pockets

           Remember, you can always put your hands in your pockets and walk away.

I think of that quote every time someone irritates me or says or writes something hurtful. I have done just that even before I read the quote and have felt better for it. Sometimes I have walked far away and stayed away, the relationship sadly unable to be repaired. With other people just a little time apart helps. The most challenging times have been when I, through a sense of duty, have to continue to be around someone and interact with them. I say to myself, "Well, I'll just pull up my big girl panties." (I like that phrase.)

It's odd but when a person is hurtful my vision of them comes into focus. Through my mind passes the thought:Ah, that is what she/he is. That is ______. And any illusion I have had about this person's morals, ethics, any looking away from what the real person is......stops.

This may all seem disjointed and you the reader do not know what the hell I am writing about in particular. Someone has written a blog post that has attacked me and someone I love. In writing it he has "come into focus" for me. 

So my hands are nestled in my pockets as I walk away forever.

end

And at the end of the day,
your feet should be dirty,
your hair messy
and your eyes sparkling.

Shanti

walk

Remember,
you can always put your hands in your pockets 
and walk away.

John Huston

oceans and puddles

There comes a time

when you have to

stop crossing oceans

for people 

who 

would 

not

 even 

jump a puddle for you.

t-shirts

While on a recent group trip abroad I sat after dinner around a table as our previously unknown fellow travelers introduced themselves. We would be together for 10 days so the tour guide thought it would be helpful for us to get to know one another while we were still fresh (without counting the cheap ticket transatlantic flight exhaustion). Names, hometowns in the States, occupations. The introductions were going well and some people even acquired new (nice) nicknames which were to stay with them throughout the trip. I employed my usual habit when in a group of people. I remember the resume a person uses."Dentist" "Wine maker" "Canadian" "Retired school principle" I even imagine each person wearing a t-shirt with their resume printed on the front. "Hey, this is the definition of me." Then a vivacious blonde thirty woman told us her name and said, "I am a breast cancer survivor." That's her resume? That's what she wanted on her t-shirt? Well, okay. So that's how I remembered her throughout the trip. My recent biopsy (I think of it as a "bebopsy" like the aunt in the Greek wedding movie!) revealed...I have breast cancer. I did not run out to have printed a new t-shirt. I am not breast cancer.I am so many things other than breast cancer that I cannot find a t-shirt large enough to list them all. Actually, I might have been defined as breast cancer for just a few days anyway because yesterday a surgeon with an alliteratve name dug "it" out of me. So I am really still the "so many things" which won't fit on a t-shirt. Which brings me to Nora Ephron's "Above all, be the heroine of your life, not the victim."

Life

Life isn't divided into genre. It's a horrifying, romantic, tragic, comical, science-fiction cowboy detective novel.

Alan Moore

Michael Holroyd

He saw the world as being occupied by two species of human beings: men and women of will who sought unity by force if necessary (and so often it was necessary): men and women of imagination who could detect a harmony underlying the discord of our lives and used it as their compass. He identified the real struggle in modern times as being fought out between these two species of human being over the battleground of public opinion. But all of us were composed of will and imagination, and were tempted to externalise the enemy within.

Basil Street Blues