Thought That Came Unbidden

The mile and 1/2 I do each way to the subway every work day gives me a lot of time to think. Things that have popped up randomly in the past few weeks include:

• Why do women insist on buying shoes they can’t walk in?
• I know it’s hot but dousing yourself with cologne is not a substitute for
  bathing.
• Is it better to do something well or to enjoy doing it?
• How does one get to be a "writer-in-residence" at a college and
  why didn’t my guidance counselor offer that as a career option?

Just some random thoughts.

Given my propensity toward depression, I’ve been trying to find things to help keep me focused on what is good in my life, on the possible and the happy to try to fight my natural tendency to see the roadblocks, the idiots, and the problems of life in the foreground. To that end, I’ve been reading these “daily motivators” that show up on my customized myway.com portal page. This is today’s:

There is a way
Always keep in mind that there is a way to get where you desire to go. What you can imagine is possible. Otherwise you could not have imagined it. Achievement is not a matter of “if.” It is a matter of “why” and “how.”
There is most assuredly a way. Your deepest desires are not empty. They are not without meaning. They point the way for your efforts. There is a way out. There is a way through. There is a way leading to whatever you can imagine for yourself.
There is a way to what you desire, because the essence and value of what you desire is largely composed of the path you follow to achieve it. When you have the desire you will, without fail, have the means to fulfill that desire. Act with assurance, with confidence, with faith. Though the efforts may be difficult and the setbacks many, with each moment the goal is more completely fulfilled.

I’ve been reading these things for months now but it wasn’t clear to me until today just what was causing that nagging feeling that I was missing something: the parameters are missing.

Yes, I know, this is supposed to be about thinking positive, about achieving the impossible dream (and how hard it is to resist the urge to break out into song just now) but the fact remains that for all but the richest of us (well, when you have everything losing something doesn’t sting so badly) and the poorest of us (when you have nothing, you’ve got nothing to lose) there are restrictions on our lives. Some of those restrictions are voluntary, some are what we were born into; regardless, they are the box, the metaphorical cubicle, in which we must fit our lives.

I guess what I really need is advice on how to cope when my desires are outside the bounds of my restrictions, when I can achieve half of what I want with the resources I have but in no way could I ever hope to achieve the other half regardless of how much I strive. Perhaps that’s what religion is really all about: providing in a subtle way the advice and comfort that is, at its base, boiled down to “You can’t always get what you want but if you try sometimes, you just might find, you get what you need.”

Michael Almereyda, interviewed in the April 18, 2004 New York Times about his movie, “This So-Called Disaster: Sam Shepard Directs ‘The Late Henry Moss.'”

Courtesy of Fussy

This came into my Yahoo! e-mail account today (this is a verbatim, cut and paste posting):

DEAR _citibank_ _Client_,

This_ LETTER was se-nt by_the_ Citicards sevrers to veerify your_ e-mail adderss.
You must complete this process by clicking on_the_link bellow and enntering
in the litle window_ your Citi-bank Atm/Debit card nummber and PIN that
_you use on Atm Machine. This_is _done_ for Your protection -p- because some of_our
memmbers _no_longer_ have access to their EMAIL addersses and we must verify it.

www.yahoo.com/?HZGlDeM1bRTtpf0XhKkauN1TXM0Jbc
9TbOfO32QfUJTk0IituErYtuHptTbtUjl59CVdELrzwbVxUeO

To verify your e_mail _address_ and _access_ your Citibank_Online
account, click on_the_link bellow.

nTtmlL5M4MYyHtVMqxIFc v7L2tHzcVoBN HZau5XyTV7Bd2oFA8

They’re kidding, right? No one actually falls for this, do they?

First of all, I don’t have any accounts at CitiBank. I’d rather bury my money in a coffee can in the backyard than do business with them. Secondly, this looks like the product of 100 monkeys and 100 typwriters before spell-check.

Human gullability always amazes me.

(See, this is the problem with walking a mile and a half back to the subway every day: too much time to think and nothing on which to write down the Thoughts That Come Unbidden)

Does it make me a bad person that I gave my $.58 in change to the guy playing Bach on the trumpet at the Metro and not to the clearly raggedy pan handler up the block from my office? (Yes, I could help you out if you did every single thing I said but, really, you want money so why not just say that?)

How do you explain to people that yes you are, in fact, laughing out loud at a book about punctuation?

How do I make sure I get the train with all the nice people on it again tomorrow? (I saw at least six people offer their seats to others who looked in need; it’s been ages since I’ve seen that.)
[Read more…] about From the trip home