Shipwrecked & Comatose

About a year ago I was beginning to notice my living room couch was looking a bit grubby. I had had that couch for over 10 years. I bought it for my first apartment. It was bound to not exactly be spotless. Even a professional steam cleaning didn't really keep it from showing its age. Sometime during the holidays it developed a rip. I was beginning to feel embarassed about my living room. The couch's framework was still solid. It had held up well over the years. Rather than replace it, I thought it would be nice to just reupholster it. After all, it would not be likely I could sell, or even freecycle a grubby, ripped couch. I didn't want a big piece of furniture cluttering up the landfills. Besides,if we went for a new couch Kevin and I would have to sofa shop together and it would be hard to carve out the time to do so. Then we would be spending endless hours in furinutre stores trying to hash out our preferences. With reupholstery, I could take home swatch books and we c...

The element of sadness and rejection that can come from social networking sites, while it is not life disrupting, is an unfortunate, although I suppose unavoidable side effect of social networking. I noticed in the last day or two that I hadn't seen any Facebook posts from a friend who used to post almost daily. Was he taking a break? Did he delete his account? There was an easy way to check. We have plenty of mutual friends, so I decided to search for him in my other friends' lists. Sure enough he showed up on their lists. Clearly he had decided he didn't want to be friends with me anymore and there is nothing I can do about that. I suppose if he said anything to me about it, nothing would have changed He would have had to have dealt with my arguments to the contrary that there was no reason why we shouldn't be friends. Obviously he felt there was a reason. I don't defriend people often. I'm not a friend collector either. I generally accept most friend request...

I was never much of a video game junkie. I never had an Atari or Intellivision or Colecovision or Nintendo while growing up. I never coveted a Playstation or an Xbox or even a Wii. It’s not that I never enjoyed any video games at all. I could geek it up with the best of them playing Infocom text adventure games like Zork. I had a few simple video games on my Apple IIE. In college I logged quite a few hours playing Tetris and Brickles in the Mac lab. Let us not forget the Lunatic Fringe screensaver that I found so irresistible every time I turned on Abbey’s computer in our dorm room. When my brother bought a Nintendo set of his own, I’d clock a few hours in his room getting cozy with Super Mario Brothers. In short, video games were always a great diversion, but they were never really a compulsion. They weren't something I wanted to spend all of my free time playing. What is boils down to is never saw the appeal of having a big expensive setup exclusively for playing video ...

I'm going to do what people have been doing for centuries this time of year. I'll be doing something that humans have done since they first began to notice the cyclical nature of of the universe and the patterns inherent in nature. I'm going to celebrate a day known in today's culture as the national holiday of Christmas. On the modern western calendar it's called Christmas, but humans have celebrated this day for centuries before that. We all know winter is rough. But even though we have hit the darkest days, we know light is returning. So let's get out the party trappings, eat lots of food, celebrate with family, and give each other gifts for no real reason. Just celebrate because we're alive and on this earth and everything on this earth tends to go according to patterns. Sometimes the universe is chaotic and unfair and nature is unpredictable, but there are some things that are reliable. As of today, the days grow longer. It always does every year....

I just finished my second semester of singing class this week. It has been an interesting journey in this class. The idea of Libera Canto shouldn’t even have to be a technique. It almost seems like something a singer unlearns in a lifetime of singing. I still had a hard time with it. My first session of the class had me thinking of who I am as a singer. I understood that my teacher wanted me to understand what it meant to just sing a song, and not perform it. There really is a difference. We were doing all kinds of strange techniques to make this happen. I still wasn’t sure if it was working. Was I really getting anything out of the class? My singing rarely received any individual attention. During the 6 weeks of the course, most of us only were able to sing our chosen songs solo once or twice. Was it helping me? After the October disaster with the Harrison Players, I knew I hadn’t learned nearly enough. I liked the teacher. I liked the other students. After meeting for a f...

This morning when I left my car and headed into the office, I left the bag containing my day's snack foods in it. I had an apple and some nuts. At lunch I realized I still had a teensy bit of Christmas shopping left to do (I know I said I was finished, but one of my gifts isn't going to make it, so I had to find something else for this person). I went out to the Borders two exits up the highway from my office to find something. When I exited the highway I saw a homeless man standing at the traffic light. I used to come through this area quite often and that man has been there many times before. I realized that I still had my bag of snacks with me. I thought it was some kind of cosmic coincidence. I had food in my car so I could give it to someone who needed it more than I did. The light was red, so it was the perfect opportunity to offer my food to this man. I rolled down the window. He looked at me expectantly. I shoved the bag out the window and asked, "Would y...

Hey look! I'm not doing the typical Christmas rant this year and am handling another topic entirely. When I was a young twentysomething, making my way in the working world, I found myself working part time in a real estate office one December. One afternoon the brokers began putting up the holiday decorations in the office. There were standard decorations with garlands and trees and pictures of Santa. The brokers wanted to be as ecumenical as possible and put up some decorations more evocative of Hanukkah as well. This also led to more discussion about how Christmas-y the Christmas decorations should be. Should they put up a crèche? They decided that both a crèche and a menorah were considered religious symbols. If you had one, you had to have the other and they weren’t sure how religious they should be. In the end, the decorations stayed with trees, santas, and pictures of dreidls (because a dreidl is a game and doesn’t have any real religious meaning behind it). Most of the broke...