more normal than not

It’s all about the expectation.

The forecast…what might happen…watch out for this, it’s coming.

We had warnings of ice this morning, but thankfully the roads seem to still be “full of traction”.

It’s still raining like crazy, but the ice seems to only be on the bushes and trees…on the car windows.

I can live with that.

Of course, it was a warning.  It wasn’t a promise with a full guarantee.  It was a forecast that I believed.

So I prepped and did what I could to be ready for hard times.

If an ice storm that lasts a couple of days is really hard times.

I doubt that it’s really hard times.  It’s really only a “temporary inconvenience”.

It’s funny how hard we work to prepare for the “maybe” stuff that “might” come along.

I was at Wal-Mart picking up some groceries.  I had a list, but I still got some stuff wrong.  I don’t know how detailed a list I need to make…it’s hard to get it right.

It was busy as could be at Wal-Mart. I knew about the Thanksgiving part…lots of folks were buying turkeys…but didn’t find out about the ice storm part until I got home.

There’s a different sort of energy out in the crowd when people are getting ready for an ice storm.

There is an ever-present kind of quiet desperation that gets amped up a little when the weather might turn bad.  People seem pretty focused.

I tend to mosey.

As a rule, I don’t hurry too much.

It felt like a lot of people were tailgating me with their shopping carts.  My focus was different than theirs.

Now, if I was going to go all “law of attraction” on this weather forecasting, and say that if I didn’t believe it and because I chose not to believe it, it wasn’t going to be attracted into my life, I would probably find myself buried up to my waist in snow occasionally.

There is some science behind a weather prediction, after all.

But I was thinking that it is strange how I give so much attention and “bad possibility” to an expectation like a bad weather forecast.

In my mind, I am sliding off the mountain before the roads even get slippery.

I am powerless and flailing, struggling to survive.

All because I watched a man or woman who told me that bad things were coming.

Anytime I’ve really run into trouble, though, it was when something took me by surprise.

Then the weather people could backtrack and explain the anomaly.  Then they could explain why the warning never came in time.

I’ve thought before that it’s a pretty good gig to get paid to predict that there’s a 50% chance of anything happening.  I believe that things could swing either way as far as the weather goes.

We don’t have any ice this morning that looks like it’s going to make driving bad.

It didn’t come together like predicted.  It didn’t happen.

But I believed.

Mission accomplished, Weather Girl.

I believed.

Danged Facebook.

Dangitdangitdangitdangit.

Jenny asked me yesterday why I had so much music stuff on my Facebook page now.

“Why do you have so much music stuff on your Facebook page now?” she said.

I told her that I thought it was because I’d clicked on a bunch of stuff when they started asking me questions.

When someone asks me a question, I try to always be polite and answer it if I can, so when they asked if I liked Jimi Hendrix, it was kind of a no brainer to answer.

“Why, sure I do. Who doesn’t?” click. like.

How about The Band?

“Heck, yeah, I like The Band. The Band is a great band.” click. like.

Victor Wooten? click.like. Jesse Colin Young? click.like. Van Morrison? Phil Keaggy? Bruce Springsteen? Richard Thompson? clicklikeclicklikeclicklikeclicklike.

The list went on and on.  I finally had to stop clicking.  I was getting tired of clicking.

But now my Facebook page is full of news from Jethro Tull’s winter tour of the Philippines and pictures of Shelby Lynne eating breakfast.

I guess that’s cool…but the thing about it all is…I can’t keep up with my real friends on Facebook, much less my imaginary, “it would be kind of cool to hang out with…” friends.

So now I’m getting all this news that I don’t read.  I just don’t have the time to read all the Tull news.

I don’t have the time.

They did it with movies, too.

There was a list with all these movies…and when they asked if I’d seen any of them, I was able to click on a bunch of them.

Sure, I’ve seen them…I’ve watched a bunch of movies over the years.

There were movies that were popular…some old classic westerns…some movies that were kind of “arty”…lots of different movies.

Now, when I look at what I’ve done with all my clicking, it says “Peter Likes City Slickers”.

I guess that I liked City Slickers OK a bunch of years ago.  It was kind of cute.  It was cute…that’s all.

City Slickers didn’t really change my life.

It wasn’t a life changing event for me.

Not like Terminator 2…now that was an action packed movie, that one.

I don’t want to be remembered for liking City Slickers.

I don’t want that to be my main “critical legacy”.

I don’t know how to put the rabbit back into the hat.  I don’t know how to get Facebook to back off and quit spreading these rumors about me…(OK, half-truths…I did click “like” when the movie poster came up on the screen.)

Pointing the arrow and clicking the mouse are too easy.  I feel like I was set up.

