Depressingly Normal

Shoulder worsens.  Anxieties deepen.  Drug Skinny is coming back to town for a few days and wants to shoot.  Me, too.  But it will be more complicated than that.  I've come to enjoy and depend upon the hermetic quiet of my life.  Why do I expect her to disrupt that?

This morning I got an email from the woman in Korea I met a couple years ago in NYC.  For a long while, she would send long emails about her life.  It was difficult for her as she was not fluent in English.  But the glimpse into her internal life was always a great and wonderful surprise.  Korean culture is changing rapidly, youth born into the global world trapped into a patriarchal tradition of obligation and work.  I have not heard from her for many, many months.  Her email today was heartbreakingly normal.  She has played heart games with her ex-boyfriend for the past year.  We all know how that turns out.  He was a dream, she says, a dream of travel and adventure, a dream of escape.  Now, she declares, she has emptied her heart of him.  She is ready to move on.

We understand what such declarations mean, too.

I will encourage her to live unconventionally, of course, and help her on her way down the road to ruin.

No I won't.  I will ask her to tell me stories, to describe her dilemmas and how she copes.  I have no advice for anyone.  I used to have one bit.

No Regrets.

Guilt and regret are the least useful, most destructive things we can cling to.

But I don't even have that advice any longer.

The pain in my shoulder is distracting.  Worse.  It does not like the writing at the computer position.  The pain is making me dour and (more) depressed.  The anxiety is due to something else.  I can't quite pin that down, but that is the way of anxiety.  It is nebulous.

Today's picture seems to me to capture both.