This has been a cool month. I don't mean weather-wise.
Isn't it funny how often it annoys people when you're happy? How dare you! Just wait and the other shoe will drop. And then you'll be re-introduced to how much life sucks. Like it's SUPPOSED to!
I have a client who has been with me since the beginning of my bookkeeping business over twenty years ago. He always seems to think I'm living the high life. The last time I dropped by to pick up paperwork, he followed me out to my car. He said, "Oh, you're not driving your Cadillac today?" He's always had that attitude toward me. I sometimes wonder, if he thinks I'm so well off, why he thinks I'm still working for a living. Back when the economy crashed in 2008, and his business was struggling like so many others, he quipped to me, "I suppose you've got plenty of savings socked away." I was baffled as to why he thought so. "Not hardly," I said, "considering that I'm nearly three months behind on the mortgage." Satisfied, he said, "Then you're struggling like the rest of us." He didn't even try to hide how happy that thought made him.
I stopped watching CNN after I got back from Montana. I've been having it on pretty much all day long, in the background, since the 2016 presidential campaign began in 2014. I realized that I had actually heard of most of the early candidates and I found it interesting to follow from beginning to end. I learned more about U.S. politics than I'd ever understood before. Once the election was over, I had so much invested in it, that it seemed pertinent to keep watching. Mostly, I found it entertaining -- not just everything that was happening, but how the news media would get so "oh, my God!" about everything that was happening. But I gradually started to feel more agitated than amused, and was turning the channel more often. And I'd feel annoyed when punters would say, "Everyone SHOULD be concerned about this issue." Well, fuck you, I'm quite capable of determining what I want to give my attention to, thanks, and it's not people or issues who haven't figured out that trying to control others never leads to long-term success. I thought no longer being fed news all day long would be an adjustment, but I haven't missed it one iota.
I finally spent some time on learning a few things about the app Notion. I really like it. After musing over various ads for planners and task managers and goal setters -- that are geared too much for what one SHOULD do today -- I created my own daily log from a blank page in Notion. I love that it's just there, encouraging me to draw together my thoughts and what I want to focus on, and checkboxes for a few habits I want to create, but it's not a "should" or "need to" thing. I also have spaces to record thoughts I might have on anything I watched or read or learned, etc, that was noteworthy enough to have thoughts about.
I have the soundtrack to Apollo 13 playing in my head. I love that movie. I love that it's based on a real event (astronaut Jim Lovell, played by Tom Hanks, has verified its accuracy), and that there was so much forward-thinking to figure out how to get the crippled spacecraft home safely. How so many citizens throughout the world all wanted the same happy ending.
I also never get tired of watching the 1998 version of Man in the Iron Mask. I love the whole movie -- that the musketeer characters are middle-aged and dealing with middle-age issues, rather than sword fighting. (The horses are nice eye candy, too!) But mostly, I love Gabriel Byrne's amazingly passionate performance as a valiant, loyal, but troubled D'Artagnan.
I own a microshare (1/10th of one percent) of a two-year-old filly named Lazy Daisy. She's racing in the $2 million Breeders Cup Juvenile Fillies this coming Friday. The My Racehorse syndicate bought 12.5% of her a few weeks ago, and then divided that up into $100 shares, so ordinary people could experience the thrill of owning a horse pointed toward a major race. I figure she'll be around 12-1 or 15-1 to on the morning line, and her hundreds of microshare owners will bet her down to about half that. However she runs, there's no substitute for the excitement and anticipation leading up to the big race. I really didn't expect it to matter that much -- considering I've owned larger portions of racehorses I've actually met in person, in years past -- but the size of the pie isn't relevant. It's just plain exciting.
I've estimated that I have five stories left to write in the "Adventure" series, and I have a few scenes written on the next story. I'm toying with the idea of writing the entire threads that follow through those remaining stories, and then filling in the gaps with more short-term plots for each individual tale. That feels like quite an undertaking, as opposed to my usual method of writing one story at a time, but it would also be an interesting challenge. I'm ready for a new challenge.
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