Details in the fabric

I'm a cat person. If everything goes according to plan, and I don't find that special One&Only that I want to make miserable for the rest of our lives by marrying, I will be that old, scary lady in the house on the hill with loads of cats. Children will fear me so much they wont even egg my house on Halloween. That's the plan.

Now, you want to make God laugh, you should tell him you have a plan. No need to go into details, He will laugh just the same. I'm a firm believer there is a God, I just don't believe He has the time to listen to every single prayer we send Him. I mean, if God has an answering machine, the tape ended a long, looong time ago. Take it He haven't gone digital yet.

Digitalis is a drug that strengthens the contraction of the heart muscle, slows the heart rate and helps eliminate fluid from body tissues. Don't ask me how I know - I just do - and bear with me on this. I lean towards the tendency to freak out on things that don't really matter, but stay calm during the real storms. In other words, I can whip up a pretty good storm in a glass of water, but during the hurricane, I'm the one nailing down the patio furniture and covering the windows with planks when people run around in panic like deheaded chicken.

I'm weird that way. Maybe because I come from a long line of worriers on one side, and a long line of worry-comatose on the other side. Mixing those genes together made me the person I am - calm in crisis, all worked up over nothing.

I realized that yesterday, pounding the ground like a Clydesdale in my wedges (thank you, Ant, for the good advice of letting my stilettos rest), because I can't seem to walk normally, always in a hurry somewhere - somewhere else then where I currently am - that important stuff make an annoying swooshing sound as it passes right over my head. All the time. While the little, pesky things just linger - dally, dwadle, drag, loiter - linger.

Like I spent a sleepless night, worrying about the car passing through the governmentally issued yearly checkup that following morning, letting the caffeine I poured into my system burn a hole in my already all worked out stomach, and instead of taking a sleeping pill to make myself actually fall asleep, and not look nor feel half dead at the checkup, I worked out, working myself up, push-up and sit-ups till my abs hurt so much I cramped up, rolled up and nearly threw up.

But at least all that was an up-motion, right?

And the car passed, without a single problem, not a single note on the sheet, the guy telling me the car will last me a lifetime, because I take such good care of it, while I in fact couldn't care less, don't even know how to change the oil, haven't washed it in moths and yes, currently am driving on fumes, because the gas is ridiculously expensive and I have the faith that I wont get stranded somewhere, on the side of the road, even though the red lamp warning about lack of gas had been on for what seems like ever. Maybe I should worry about that?

When big things happen, really big things, I tend to watch them from afar, laid back, not worrying. I'm good in crisis's. Maybe because I have gotten so used to them by now, the little ones, that I developed an internal antihistamine towards them, teaching myself how to subdue a panic attack and turn it into serenity. Or something.

And now - a big thing - crisis - exigency - call it whatever you want to call it, just don't call me in the middle of the night - I'm not sleeping, but I'm not mentally where I am physically - has festered and is lingering, and I'm prone to wait this one out, laid back, slowed down. Yet here I am, biting my nails down to the bone, with that indefinite pain inside my stomach that's drilling a hole in my intestines, making my entire persona tensed, so tensed I look like somebody shoved a stick up my butt, all the way to my brain, and all I want is to go to bed, close the drapes and sleep. Just sleep. For once not thinking things through for a thousand time, just be, be satisfied with the journey instead of working myself up over the goal, enjoy the view.

I caught my train, even though the mentioned wedges are of the flip-category. And you know what? Sunken into the seat of a commuting train between two cities on the west coast, with more people around me then I could ever care for, with the sounds of laughing, and talking and baby screaming and the motion of the train and the whistle and the whining and the woofing and the waffling and the landscape escaping before my very eyes I found a contentment that I rarely find in life. Just being.

Being on a train, in a plane, on a boat, in a car, getting from point A to point B, sometimes continuing to point C and working my way through the entire alphabet, and constantly moving, forward and sideways and diagonally through parallels, and finding the calmness in the panic and the motion and the celerity - just to be - moving - on my way somewhere.

I close my eyes and I exhale and let the realization that the world is going on, like it should, all around me, stolid of whatever or wherever I am, just wash over me. And be fine with it. Be fine with the fact that I might just be one person to the world - and perhaps one day the world to one person - and not worry in that moment, not hurry though the emotions in that moment, not work myself up till I'm ready to give in, emotionally, keel over, falter in my belief of what I am and where I'm heading.

You know, if you could just keep on moving forward - continuously - and just be...

Maybe I work myself up into a frenzy over the little things because curiosity is what drives me forward? They say curiosity might kill you - it killed the cat - and it's like everything else lethal, in small doses, it makes you stronger, unless it kills you? How do you dose curiosity?

So I work myself up over pesky little things that don't mean anything, to feel that I can still feel and be a human being. Instead of watching the world go on before my very eyes, not participating?

Or maybe I just don't have the strength to deal with everything that falls down from the sky, some of it over my shoulder, making splatting sounds as it hits the ground, down, by my feet, in the puddles of muddy problems I never volunteer to jump into?

Or maybe my brain is like a grid-chart, everything neatly fitted into labelled boxes, put for storage on raggedy old shelves, with too much stuff on them to be healthy, for usage later? The Excel mentality has often gotten the best of me, where I try to organize people and feelings and events and emotions and words and memories into the chart system like I have with my CD's, alphabetized on their shelves, and books, just the same, by the author, so I can just reach out and always know which book I'll get in hand. So I pull out the charcoals and a sheet of almost white rice paper and doodle and doodle and doodle, phones and shoes and hearts and flowers and animals and faces and eyes and houses and skylines and notes and zigzags till I run out of paper.

Sometimes, when I manage to keep my mind focused for ten minutes or more, I manage to actually do something artistic. Like this. Sometimes, I just can't be bothered.


Life is a series of events, loosely fitted together, not by far "one size, fits all". And we pick our favorites out of the memories and put them neatly into scrapbooks that lay on shelves and get covered by thick crusts of dust till we blow the dirty particles off it and take another look, reminiscing what we want to remember, letting the rest fall to the floor of the mental editing room, trying to pretend it never happened.

And we are fine with it - most of us - because otherwise, we'd be emotionally paused in a never-ending temper tantrum. Moving forward means evolving. Revolting towards the past and finding a better tomorrow, creating our own future.

And God laughs and laughs and laughs. He is a happy Guy. I like Him. We don't always see eye-to-eye, but we work out most of our difference's. And what's most important, He seems to believe in me. And that's always nice.

So, at the end, the old scary lady with the abundance of cats living in her house on the hill. Unless curiosity kills me or I submerge into the can of worms that is my mind. Yet I keep myself afloat, because I want to, because I'm the best me anyone could ever be,



Did that get too philosophical for you? I'm sorry...



I at least try to be. And don't take this personally, but this is one of the pesky things I decide not to worry about. I know you wont mind.


//H




PS. Got my Jason Mraz CD, that had been on pre-order for the last month, yesterday. I haven't taken my earphones off for 36 consecutive hours. Eloquently juggling with words, and apparently balls too... he floors me!