My blog and welcome to it
Why through a looking glass? Most people see the place I call home, the place I was born, the city where my great, great, great grandmother is buried, as one unlike any other. Many can't understand why I stay. I can't see that there is anywhere else to go.
Perhaps we do look at life differently here, or I do, which explains the looking glass: life mirrored, slightly askew. It's not how you might assume from TV, whether "reality based," i.e., news, or fictitious.
Today? It's the second anniversary of my having quit smoking, and of one of my closest college friends, then age 41, e-mailing to announce she had stage 4 breast cancer. It's the day after my mom's birthday; a week after my own. Twenty-two years since I have moved to this block, twenty-two years with the same phone number, in the so-called real world, where my mind is prone to wander, and my synapses misfire with some consistency.
It is a strange world, when life's most intimite details are proclaimed in cyberspace -- but since I gave up cigarettes (without becoming an irritating "reformed smoker), I need a hobby. More precisely, a place to talk to myself, and, I hope, to you, whomever you may be.
It is a challenge, to understand why smoking indoors has been outlawed here, when the average person who stands on the street will breathe in more carbon monoxide in 20 minutes than I would exhale in 200. I get it -- that I am smaller than the average car, much less bus or truck, so it's easier to try to make me conform to a new social norm than to force the average driver to make an effort. (Car does beat pedestrian; bus beats car, and so on in the run-me-over sweepstakes.)
One caveat: despite or because of all the techno-changes since my brain was young enough to absorb them without forgetting what to eat for dinner, I remain technologically challenged. It wasn't my intention, but there's just TMI out there. I realize I'm adding more, but no one ever said irony wasn't my strong suit -- it's one I wear well, one that escapes many people in many places, but its absence would be stranger here, particularly at this time in our political landscape, to put it politely.
Word for the day: VOTE!
Perhaps we do look at life differently here, or I do, which explains the looking glass: life mirrored, slightly askew. It's not how you might assume from TV, whether "reality based," i.e., news, or fictitious.
Today? It's the second anniversary of my having quit smoking, and of one of my closest college friends, then age 41, e-mailing to announce she had stage 4 breast cancer. It's the day after my mom's birthday; a week after my own. Twenty-two years since I have moved to this block, twenty-two years with the same phone number, in the so-called real world, where my mind is prone to wander, and my synapses misfire with some consistency.
It is a strange world, when life's most intimite details are proclaimed in cyberspace -- but since I gave up cigarettes (without becoming an irritating "reformed smoker), I need a hobby. More precisely, a place to talk to myself, and, I hope, to you, whomever you may be.
It is a challenge, to understand why smoking indoors has been outlawed here, when the average person who stands on the street will breathe in more carbon monoxide in 20 minutes than I would exhale in 200. I get it -- that I am smaller than the average car, much less bus or truck, so it's easier to try to make me conform to a new social norm than to force the average driver to make an effort. (Car does beat pedestrian; bus beats car, and so on in the run-me-over sweepstakes.)
One caveat: despite or because of all the techno-changes since my brain was young enough to absorb them without forgetting what to eat for dinner, I remain technologically challenged. It wasn't my intention, but there's just TMI out there. I realize I'm adding more, but no one ever said irony wasn't my strong suit -- it's one I wear well, one that escapes many people in many places, but its absence would be stranger here, particularly at this time in our political landscape, to put it politely.
Word for the day: VOTE!
posted by alice, uptown at 4:32 PM
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