The Daily Mood

Guess what? I’ve discovered that if I miss the seventeen second window on waking, I can still determine how my day will go by consciously choosing my mood when I get to work.

Ter gave me this hilarious item for Christmas—a little flip chart of “mood possibilities” with emoticon visuals. To get maximum use of it, I brought it to the office and have consulted it every weekday since. I’ll get my morning tea and, while my computer boots, I’ll peruse the pages with one question in mind: What’s my mood?

I’m already in one when I get to work, of course. It’s not always good, but it’s usually better than my default on waking (I miss that window a lot) because I may like my job, but it’s not my bliss and who wants to get up early for something less? The receptionist where I once worked could read someone’s state of mind on sight, without exchanging a word. It became a joke between us. I’d walk in and ask her, “How’s my vibe today?” She’d either nod, shake her head, or wag her hand in the yea/nay gesture, and the tone for my day would be set.

She was right ninety-nine percent of the time.

Fast forward to Now. I’m at my desk, flipping through my options. So far this year, I’ve been Addled, Borderline, Bouncy, Chill, Dreamlike, Fabulous, Hunky-Dory, Overstimulated, Rockin’, Rushed, Scattered, Splendid, and Wonky. I’d like not to repeat myself, but I can’t bring myself to admit when I might feel Apathetic, Cantankerous, Maniacal, Neglected, Non-Essential, Redundant, or Subversive … except for one day at the end of January, when our office manager innocently asked me ahead of my decision how I was doing that morning.

I silently flashed the card for Grouchy.

She gave me wide eyes and retreated a pace. “Ohhh …”

“But it’s okay,” I assured her. “It won’t last.”

It rarely does. Acknowledging my crappy mood will often make it disappear, like a petulant child who just wants a pat on the head before running off to play by herself. Even if I suspect I’m closer to the Dark Side of a morning, if I hesitate on one of the more negative options, I will hesitate again by asking myself if I really want to be in a crummy mood for all to see.

I do not.

Since then, our office manager will pause at my door when she comes in, and I will proudly flash whatever card I’ve chosen for the day.

It’s become a happy ritual.

My Left Foot

lucky to live here

Flâneries have been verboten of late, due to the rebellion of an ankle injury that went untreated around two decades ago. I stepped off a curb and my foot went sideways. The tendons locked, the bones jammed, and over time, scar tissue has formed and arthritis—sigh—developed. The joint finally seized on me last summer, shooting pain all over the place, so I’ve not been walking as much as I once did. I can do short stints, but I haven’t hiked home from work in months. It simply hurt too much.

My massage therapist suggested orthotics after a number of acupuncture treatments only accomplished so much. I was thinking about where to get them when I noticed a sign on the wellness clinic that recently opened ten minutes from home: “Custom Orthotics”. Below that: “Walk-ins Welcome”.

Good sign for a podiatrist’s office, eh?

So I walked in. Six hundred dollars, six weeks, and six visits later, I’ve got the orthos and am seeing Chiropractor #2 specifically to address the wrecked ankle while my frame adjusts to the new insoles. I can’t believe that I pay my pit crew to hurt me, but you gotta do what you gotta do. He’s managed to get the joint moving again, and after a few hours of it venting its post-treatment spleen, I am winning the battle.

I went for my first “real” flânerie last weekend. I walked all along the water and back through the cemetery, and for three-quarters of the way, I was pain-free.

I was also taking pictures. Technology has also interfered—my lovely little Canon was semi-retired when Mr. Moto came on scene. The phone has a camera, albeit not a very good one, and I had taken it on the final few strolls before my ankle crapped out last summer.

So, on deciding to test my endurance with the orthotics, I also decided to blow the dust off the Canon and leave the cell phone at home.

What a beautiful day! Bright sun, brisk wind, pounding surf, and glorious mountains on the horizon. I was more in awe of my home than I’ve been in months. Now I’m all pumped because Easter is coming and I plan to get up early on the long weekend to watch the sun come up over the water.

