Mud

I couldn’t walk this morning because it was so muddy under the thin layer of snow. But I did stand back by the creek for a while and watch the water go by. One of my co-workers wants me to adopt a dog she knows. She doesn’t mean it this way, but I feel like she just wants me to solve a problem she has–since I have pit bull experience. I looked up dogs at animal control and found that I was clicking on all the black and white ones to see their pictures. So, that’s where my heart is. Nothing yet about the lab. That’s also the funny thing about people–they need decisions from you so quickly, but they move slower than you can stand when the time comes.

One of my long-time friends has had a professional disappointment the likes of which kind of stops me short. I thought the problem was solely him not getting the support he needed from group a, but really, it’s that group b–a bunch of people who are all our friends and who have previously had a professional relationship with said friend–kind of forgot about him. In other words, if group b had offered their support to him, the ways that group a didn’t come through for him would have mattered much much less. But b was awol.

So, even though he’s done this good, interesting work, it kind of doesn’t matter. Or, at least, if it’s going to matter, it’s going to happen in a way that can’t be mapped out and counted on.

I guess the thing I think is that I do such a shitty job of letting the people I genuinely care about know that I care about them and spend enough time with them. And it’s scary to think of how important it is to show up and hang out with people you don’t necessarily like and who don’t necessarily like you just so that you are a person for whom shit gets done.

Seeing How Things Play Out

No further word on the dog. I am anxious to know either way, but the world works at its own pace, I guess.

The eye doctor was the eye doctor. I really like my eye doctor. She’s great and she’s stabilized a lot of my eye issues. But this was the year when she told me that 40 is not only going to be the start of mammograms, it’s going to be the start of someone more qualified than her monitoring my retinas. So, it’s nothing to freak about but I still find it unsettling.

She was like, “People say their eyes are really bad and that they’re blind without their lenses, but in your case, it’s really, really true. Your retina problems are just exactly what we’d expect to see in someone as nearsighted as you.”

But the thing is that I’ve always has my mom as the marker for what really bad nearsightedness is, so I’ve always felt like mine can’t be that bad. So, it’s taken some adjustment to settle into the idea of it being bad and it causing situations (problems is too strong, I think) that need to be monitored.

I don’t know. There’s just nothing to make you feel like you’re skating out on the thin ice of lucky like hearing all the things that go wrong for people like you but haven’t gone wrong for you yet.