I mean, it's one thing if someone close to you says, "You're pretty cool." Or your boss tells you, "Nice work on the Schnorbuss account." These are people who know you and have some experience of your characteristics and actions, and can tell you something good about yourself that you have reason to believe. But mindless affirmations ("You're the best you that you can be!") mean nothing coming from a fortune cookie or some repeated meme.
Then we have this.
From the back of a box of Cheerios.
These are actually even more useless than affirmations; they are chants to make yourself feel puffed up. They're worse than someone who doesn't know you saying you are great; they're slogans to delude yourself into thinking you are terrific, based on nothing. (They also seem to think that 33% of Americans speak Spanish as their first language, or at least 33% of Cheerios eaters. What the hell, maybe that's accurate.)
Anyway, I don't buy it. They don't know me, and I know from long history that telling myself I'm awesome doesn't work; worse, it always seems to invite circumstances (like, say, a letter from the IRS or complaint from a client) to remind me that awesomeness is far out of my reach.
So, for me anyway, General Mills' attempt to make me feel better about myself has wound up making me feel worse. Thanks, cereal dudes; I've just lost my appetite.
All our dogs have had different ways of going for a walk. I think it's because they had or have different values. Some dogs are really into running, and thank heaven none of our have been, because the humans in this house were never fleet of foot and are not likely to become so soon. But there are other differences to note. For example:
1) Large Guard Dog (Tralfaz): The late Tralfaz was by breed a farm dog, meant to tow small carts and protect the herd--making him a guard dog, not a watch dog. His walking habits reflected this: straight line, watch everything, be suspicious of deer and squirrels and any other critter but not immediately aggressive. Walks with him were usually brisk, of varying length.
2) Medium Retriever (Nipper): Nipper was a fuzzy, fun-loving chap, the kind who would love to go on a hunt and retrieve things. Not having been trained as a hunting dog, though, he would probably freak out at the gun and grab the dead duck and eat it. Walks were very brisk, but with long stops to smell what there was to smell, and could be quite long.
3) Medium Retriever Redux (Izzy): Izzy is a sweet mush for the most part, with protective instincts but a scientific interest in smelling every blade of grass along the sidewalk. Walks are slow and include many stops.
The fact is, Izzy's walks are not great exercise because he stops constantly. Ants outpace us. Every walk is a snurffin' sniffari. I mean, it's better than nothing for me (who leads the majority of his walks), but it's not taking excess weight off either of us.
But it doesn't much matter to me about the exercise. Since I work at home, any day that isn't tempting by its pleasantness would probably be a day I stayed in and gathered dust. Having a canine companion guarantees I am going to be outside however lousy the weather is, and I think on the whole that has done me a lot of good. Not that it always felt good, mind you.
So thanks, fuzzy friends, for keeping me moving, not letting me become a potted ficus. But seriously, can we move someplace warmer?
It's been a busy time here at the ol' ranch, the ranch that is actually a Cape Cod style, the ranch that we can't sell at anything close to the original asking price.
There are reasons for that, some our fault, some the fault of others, and some that are part of the complex situation of our town.
Regardless, I have been under the gun to try to rake in as much dough as I can with my freelance work. So...
Sandra Boynton channeling Gilbert & Sullivan via Kevin Kline -- a highly unexpected but successful combination.
I was kvetching to a friend that selling the house is the most stressful thing I've ever done in my life -- not the saddest, not the hardest, but the most stressful. She thought that moving out of her house rather than selling it was more stressful, but she also noted that she sold her place in less than a week. I kicked her in the pants and said FINE. No, I didn't, but I want to kick someone. I'm looking for suitable subjects for kicking, if you know any.
As if I was unaware of how stressful this is, I found myself suddenly suffering from periodic and severe pain on my right jaw. It encompassed the upper and lower teeth and the entire region around it, and was some of the most awful pain I've ever felt--and I've been hospitalized with back pain, had stitches, had a concussion, and had a tooth out, so I know a little bit about pain. This stuff was Advil AND Tylenol level, and even then I would have to just wait out the sieges. It was like having a charley horse on my face.
I figured I had managed to give myself a nice dose of temporomandibular distress, probably from clenching unawares and also in my sleep. So rather than my dentist, I went to the ENT. My old ear doc has retired, so I went to a new one covered by my insurance, a fast-talking Chinese-born doctor with a heavy accent. It almost seems like a cruel joke to have an ear doctor who speaks quickly and with a strong accent, but there we are.
The doctor confirmed my self-diagnosis, though, taking pains to make me understand what I can do, which isn't much. He did give me a very light prescription for a muscle relaxant to take once a day. It seems to have helped. I've also made a conscious decision to try to stop myself from clenching the ol' jaw during the day, with mixed success. Nevertheless, the facial agony has moved off, at least for now.
If you've stuck with this entry all the way to the bottom, I thank you for your kindness, and please share your own agonizing adventures with facial pain, or moving, or stress, or anything else in the comments, so I can return the sympathy. Life is stressful, as we know, and we're all in this together.
You know, you don't have to hit Social Security age to realize you just don't bounce back the way you used to. A couple of weeks ago I was putting down some nice store-bought rocks around the front-yard bushes to make the place look nicer, hoping to entire a buyer for the house. I had already distributed mulch and dug up weeds, and so far all was well.
Then the irony.
Because while it's called egg rock, it was I that broke.
Well, not broken eggactly (har!). I lifted properly, showed good form, but then I turned in a funny way, and my body took a funny turn. It was one of those muscle pulls that you feel as it happens, and it happens that I felt it.
It didn't seem that bad at first, but it was pretty painful. When I was a strapping young lad (well, not that strapping) I could bounce back in a couple of days from this kind of thing. But it took me most of a week to stop groaning every time I bent over or stood up. Worse, my ability to twist to the right was severely impacted -- there, the pain was so bad it was almost impossible to force myself to do it. You never know how often you make a particular motion until it hurts every time you do it.
I'm glad to have recovered now, and the place does look a bit better with the new rocks.
All this got me thinking about getting older, and thus about an elderly friend of mine who retired to The Villages in Florida. If you are not familiar with that particular patch of real estate, it is a community for people 55 and up about 20 miles south of Ocala, Florida. In the year 2000 it had about eight thousand people, but now almost EIGHTY THOUSAND people live there.
My friend tells me that on Friday nights the widow women still doll themselves up and go to the bars (people get around by trolley and golf cart, I hear). A couple of years ago the place was labeled "The STD Capital of America," although that turned out to be a myth. However, I'm willing to bet there's a lot of shenanigans afoot all the same. It may be a foot that needs podiatric care, but afoot all the same.
My question is: Why is there no reality show about The Villages? It's a natural! And it would appeal to the people who still use cable for most of their TV watching -- that is, the 55+ folks.
I think it would be huge. People would get caught up in the drama. Who's sleeping with whom? Whose kids are visiting and likely to cause trouble? Which guys are doing drunk wheelchair races in the middle of the night? Which black widow is looking to land a rich dude with one foot in the grave and the other on a banana peel?
It'd be a regular Polident Place.The Old and the Restless. Medicare Hospital. All My Great Grandchildren. Dwindling Days of Our Lives. Insert your own jokes in the comments.
I can only assume that the governing body of the tri-county Villages frowns on such coverage. Well, more's the pity. Not that I'd watch the show -- at least, not until I'm riding a wheelchair myself. Which, if I keep fooling around with these sacks of rocks, could happen sooner than I think.