I also hope to walk partway home a couple of times a week, just to get back in shape. I hadn’t realized how much I’ve missed walking through the ’hood, camera in hand, looking at heritage houses and breathing fresh salt air. It’s good to be reminded that I live in a place where other people spend their vacations, that I am alive and healthy and mostly mobile (getting better all the time), in short, incredibly lucky this time around.

Better All The Time

Except for John Taylor, the Jaguar E-type, and Chocolat’s champagne truffle, nothing is completely perfect. It may seem so at the beginning, but in due course, flaws will become evident. Your shiny exotic sports car will start to misfire. Your dream home will develop a leaky roof. The new colleague you clicked with turns out to be bipolar. Mr. Right comes with two kids and a clingy ex-wife.

You get the picture.

The opposite is also inevitable. What sucks right now will improve. It doesn’t matter where you are in life, that big wheel keeps on turnin’ and everything associated with it is in its own present moment.

What am I trying to say here? Basically, that good stuff co-exists with bad stuff and vice versa. It’s a matter of—there’s that word again—perspective. You can find something positive in chaos and you can find something to kill your joy. It’s your call whether to seek gratitude or not, but it’s also a given that positive and negative happen at the same time. Life is never solely one or the other. It’s always both. What takes precedence is whatever gets your attention. Admittedly, some downers demand attention as part of our learning, but while we’re dealing with the human condition, we can take heart in knowing that everything around us is moving like a Ferris Wheel, some things rising to a pinnacle and others on the descent. Sure, the latter may be construed as depressing, but really, it’s not. It’s life—evolving and revolving.

Many years ago, my father quoted me a Chinese proverb (and I’m paraphrasing here): “Bad luck, like good, cannot last forever.”

And it doesn’t. Change is always happening. The trick is to enjoy the ride—and when it’s scary as hell and you want it to stop, gird your loins and trust that it will, because it will.

With love,

Those 70s Shows

Nostalgia has figured prominently in my life of late. Apparently I am old enough to have nostalgia, which is in itself alarming, but on the other hand, it’s provided some great entertainment. Ter and I have done some serious bonding over the music we loved in our formative years, i.e., before we met, and at Coffee on the Wall last week, the conversation somehow found its way into the same decade: the 1970s. And here’s where I learned something that I’ve always known about my wee sister:

She loved police shows. Boy Sister gave us a list of the cop/detective series that were hip in the 70s (more than I’d imagined), and wee sis said she watched most of them. More than I did, for sure. I recall watching reruns of Emergency! with her after school, so perhaps it’s not so strange that her significant other happens to be a paramedic. Funnily enough, when BS asked us what our favourite 70s show was, without hesitation, we both said “Starsky & Hutch!”

“Do you want to borrow the DVDs?” I asked her. “I have the first two seasons.”

She wrinkled her nose. “I dunno, they’ll be pretty cheesy nowadays.”

She’s right, of course. Cheesy doesn’t begin to describe the hokey plots and ham acting that seemed so hip back in the day … though Starsky’s Torino is still pretty darned cool.

The sitcoms of the time seem less dated. Maybe humour is timeless? Sure, the costumes and sets are hideously pea green and polyester, and we get as much laughter out of the hair and makeup as we do the dialogue, but it’s less painful to sit through an episode of M*A*S*H  or Mary Tyler Moore as it is an episode of, well, any of the dramatic fare. Granted, some of the humour then was as blatantly stupid as much of the humour now, but laughter is truly ageless.

Rolling further back in time, the local TV station runs back-to-back episodes of Star Trek on Tuesday nights. Talk about cheeseball, but it’s the original series with the original crew, and that makes it mandatory viewing on “Trek Tuesday”. I look forward to it for the humour as much William Shatner’s wiggle—and I don’t necessarily mean the humour in the script. In the right mood, Ter and I can crack ourselves up during the show, turning a TV classic from drama to comedy with a single well-crafted quip.

