“On no account brood over your wrong-doing. Rolling in the muck is not the best way of getting clean.”
Aldous Huxley
Thursday
It is awards day. Inevitably, more students do not receive an award than those who do.
We have spent the last few weeks discussing this. Working towards building resilience, accepting this is how the world works. Understanding that in life, we are not always the best, and losing graciously is as important as winning.
In the end, it is the parents who cannot accept this reality of life.
How can children learn through losing if their parents throw tantrums when faced with not getting what they want?
Adults behaving like children, raising children.
“Win without boasting. Lose without excuse.”
Albert Payson Terhune
Friday
“It’s a hard thing to leave any deeply routine life, even if you hate it.”
John Steinbeck
Sleep in. Gym. Shopping.
The high life.
There is one more week of school left. This time next week, we will be flying out to Budapest.
“Suppose we suddenly wake up and see that what we thought to be this and that, ain’t this and that at all?”
Jack Kerouac
I spend the day reading.
I usually have two books on the go, one fiction, and the other nonfiction. Usually one captures my attention more than the other. I sometimes have to put a preferred book down and focus on the one that is not as captivating.
I am reading two very good books, Against Interpretations by Susan Sontag and Comanche Moon by Larry McMurtry. Both are hefty, at 500 and 600 pages respectively.
“We live in a time in which tragedy is not an art form but a form of history.”
Susan Sontag
“The thing that Buffalo Hump was most grateful for, as he rode into the emptiness, was the knowledge that in the years of his youth and manhood he had drawn the lifeblood of so many enemies. He had been a great killer; it was his way and the way of his people; no one in his tribe had killed so often and so well. The killings were good to remember, as he rode his old horse deeper into the llano, away from all the places where people came.”
Larry McMurtry
Tomorrow I am catching up with my oldest friend.
We message each other now and then, but the last we messaged I felt the urge to talk to him in person.
Not exactly in person, online. He is currently in Bali and I am in the desert.
We share a birthday, a primary school, and not a few misadventures.
“Don’t walk in front of me… I may not follow
Albert Camus
Don’t walk behind me… I may not lead
Walk beside me… just be my friend”
Saturday
“To describe a phenomenon as a cancer is an incitement to violence. The use of cancer in political discourse encourages fatalism and justifies “severe” measures.”
Susan Sontag
Gym.
If I was diagnosed with cancer would I accept treatment or allow nature to take its course?
With any other ailment, life threatening or otherwise, I don’t hesitate to plunge into a pharmacopeia of modern medicine.
Yet for some reason, the idea of my body producing a cancer, and then waging some kind of modern science war on my own body, seems like an undertaking I am not willing to take.
I will finish Against Interpretation this week. My next Susan Sontag book is Illness as a Metaphor. Maybe the answer lies there.
“Much of recent discourse about the body, reimagined as the instrument with which to enact, increasingly, various programs of self-improvement, of the heightening of powers.”
Susan Sontag
I go to the dentist for a clean.
I need a wisdom tooth pulled.
Fantastic news.
I chat with Tim. It is good to hear from him.
The Pies lose.
I spend the day reading.
Nothing like variety.
Sunday
“We do have a zeal for laughter in most situations, give or take a dentist.”
Joseph Heller
I dream of tooth extraction.
That half dream, semi conscious state where you are writing the dream narative.
Last night I finished Comanche Moon. Lonesome Dove is next on the list.
When Shell recommended the four book series, I had no idea three were over 600 pages and the fourth was over 700. No small undetaking.
Shell demands much from the relationship, but this is in the top ten.
“He felt the grass growing beneath him, growing and rising to cover him, growing to hide him from the wolf and bear. Then he knew no more.”
Larry McMurtry
“The whites are not foolish,” Buffalo Hump said. “They know that it is easier to kill a buffalo than it is to kill one of us. They know that if they kill all the buffalo we will starve – then they won’t have to fight us. Those who don’t want to starve will have to go where the whites want to put them.”
Larry McMurtry
There is one more week of school.
I prepare my lunches and settle in for another day of reading.
Good luck with your tooth – hope it pops out easily xx
So do I!