Dispatches from the middle

Day 12: Things that make me shudder:

1. How tempting it is to admire, and sometimes envy, people I do not know, have never met, and likely will never have any personal contact with. Authors, athletes, public figures and so on. Which is not to say they’re not worthy of my admiration, for they may very well be. It is also not to say that, regardless of disagreeable personality traits or habits, their achievements could not stand alone as admirable. I just shudder at how easy it is to fall into admiring, envying, and wanting to emulate individuals one does not know from a hole in the ground.

2. The sneaking suspicion that young, un-married women are STILL not taken entirely seriously by our parents’ and older generations. I don’t have children to wrangle, so I must therefore have an entirely flexible schedule and be able to accommodate everyone else. I’ve requested advance notice of family events, but gotten no response, and I can only suspect it’s for this reason. *I am not a real human yet.*

As a quick aside, I’m becoming increasingly sure that the short cut (i.e. achievable before marriage and children) to recognition as an autonomous human being lies in Christmas cards. If you send out your own Christmas cards from your own place of residence – and not just to your friends, but to your entire family, where you used to let your mother do it for you – you are a real person and will (hopefully) be recognized as such. I realize this is a very culturally-specific strategy…

3. Missing limbs and digits. Decapitation bothers me particularly.

4. Wet, sandy feet in flip-flops. I love walking in the sand, I love wearing flip-flops, but the minute I slip my wet, sandy feet into flip-flips, I feel my face contort into that expression of painful disgust and discomfort I have heretofore reserved exclusively for green beans.

5. 4:00 am. 4:00 am is the point of no return, the time after which, if I am still awake, I abandon all hope of getting a decent night’s sleep. However, there are some things worth losing a bit of sleep over. And an extremely early morning run never hurt anyone either.