Saturday
January 24, 1997
Home

I have waited and waited and waited, and finally a couple of weeks ago I was rewarded. South Park is now available for our viewing pleasure. Just like Ren & Stimpy, Beavis and Butthead, and now South Park, Scott and I will watch it, tell everyone about it - be ignored and teased about watching cartoons until one day one of the "commercial" [ugh!] networks will pick it up and then all those we raved about it to, will start telling us about this new show that they've seen, with these funny little kids who swear and make fart jokes. Well because they're all so dumb and slow, of course we'll wait a few weeks before we let them in on the (no matter how obvious) secret - yes Kenny does die in every episode.

Although I am quick to act on thoughts and realisations, I am slow to adapt to the bigger, sweeping changes in my life. I relish the quick changes, instant additions, variations. But on an intra-personal level. I have to constantly readjust myself in order to keep going. I find that I'm just not a person who can humm along "Just OK" all the time. Life feels like a game of strategy, a game of chance and opportunity. To miss opportunities and chances feels like I'm cheating myself. I suppose in living my life I just feel like I don't want to miss anything, let something that could be good or even great get past without me seeing it, or grabbing it. Slowly over the past few years I've adjusted to living for today. I stopped trying to orchestrate my life, stopped trying to make everything something I could control. Now I just stay in "ready mode" so I can leap at anything I want to. I find that living each day as a life unto itself, means that I don't have to think or worry about tomorrow, and that I don't put things off or wait around for others to make things happen.

I have off weeks however. Toward the end of last week I had one. Wednesday, Thursday and Friday dragged on, I got into work late and my boss way there - it was quite uncomfortable, and whilst I had an excuse I was thrown off balance by her being there. Had I done all that each day requires in its own day, I wouldn't have been late to work. I couldn't pin down on Friday why I felt so shitty, but I know why now. I just know that when I put things off, or hope that by leaving something undone or un-acted upon they will go away, that I'm just cheating myself. Shit they're all such simple lessons, but I have to keep relearning them or I'll always feel like I did last Friday.

This evening when I was going through some of the belongings I've collected over the past few years, I kept coming across things which had associations with you.

Text books, assignments, television leads, magazine articles, printouts - all kinds of stuff. In particular were a couple of photocopied text books we had. Remember those? I remembered you standing there copying off hundreds of pages, then having them bound, then not charging me for them - saying only that it was your pleasure and you'd had to do it for yourself anyway. Or I remember you bringing me things, or showing me stuff or just sitting with me and having lunch. I remembered those times and a lump rose in my throat as it does now recounting those times. I have a back-catalogue of memories of you doing things for me. Often really trying hard to make sure this or that came through for me. I know now how much love you must have been putting into those things. I know now how much it all meant. It's funny to think that when it was all unspoken - you would have done anything practically. Yet now, it's not the same. I wonder what it is. It doesn't matter, or take the shine off those times in any way.

I love memories, because as time goes on, we tend to disregard those things which are dreary or mundane, that which is coloured with pain or sadness. Finding ourself left with a shiny, fresh group of thoughts which comprise the memory of a time or a place or a person. I enjoy my memories, exercise them often, keep them in use. Not that I dwell on what could have been, or should have been. I just sit back, knowing that the memories held on to are, whilst a reflection of what went on, usually more pleasant to look back on, than the actual experience. They also give me strength, to remind me of how things can be, and allow me to recall those things about myself and others which are important. When you live in the moment, and take each day as it comes, life can seem a little fragmented, and it is only when I look back that I can complete the picture.

I am moving house at the moment. No more cramped, tiny, four roomed flat. Hello big old Victorian house with 15 foot ceilings, creaking floors, an outside toilet (well it's joined to the house by a porch) and the luxury of space. We have enough rooms to have a "Reading room", a lounge room, a bedroom each, a large kitchen, a bathroom, a laundry in its own room, and a toilet! We even have a pantry you can walk into! I'm childlike with glee over this.

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