End Time

It's New Years Eve, the perfect time for reflection. Or avoiding reflection with heavy drinking. I think I'll take them in order, and start with the reflecting.

While I do have problems with some endings, the change in year is typically not one of them. It is all the cycle of life and, once the days start getting longer, the worst of any year is over. And a new year, like a newly fallen snow, casts a clean blank slate over what is already there allowing for hope and new perspective, even if it does grow dirty and melt away eventually. What is bothering me this year is how many things that I had hoped to accomplish but did not get done. Especially since a lot of those items are things I have been hoping to accomplish for a long, long time.

I've realized lately that while my sense of time is fairly accurate (I tend to be able to tell what time it is, without any help, within 15 minutes or so), my sense of time passing in the broader arena--multiple years, decades, and such, is very poor. I think it is only natural to feel that one has all the time in the world, but at a certain point, that premise rings less true than it once did. It is easy to put something off, and once put off to keep putting it off. I have been working on that, but without the handle on time, I still have a long way to go.

I think this year for the first time in ages I will make some resolutions, the first of which is to get a better handle on this whole time thing, before it actually does run out. Hopefully, that will allow me to actually accomplish those items languishing on my to-do list. Fingers crossed.

Happy New Year!

Enjoy the Silence

Driving home the other night, I realized it was more or less the anniversary of my car crash last December. Modern society is not much for admitting that humans, despite all their technical advancements, are still fragile beings, at least if you want more than a pill to "fix" whatever is making you feel fragile, so it is easy to minimize the trauma that one goes through. Especially in a day and age where the most horrific tragedies enter every aspect of life through the media and Internet. You walked away, how bad can it be?

Not bad, perhaps, but impacted (excuse the pun).

For most of my life, I've been a pretty good sleeper. There are few times in my life when I've had trouble falling asleep or staying asleep. One of the first times I recall not being able to sleep was when, in junior high, a male friend of mine told me he liked me and I did not share the feeling.

But even that was after my radio days. I used to have a red and white cube radio that looked like a die. The dial was on the top like a big one, and the on/off and volume buttons were the 2 side. In fifth grade, at least on Sunday nights, I used to go to bed listening to the radio, to Casey Kasum's top 100. It was the age of disco and I still recall having to endure 'You Can Ring My Bell' which I believe was performed by a school teacher from somewhere in Pennsylvania.

More recently, I found periods of great stress led me to need something to listen to while falling asleep. My last breakup had me take to listening to my one audio book, Neil Gaiman's 'The Anansi Boys' as read by Lenny Henry. After the crash, I started playing the podcasts I'd started listening to in Hawaii last year to fall asleep. Nothing puts me to sleep quicker than Michael Feldman's "Whad'Ya Know."

In thinking back to grade school, I had thought it was my mother's health that was the issue, but now I'm wondering if it wasn't school itself, at least if I was only listening on Sunday nights. I know people who have bad Sunday night stress. Maybe I did too back then.

I'm to the point where I can get to sleep easily without the podcasts, although I still feel the unease if I've gone to bed late of trying without it. Of embracing the silence once more. Or, perhaps more accurately, the voices inside my head.