Misspent Youth

My first spring-break from college is here, and I'm off to Florida for the weekend. I found an old-folks resort, so I won't be troubled by all those young whipper-snappers and their jello-shots and body-shots and whatever other shots that a good spring-break includes, when you are actually young enough to be on spring-break. I hope to get a few good shots of Sandhill Cranes, of snowy white dunes and porpoises in the surf...as the school classifies me, I am definitely not a traditional student.

I always intend to write here more often, but I rarely have the time. I was writing a silly poem about acting like your dead and actually dying from it, when I realized that I have so much yet to achieve, regardless of how old I may be. So I have embarked on my voyage to self-discovery, and, as boring as that may be to everyone else, it's a story that tells itself. It begins with a boy who is too ignorant about life to realize what he is missing (me), and then he becomes so involved with living that he misses out on growing (also me), and then he gets it, trains hard and goes to the Olympics where he publicly humiliates Adolf Hitler (Jessie Owens), and then he goes to school and learns things about life that he never knew, and he stops writing poems about playing dead (me). The end.

I actually like poems like that, and will continue to write them secretly, but will never share them as they detract from the lessons that I am learning on my journey to self discovery. I'm like Marco Polo, searching for the route to china or India, somewhere with lots of spices and different cultural rituals than I have ever experienced.Maybe I will bring back pasta, or an aquatic game that will captivate children throughout the rest of time...the possibilities are endless.

So, it sort of feels like, a few decades later, I may still recover from my misspent youth, and actually achieve a respectable level of personal growth. Time will tell.

Allegro or Largo

In the olde days, "without a moment to spare" implied that something had happened just in the nick of time. It now means that everyone is so busy that the wound has to be potentially fatal before it gets the emergency room doctor's attention. Someone actually sat in the emergency room waiting area and died from a stabbing wound.

"Sir! We all think our "emergency" is the most important one. The doctor will be with you shortly."

Sometimes it's not so blatantly obvious that the needs of humanity are blurring in the background. Sometimes the things that we don't have time for are things that are really important, not life threatening, and unbelievably worthwhile, given their moment.

Someone recently told me they are biding their time, hating their job, until they can retire... oh wait, that was me, but as I watched a large redheaded woodpecker out the window this morning and thought of how comforting and wonderful the nurses were for my Grandma after her stroke last week, I thought how offensive it is to just exist when there are people who need others to help them and people who dedicate their lives to providing this help.

I check my investments and do a little calculating to decide when I'll be able to move on to retirement and ...and what? Waiting to die?

Sometimes I have a hard time seeing the whole scope of things, and when my view involuntarily expands to include a larger part of the world around me, it's pretty scary how shallow my existence is. Perhaps there's something that can be done about it.
Sometimes facing things is more painful than numbly ignoring them, but sometimes, given their moment, these things lead you to where you really want to be anyway.

Part venting, part grieving, partridge in a pear tree...What?
It can't all be morose.