Today I went out in the rain to renew my car registration. Every two years we have to take our cars to a Department of Environment Quality test station so they can make sure our carbon footprint isn't too big. My old Focus passed the test, no problem. Yay. A car that fails DEQ implies a moral failure, I'm pretty sure, so I was feeling smug. I was out of there in less than 15 minutes, $143 poorer and wondering, if I can't find work A.D. (after degree), will I have to park the car and start transiting with the masses? I'm not afraid of mass transit like my friend Sheryl. But mass transit is a devious invention cleverly devised to keep poor people poor.
Where would I be transiting to, though, is the question? Sheryl hasn't found work yet. I doubt I will be any luckier. No one wants to hire old women. Not when there are so many chirpy young people around who are eager to do the job. Maybe we should do what they used to do in Japan: take the old folks up the mountain and shove them off a cliff.
Judy Woodruff and Gwen Ifill are my heroes: two older gals who are still tearing up the airwaves. The only waves I can tear up are the ones in my microwave oven, and even that is iffy sometimes. Sometimes pressing the button gets you nothing but dead silence. The monster is old and tired. I am referring to the microwave.
After the rain stopped, the sun came out and the temperature dropped. I yanked on my (tight! ow!) spandex jogging gear and trotted up to Mt Tabor Park. I shuffled carefully along the slippery leaf-strewn roads, avoiding the muddy trails, very aware that one slip, one fracture, would change my life forever. There were about twenty Canadian geese honking and pooping happily in the reservoir. Big gray clouds intermittently hid the sun. These clouds are the storm cells that come in with colder air. I can see Bruce Sussman's weather map in my mind...yep, these are those patchy storm cells that can dump cold rain at any moment and then trudge on toward Mt Hood to lay down some snow. I hate snow. Not that you asked, just sayin'. It's 48° right now in Portland, and 83° in Phoenix. Enough said.
A boring day. I've lost my momentum, my mojo, waiting for feedback on my personal albatross. I might actually have to get out the sewing machine and start—gasp!—mending or making things. If you knew how much I hate to sew (long story), you would realize what a big deal this is.
I could start working on my business again. It's there, in the back of my mind, all the time, like an unhealed wound. No, that's a terrible metaphor. Let's say... the idea of working on my business is like having a grain of kitty litter stuck in my sock. A nagging irritation difficult to ignore (especially while I am trying to jog). I have some ideas, I have some half-formed plans, but I have no enthusiasm while waiting for feedback on this dissertation. I am frozen in time, like a decrepit bug stuck in amber.
