In Between Days

Yesterday I got so old, I felt like I could die.  Possibly that’s because I finally noticed Facebook’s alert that my best friend from high school had to have a cardiac ablation.  No, I didn’t know what it meant either.  On the plus side, I pay so little attention to emails from Facebook that, by the time I noticed that my friend was scheduled for this scary procedure, he had already returned home, safe and sound.  So that’s some suspense saved.  But, on the other hand, it’s a bit sobering to realize that people you went to school with are now old enough to be getting strange ailments you never heard of.  How old does that make you?

By which I mean me, of course.

This weekend is the one between National Heroscape Day and Halloween, and two weekends before my birthday.  It’s the first full weekend of Scorpio Season ... a surprising lot of my friends are fellow Scorpios, including the aforementioned best friend from high school and my best friend from my last job.  Also another of my best friends from just-after-high-school, and my best friend from just-before-moving-to-California.  Also a former business partner, a former office manager, and any number of roommates, friends of roommates, friends of my brother, former workmates, former employees.  I suppose it makes sense, if you think about rationally: one-twelfth of all the people you meet in your life are going to have the same zodiac sign as you.  Of course, my feelings towards astrology (which I touched on ever-so-briefly when discussing balance and paradox) are anything but rational.  Rationally, it’s probably not particularly meaningful that four out the five people I’ve considered my best friend at various times have been Scorpios.  Still, I continue to see a bit of meaning in it.  I know I was wrong when I said it was true ... still ...

So this week is a little bit of in between days.  A bit of a respite from the busy schedule, but not so much that I really have enough time to devote to a full blog post.  I rather thought I would have enough time, but after going down a couple of blind alleys and not really making any progress with anything, I ended up here.  And now I’ve drug you along with me.

Halloween will likely be fun this year.  Our littlest is two and a half and is planning to be a unicorn with pink wings.  I didn’t know unicorns had pink wings, but apparently they do.  The the Smaller Animal (who gained that moniker, recall, when he was the younger of two) will be Tree Rex, which is a thing from a video game—if you have an eight-year-old, you probably know what I’m talking about.  The demonspawn (that is, our eldest, who gained his nickname before he was even born) is of course too old and jaded to be trick-or-treating, but he has a costume for attending parties: sort of an evil jester thing.  When he was the only potential trick-or-treater, Halloween was a very meh holiday.  He’s mildly anti-social and not particularly motivated by candy, so he never had much patience for the whole thing.  OTOH, the Smaller Animal is completely motivated by candy, and the newest one is motivated by anything edible (or anything she can perceive as edible, which is a disturbing distinction to have to make) and she’s very social on top of that.  This year I’m imagining that we’ll have to drag the two of them back home kicking and screaming.  Almost made me shudder just now, thinking about it ... I got so scared I shivered like a child.

And then another birthday.  I’ve reached the age where, when people ask me how old I’ll be, I have stop and do math.  The Mother keeps asking me what I want to do for my birthday ... I dunno.  I don’t want to have to be in charge of thinking about anything, mainly.  Holidays in general are so stressful for us, because everyone has expectations, and they’re generally conflicting, and we get ticked off at each other when we keep the other folks from fulfilling their expectations because we’re so busy trying to fulfill ours.  And in the end it’s not worth it.  I think we spend too much time trying to plan life, but we always seem to be happier when we just let life happen.  Too much time worrying about trying to have a perfect birthday—it froze me deep inside.

Anyway, that’s my completely long-winded excuse for why I didn’t write a full blog post this week, when most likely you couldn’t care less.  But feel free to ignore me.  Go on, go on, and disappear ... see if I care.  Other than the fact that it would mean I now owe all that royalty money to Robert Smith for nothing.  Ah well.  Maybe I can owe him a battle against Mecha-Streisand or something.