We do the same thing with modern-day shows as well, though truth be told, we’re hard-pressed to find much worth watching. Give me the good old days—ironically, the days when folks in their mid-fifties lamented the lack of anything worth watching, deeming it all too crude or controversial.

Time really does move in circles.

“Diva”

"Land Use Application" by Nancy Ruhl

Ellie stands on the pavement as a soft rain starts to fall. A cup of tea and kitty await in a tiny one-room flat, but she lingers on the sidewalk, remembering.

Cocktail parties photographed in black and white.

Holiday dinners hosted for friends and rivals alike.

Poets, artists and musicians clamouring for a muse.

Dancing with diplomats and presidents.

Lovers by firelight on long lazy weekends.

Flashbulbs and fashion, fizzy champagne and fenders on limousines.

Diamonds and pearls.

Then she grew old.

The grande dame of her age, once elegant and proud, now faded and frumpy, unsteady on her feet.

It’s another’s time, now.

She shuffles on her way, shoulders rounded in the gently falling rain.

If those walls could talk.

I Got the Music in Me

They say that the printing press was the most important invention in history. If this is so, then the advent of recorded music must be a close second.

Ter and I met in 1982. Our mutual musical history began then, with Duran Duran, Def Leppard, Tears For Fears, Michael Jackson, and a host of others. When we tune into the 80s music channel, almost every song conjures a memory that starts with one of us saying, “Do you remember …?” We laugh and reminisce and wonder whatever became of So-and-So when it seemed at the time that we would always be in touch with our friends. Good times, bad times, hard times, doesn’t matter which. Pick a song and we are transported instantly into our shared past.

Tune into the 70s channel, however, and we have discovered buried treasure. Music was less homogenized back then. Folk rubbed with rock, disco dropped in, and pop was often schlock, but everything got airtime because radio had yet to become “formatted.” It was fun, even though I was battling my bones and Ter was in her turbulent teens during most of the decade. We didn’t know each other then. One had no idea that the other existed, in fact, or that the scene was being set for the destiny point when our paths would cross and the adventure would begin.

We hit the 70s channel one night, just because. Oh, we laughed. We laughed … and then the memories surfaced. Not mutual ones, of course, but the fossilized ones unearthed by songs we heard while growing up in our separate worlds. “These Eyes” is her favourite Guess Who tune. “No Time” is mine—but she and I both remember the pink and orange label on the old 45, even if neither of us could name the company that owned it. The 70s channel inspired a different question from the 80s. Instead of “Do you remember?”, one of us asked, “Where were you?” and wow, we had a blast bringing each other up to speed.

I generally stream my silly jazz station at work. With thirty channels to choose from, there’s always something to fit my mood. My membership, however, also covers jazzradio.com’s sister station, radiotunes.com, which features a gazillion channels spanning pretty much every genre in existence. Last Friday, for the heck of it, I picked the Oldies, and O-M-G, everything they played dated from my elementary school years or earlier! It was the perfect playlist to file by!

So, whether at work, at home, or somewhere in between, music has proven critical to my existence. It fires up my imagination and grounds me at the same time. Of course I appreciate the value of the printing press—what writer wouldn’t?—but if I had to choose between TV and my stereo …

“Queen of Hearts”

Look at the size of her heart.

You can’t miss it. She wears it on her sleeve. She couldn’t hide it if she tried.

It’s just too big.

It’s been broken. It’s been stolen. It’s been shattered, double-crossed and stomped on, but it’s still beating.

“You have to keep breaking your heart until it opens.”

She has no idea who Rumi was, but he thought of her.

“The wound is the place where the light enters you.”

She knows this better than anyone. Has it stopped her?

It has not.

She has figured out that the wound is also the place where the light leaves you.

She may be little, but her heart is huge. It is open. It is the portal through which her inner light shines to make the world a kinder, more compassionate place. She offers it freely, without fear, giving and forgiving in equal measure.

She is the bravest soul I know.

Happy Valentine’s Day.