January 24, 2016

Sometimes Sleeping

I had a hard time staying awake today. It was a drowsy fast moving cloud, slow moving thoughts, just keep your eyes open a bit longer kind of day. I felt a bit guilty as I floated in and out of consciousness. Guilty because I could have been marking a few straggling papers. Guilty because I could have been entertaining my kids. Guilty because I could have been helping Mairin​ unpack and sort all the groceries for the week. Guilty because I could have been reading or playing guitar or even watching a movie, but I really couldn’t keep my eyes open.

The most exertion I was able to muster today was a ride to lunch- veggie burger and XIPA from Brewerkz. We were the only ones there and it felt a bit like a Zombie Apocalypse with refillable root beer. We forgot to ask for no straws and they brought four to our table. Made me think about a headline I just read where in 2050 there will be more plastic in the ocean than fish.  That is a few years after peak oil, now that should be quite a show. I will be seventy something; I wonder what that will look like. The girls will be the age I am now. I don’t like to dwell on the depressing stuff, but on lazy sleepy Sundays sometimes the shit comes crashing down.



For some reason the snow on the Eastern seaboard is making me miss New York. I always loved NYC in the winter. Well, that is a total lie, I hated it when I had to wake up at 5am and take two busses and a train to teach in the Bronx and I would step in puddles and the classroom would be so over heated that we couldn’t breathe, all 38 of us in the room, fresh off the boat,  and I would run outside and smoke cigarettes in the cold in between classes and cry on the train on my way home, because it all felt too big and too hard to fix.

But I did always like the fresh snow in Central Park. The whole city hushed under the blanket of white, while down on the lower east side, we crammed into bars with blaring jukeboxes, small crowds huddled outside watching the snowflakes fall, intermingling with our upward clouds of smoke. Still somewhat young and fresh and alive in the most exciting city in the world as we were slowly erased by the snow.

….

It’s strange when you try and document your daily life, and you realise that it is all pretty ho-hum. Even your thoughts on it become unoriginal and predictable. How many years have I been saying the same old stuff? Years of tweets and blog posts and Facebook statuses contemplating the same old thoughts. But then in a few weeks, there will be an upturn when I will realise that this stability is good. I think I was even writing about that last night.

I needed a rest today. I needed a slow day. I love these quiet weekends alone with the family, sometimes sleeping.

Ahhh, who knows? This one doesn’t seem to be going anywhere. Might be time for a good book, a full night sleep in preparation for the big week ahead. I hope Sarah Palin gives another speech this week. I really enjoyed that last one.

Lessons Learned:

  • Live your life as responsibly as you can, knowing you will never get it all right, and rest when you need it. 
  • Nostalgia doesn’t always have to hurt. Sometimes it’s just a fleeting memory, like a snowflake meant to only last a brief time. 
  • Some nights the words must be hard earned and etched out of the granite of your mind, and even then the diamonds are not always to be found. 


  1. What are your thoughts on the state of the world in 2050? 
  2. Share a memory of a place you loved to love. 
  3. What’s something you do that is hard and does not always yield the results you wanted?

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