In cyberspace, no one can hear you say, “NO…WAIT!! THAT’S NOT WHAT I MEANT!!!”

There’s no chance to convey subtle inflection.

There’s no “hipster irony”…there’s only what the words that lay on the page say.  What you see is what you get.

“Peter Likes City Slickers”.

Indeed.

I don’t know what to do about all of it.  I better get to clicking.

I hear that enough monkeys with enough typewriters can write a sonnet.

Who knows what I can accomplish if I type fast enough?

My youngest son, Nate, never used a pacifier.

He’s a smart kid.  He knows exactly what a pacifier is for.

But he never used one.

That’s why it was such a surprise in some ways to glance over at him the last time we were at the “dirty” Goodwill Store and see him engaged in something that kind of grossed us out.

I say “surprise in some ways” because it’s never completely a surprise when a four-year-old boy does anything strange.  They are inventive and productive in the ways they can be weird.

The “dirty” Goodwill is one that is kind of a clearing house for things that are too strange for the other Goodwill stores.  You can find some good deals there.  It’s more like a traditional thrift store than a lot of the bigger, nicer Goodwills….messy and jumbled…full of buried treasures.

When Jenny looked over at Nate, he was riding on a rocking horse that looked like someone had dragged it out from under a trailer somewhere.

Maybe they sent it up from New Orleans after Katrina hit.

It’s hard to tell what kind of journey a lot of the items at the dirty Goodwill have made.

Riding a nasty horse isn’t really cause for alarm.  Germs are everywhere.  You can’t escape germs.  You can’t “anti-bacterialize” the whole world.

There’s nothing wrong with a few germs.

But when Jenny took a closer look at Nate, she realized that there was more to the activity going on than just rocking.

He was canted over at a strange angle…and there was a 5 inch piece of string attaching his mouth to the plastic horse.

When she followed the string from the horse to his mouth, she saw that it was attached to something made of soft plastic that he’d put in his mouth and was actively sucking on.

OH MY GOSH…IT WAS A THRIFT STORE PASSY!!!!!

It was a crusty, brown with dirt thrift store pacifier.

Nate had found one of the grossest things you could dig up in any thrift store…and he had it in his mouth!

GET IT OUT! GET IT OUT!! GET IT OUT!!!!

Who knows what motivates something like that.  Like I said, he’s a smart kid…he knows some of the score.

Thrift store pacifiers are pretty gross to suck on, though.

Actually, I do the former owner a disservice.  It’s not so gross in its original state.  It’s just something some little kid sucked on…nothing really gross about that.

It is just the thought of a piece of soft rubber attached to a plastic rocking horse, bobbing in the waters of Hurricane Katrina and then making its way to a thrift store a little ways above Greenville, SC…and then making its way into our little son’s mouth….well…

THAT’S PRETTY FREAKING GROSS. IT’S REALLY PRETTY FREAKING GROSS.

Nate will survive this latest escapade and so will we.  It’s a learning thing…you learn not to suck on thrift store pacifiers as you mature.

You mature and you don’t put items at the thrift store into your mouth.

THRIFT STORE PASSY?!!!  REALLY?!!!

I worked at summer camps for 8 of my 53 summers.

The first 6 years, I worked at a camp that’s down the road from where we now live.

The first two summers I worked there, I was a member of the crafts department.

I worked in crafts because I was majoring in Art.

The crafts area was under the dining hall.  It was a big cage…enclosed in chicken wire.  I spent my first two summers at camp working in a big art coop.

Everyday, I’d see the mountaineering staff come and go…loaded down for a hike or carrying ropes for another climbing trip.

I think they all thought it was kind of funny that I was stuck behind wire.

My third year at this camp, I got to join the Mountaineering staff.

It was closer to where my interests lay than making hundreds of macrame bracelets.

I guess that where this lead in is going is that, even though being on the Mountaineering staff was as close to “right livelihood” as I could get, there was an element to it that occasionally terrified me.

For some reason, I am pretty afraid of heights.

I remember my mother warning me as a three-year old, as I looked up at the cliff behind my Grandmother’s apartment building in Spokane, not to “ever climb on that…you could be hurt.  It’s too high for you.”

If I revisited the “cliff” in Spokane as an adult, I’m sure I’d discover that it was probably only about twenty feet high.  When I was less than three feet tall, it looked like Mt. Everest.

I can’t blame it all on that…but maybe it planted a seed somehow?  I don’t really know.

So, to be so afraid of heights, and to be a counselor at a summer camp who was on the hiking and climbing staff, was sometimes kind of a trip.

For me, there was a lot of “deep breathing and intense focus” going on during those climbing trips.

