as one can rise; let's not overstate my godly powers of objectivity). There is a great sense of calm in this perspective. There is also a kind of resignation. Not that I don't have dreams that I wish to fulfill, but I resign myself to the fact that the attempt to make those dreams concrete is the important part, not the result.
I am learning to forgive myself for the sins I'm not actually guilty of.
Today's plans are not earth-shaking. They include some work I have to do at home, writing DOB, reading Jitterbug Perfume and "Runaways" torrents, buying the second trade of Exterminators, taking the dog for a walk after Snake gets home (while he heads for the kitchen to finish preparing something sweet and mysterious) and going out for dinner at the Biryani House.
I have a gift-certificate from HMV but I'm damned if I know what to buy with it. Also a leftover one from Chanukah for Chapters bookstore. Maybe I'll go spend those tomorrow.
