Month: October 2015

Everyone,

I don’t have to draw your attention, regular visitors, to the fact that the blog’s been woefully light on updates of late. Since I don’t let any of you get away with lame excuses, I won’t make any either.

Okay, I’ll just make a few, and it’ll only take a minute : I’ve been busy. My house is still wrecked. And I’ve been somewhat uninspired in the direction of writing of late. Nothing tragic or fatal, just a lack of new and interesting anecdotes and a hesitance to post fluffy crap just for the sake of posting.

Since the above stuff, it’s been hard to figure out what to tell you all about, until I logged in to the blog’s admin today. Then I had something to write about. Someone helped me out, and for that I’m grateful.

A reader left a comment on my birthday post, ‘Perspective #43’, calling me out for not sharing more intimate and candid photos of myself and my life.

While I often share stories and ridiculousness, usually in the form of TUS (Totally Unrelated to Spanking) posts, I rarely attach photos. This much is true. The reasons for the absence of photo proof of my day-to-day doings are pretty simple :

– I am not surgically attached to my smart phone. I actually have to look for the damn thing half the time when I want to use it, and even when I find it, have to turn it ON before use.

– As stated in the above referenced post, I am now 43 years of age. “Selfie” is not a part of my vocabulary, and I like it that way.

– Most practically, I do not wear cute skirts and eyeliner most of the time. Vanity precludes me from showing the world what I look like when I wake up in the morning. (You’re welcome.)

– And finally – most important of all – it’s none of your business. Really. I love you all as much as is reasonably acceptable, but my entire life is not anyone else’s peepshow. Yours isn’t mine, either, and rightfully so.

This whole ‘look into my life 24/7’ thing that we’ve all become so accustomed to makes us think it’s acceptable to fuss at someone for not leaving their drapes open at night. Personally, I think we’d all be better off if we kept a little more to ourselves.

With that all said, each person is entitled to his or her opinion(s), and I hope that the poster of the originally referenced comment understands that I am entitled to mine. I won’t be taking more selfies.

– Dana

 
Everybody has one – a perspective, I mean. From where you’re standing things look, feel, and probably even smell different than they do to someone standing just a couple feet away, so imagine how much differently we see things from inside our own skulls. It’s a wonder we manage to communicate at all, considering that every single experience we have, as individuals, colors us – we are all specific, original, and one-of-a-kind.

This month/year/week, on the edge of turning forty-three years old, my perspective is naturally different than it’s ever been before (or ever will be again). And while I’ve no way to know exactly how I’ll feel, think, or perceive in the future, I can tell you – quite clearly – that I’m damn thrilled to still be in attendance, today.

I’m thrilled to be alive, healthy to a measurable standard, and living in a time and place that affords me the luxury of things like fair trade dark chocolate, walnut burl, and boredom.

I’m also dismayed at my body’s flat-out refusal to produce collagen at a rate which I find acceptable.

It’s a toss-up. But then every birthday is, isn’t it? No matter how much we bitch about getting older, it’s a large margin better than the alternative. And even on days when we say things like, “I’d rather die than..”, we rarely mean it. Not really.

The past year’s been tough.
It almost feels disingenuous to say that – every year is tough somehow, so typing the sentence, ‘the past year’s been tough’, could happen just about any time, and to anyone, and probably does.
With that said – it’s been tough. Tougher than usual, by my pretty tough standards. We lost my dear paul to an icky and awful illness and an even ickier set of circumstances…

I started to list a few of my other grievances from the past year, but nothing else can (or should) follow that, so enough said. For those of us lucky enough to be able to say, “Life goes on”, well, I guess we should be sure that it does, in abundance.

So that’s what I’m going to do with my 43rd year : Live. Abundantly.

I hope you do, too.

Great giant heaps of love (and dark chocolate),

– Dana