What to write today? I’ll make it easy on myself and start with the terrifying tale of the washer that ate my laundry. On Saturday I finally gathered enough motivation to do my laundry. I had so much I couldn’t do it all and I still have the white clothes to do. I packed it up in my laundry bag, put the bag in my shopping cart, and headed down to the laundry room. I filled all three machines and put money on my card to pay for it. After it started I noticed a problem in the biggest machine. A pair of my briefs, it’s one article of clothing, why pair and plural? Was caught in the window of the machine. Not in the door, in the window. I could see it twisting and pulling the briefs which stayed tethered. There’s nothing I could do about it so I figured that the worst that would happen is a ruin pair of briefs. There was still only one. I set the timer on my phone and came back just as the machines finished. The machine with the captured briefs, still but one, had let them (it?) go. But the door wouldn’t open. The other two machines would. I waited. The door still wouldn’t open. There was an “out of order” message on the display. Ugh. What was I going to do? What would you do? I called the service company and the charming woman that answered told me to unplug the machine. The problem with that is that I couldn’t get at the plug. Fortunately, one of the porters came by and I asked him to do it for me. It involved getting a bench to stand on and then climbing over the machines. That’s what I was trying to avoid. That didn’t solve the problem, at least not at first. The service person told me it would take half an hour to open. I came back in 25 minutes it wasn’t open. I came back in another 20 minutes and it did. I was prepared to have to wait for the service person to come to fix it. I left them my contact info. After all that I was good when I got back and immediately put the clothes way. Part of that was swapping out my summer clothes for my fall. All my hot weather gear is now in my footlocker and my warm sweatpants are in my drawers. I once again have clothes to wear.
How was that for a gripping tale of suspense and terror? I’m Alfred Hitchcock and H.P. Lovecraft rolled into one. That does not mean that I’m a misogynist racist anti-Semite. I had a friend, a doctor, who has an adult thought that Alfred Hitchcock was an author and didn’t know he was a director. I don’t think he was aware that films had directors. He didn’t believe me when I told him that Hitchcock didn’t write the movies. He never noticed that in the Hitchcock book anthologies, that each story had an author that wasn’t Hitchcock. My guess is that Hitch never even looked at the books before they were published. He just sold them the right to use his name. Never be surprised at what people don’t know, even educated people. I had to stop following a FB group devoted to protesting Trump naming a replacement for Ginsburg because so many of the people in it had no idea how Supreme Court nominations and confirmations are made.. You’d think a group like that would be populated by knowledgeable people, but it’s not. I decided it’s not my job to give them a civics lesson. I doubt they’d listen. I know you want to blame Pelosi but there’s nothing she can do to stop Trump from appointing someone. There’s nothing.
Enough of that. What I wanted to write about is giving your brain leave to think about things other than politics. Your life goes on, and it will continue to go on. People are resilient, and you are a person. Things slowly get better, even when there are major setbacks. World War II and the Holocaust were the worst thing that ever happened. The world is still better than it was before the War. I just realized that WWII was like the Black Death in Europe. The worst thing that ever happened that directly led to a period of great improvement in people’s lives.
I thought the world would end when Nixon was elected, and re-elected, and again when Reagan was elected. Then I learned. We survive. We are still getting over the damage the Reagan did demonizing the poor and the government. We’ll survive what’s going on now. Don’t neglect your own happiness. Happiness is a virtue, not something to feel guilty about. You can’t change the world alone, but you can make differences in individual lives. Every time you make someone happier it’s a mitzvah. Take your victories where you can. What are we? Less than a drop in the great blue motion of the sunlit sea. But it seems that some of the drops sparkle. Do your best to sparkle and recognize the sparkle in others.
Wise Madness 