When you’re afraid, you should pay close attention to what’s going on around you.

I was riveted by my surroundings.

But I learned to hold it together…push the fear or discomfort down and just work at getting the job done.

I didn’t get over being afraid of heights…I still hate sweeping the chimney, hate getting up on a slick metal roof to do that, and it’s not even all that high on our roof (we don’t live in a country cabin hi-rise or anything…it’s only about 30 feet or so…not so high). ….but I learned to push through being so nervous about the climbing part of my job.

Or maybe I just learned to mask the fear.

A buddy commented on Facebook that if “and then if all you dwell on is a dog you just ‘met’, what a great life you must have.”

It was in response to a post ( I almost typed “poste”…I’m not in FRANCE!!!) I’d written a few days ago.  It was a post about lingering memories.

To be honest, I’m worried about a lot of things.  I want things to be good for my family.  I worry about the future…I worry about the present…I worry some.

But I’ve worried long enough to know that it doesn’t do much if worrying doesn’t inspire action or preparation of some kind…so I know it’s healthier to push the big worries back a little and pick something a little less threatening to ponder…like a shoe coated in dog detritus.

I’d really rather not have a shoe coated in anything smelly, either…but sometimes that’s how the cookie crumbles.

It’s a complex thing…choosing what to push down and what to trot out and obsess over.

It’s a good thing if you have the blessed option (or ability) of being able to choose.

Re-reading my friend’s comment, I really appreciate it…especially the part where he said, “and then if all you dwell on…”

My choices shape my life.  I’ve made some bad choices, I’ve made a lot of good choices.

What I choose to dwell on from here on out sets the tone for my life…and the lives of the people in my life.

I can push the sad stuff down.

I’ll probably still freak out about something.  Something will break somehow and I may or may not know what to do.  I don’t have control over a lot of what happens in our lives.  I don’t always know what to do. There are many, many things that happen that can’t really be fixed.

Until it really happens, I’ll try to be a little less bothered by worries.

Poo-shoes are hard to ignore, anyway.

They are a strong distraction.

I think I must have been in the seventh grade when we did the “one square yard” lesson.

It got us outside, so I remember liking it.

Anything that got us out from behind our desks with the attached table was alright in my book.

We went outside and set up a section of ground that was a yard wide on each side.

Each of us had his own section of earth that he or she was “Master and Commander” over.  For the week, we were assigned that piece of real estate.

The point of the exercise was to notice and record everything that we saw in that square yard.

We recorded all the plant and animal life we saw over the course of the week…every blade of grass or bug, the different kinds of rocks…everything we could see in that small section of ground.

We didn’t have to understand it all….we just had to practice noticing.

I think that the real lesson in the exercise was that there was a lot of stuff in a small section of ground.

There was a lot of life that we never noticed until someone made us pay attention.

( Someone is probably thinking, “Now that’s what I’m talking about!  That’s the problem with PUBLIC EDUCATION!!!  If it were up to me, I’d take all those kids and homeschool ’em, get them out from under the thumb of a corrupt government…save the taxpayers some money and hook those kids up with a real education.  Staring at the ground!!!  What a waste!!!!!  If it were up to me….”)

It was one of the things in school that we did that really stuck with me.

It was a good lesson.

I wrote a post yesterday about picking the wrong detail to be distracted by.

The post was about a “bad day” delivering the mail…and how, until I got my head screwed on a little straighter, I was letting it get me worked up.  I was hung up on the wrong detail…and it was bringing me to an unhealthy mindset.

My conclusion was that I needed to try and start remembering the big picture…that there was always something bigger than my temporary circumstance that I could be thankful for.

This morning, I’m thinking about that “one square yard” lesson.

There was so much life in that little piece of ground.  There was so much life that we could see by just really looking at it.

We didn’t use a microscope…but I’m sure that the ground was teaming with things that we couldn’t see, too.

I miss a lot.  I’m distracted.  I’m confused, befuddled…or, on the other hand, such a little egomaniac that I think I know more than I probably do. There’s a lot of reasons that I miss things.

Thinking you understand something will stop you from looking for what’s really going on.  That’s as dangerous as not looking at all.

One square yard of ground held so much that we almost couldn’t catalog it all…the world on the head of a pin.  There was a lot to be seen if you looked hard enough.

If there was that much going on in something we’d usually pass by without thinking about it, imagine how much possibility there is in the world that we never notice.

Getting fixated on a single detail can be really damaging.

Supposing that we understand everything because we’ve cataloged our own little “square yard” of our lives can be just as damaging.

Knowing that there’s more to life than what we think we see is ….priceless.