We Didn't Watch Videos Tonight

I suppose we are getting just a bit set in our ways: it really is news when we don't watch either an episode of a TV series or half of a feature film.

Tonight, we were planning to go to a potluck at the Oddfellows Hall, but as it turned out, we went first to a vigil at the mosque, to show the community's support for the congregation as they recovered from a terrorist fire attack.

So, that's what we did this evening, instead of watching Ratatouille.

//The Magic Eight-Ball says, "Ratatouille still has a few days left before it has to go back to the Library."\\

Sphygmomanometer

I like sphygmomanometers. I like to look at them. I like to use them*. I like to say "sphygmomanometer".

*[I am gradually getting more confident in my desire to go back to nursing school again, in spite of multiple failures in the past.]

The other day, I was watching some kids playing with a toy medical kit, noticing that among other things, it included a plastic bracelet in the form of an adhesive bandage. Also noticing that they still put it all in a "little black bag", a feature almost as anachronistic as the way that toy gas pumps still go "ding-ding" as they pump imaginary gasoline.

I was intrigued by one little boy using a toy sphygmomanometer on another boy, squeezing the little bulb and pretending to read the dial: "Eighty, ninety, ten, eleven, twelve." Interesting combination of the correct and the almost-correct -- notice that he did keep the tens column straight.

//The Magic Eight-Ball says, "Mind your blood pressure."\\

New Perceptions

Kathe:

Since I started therapy, I have been overcoming sensory inhibitions right and left: food tastes better -- and I pay more attention to its nutritional value as opposed to any emotional comfort it might give. I told you about the ground under my feet feeling more substantial. I don't know if that has led to any improvement in my posture, but I feel more balanced anyway.

But tonight while soaking I was overwhelmed by a rarer and more precious kind of improved perception: I suddenly had a powerful feeling of how much you really do value me, how much I mean to you.

I would have been unable to recognize such a feeling before, or if I started to get an outline of it, I would have recoiled from it with fear or horror or shame, feeling both unworthy and unfairly burdened.

The thing I craved like an addict was also something I couldn't bring myself to look at directly.

Oh, well, doesn't have to make sense.

But thank you for your love, admiration and desire.


-- Love, John

//The Magic Eight-Ball says, "Value all that you see, and see all that you value."\\

Sometimes Parking Is Difficult

[NOTE: Illustrations will be added to this post when Blogger quits acting weird.]

When there isn't a parking space available on "our" block (10th Street, between Jefferson and Adams, preferably on the east side, preferably at the north end near the house), we have to park the cars elsewhere in the neighborhood. Parking got more difficult when the medium-density apartments across the street were replaced by the high-density construction which we call the Great Wall, and more recently when a nearby area was made into a parking district, and our block was not included.

The other day, I wound up parked on 9th, between Jefferson and Adams, in between a carnation-pink Smart car with a license plate that read FLUFFF, and a vehicle with plates issued by the Grand Portage Band of the Chippewa nation.

Almost 30 years ago, while hitchhiking across the country, I got a ride through Chippewa country in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. I had an interesting conversation with a Chippewa, and had the pleasure of joining him in urinating into Lake Superior, at what he told me was Whitefish Bay, a location I instantly identified as the safe harbor that the Edmund Fitzgerald did not reach. He told me that people on the lakes appreciated that song very much, and took it as recognition for all the many ships which had been lost on the Inland Sea.

But I did not know that the Chippewa issued their own license plates, much less did I think that one day I would see one in my own Corvallis neighborhood.

//The Magic Eight-Ball says, "And what associations do you have with a pink car named FLUFFF?"\\