Letting the days go by*

"Great. More exciting adventures in sitting." - Simon Tam

Being sick is always a surreal experience for me. My daily life is composed so much of movement, and being sick is all about sitting still and waiting to heal.

"I hate waiting." - Inigo Montoya

Me too.

Even though I occasionally get something extraordinary out of the experience, like what happened to me last night when, watching PBS with a desultory eye, I had a revelation about what I'd like to do next with my professional self. Or rather, how my unasked-for talents for evil could be put to better use.

I shan't go into specifics, since I like to preserve a little proscenium here. But it was a grand idea, and I intend to see what can be done about it - though I have, of course, no real idea of how to proceed with the transition.

"You keep using that word." - Inigo, again.

Yeah, I do - even though it is perhaps my least favorite activity in the universe. Boywich pointed out to me the other day that, despite my reputation as a change-resisting stick-in-the-mud, I've actually been changing by leaps and bounds. I suspect a lot of it is going on at a level I'm not quite aware of. But I do find myself experimenting with things I never thought I'd be able to do.

{pause for coughing fit that scares cat off my lap}

{another pause to retrieve oatmeal I'd forgotten about. I always forget about oatmeal. However much I may like it, it's just not a memorable food. I wonder if anyone will speak of me in those terms, after I've left. Anyway...}

One of those things is -erm- "interacting" with more than one person at a time. No, I am not referring to the menage a rouge, or any other color. I just mean that until quite recently, it had never occurred to me that I could or would have any desire to juggle multiple lovers. I am not even sure now why I am doing it, apart from the fact that the opportunity exists, and that neither one of them is in any way a serious thing.

Actually, that last bit may be the most surprising of all. There's nothing doing, romantically, with either of them. Never thought I'd be down for (up for?) that. But the list of things I never thought I'd be, or do, or want to be or do, has been getting exponentially longer.

There's always a space on an online personals questionnaire that asks you to project yourself into the future, and I always heave a huge sigh about that. The longer I'm here, the more solidly I realize that planning isn't the point of life. Or at least of my life.

Quite the opposite, in fact. My goal has become to simply get out of my way as much as possible. To let myself breathe, and be here, in this moment, in this place, to see it and hear it and smell it and taste it. To experience the sweetness of that lady behind the pharmacy counter after I joked that I'd gotten sick helping out a friend, and mock-swore that that would be the last time I did something nice. She looked into my eyes, assessingly and with good humor, and said, "You're lying. You'd do the same thing all over again. Because that's how we are with friends and family." I told her she was absolutely right, and we laughed, and it had that delicious sweetness of the real.

Sometimes I feel like we're just here for that - to connect, to interact, to share that knowledge of what it is to be here, to be human.

You know, the funny thing is, with the two boys...despite not being in or planning to be in a "relationship" with either of them, neither of those connections feels false or stale or empty. It's not callous or meaningless, and it doesn't seem to need anything attached to it, or to lead anywhere else, in order to have value. It is its own thing, sitting there in time and space, me and him, in my room.

*with apologies to Talking Heads.