A disconcerting weekend

I have felt a bit off-kilter this whole weekend (I include Friday) but for very good reasons, or so it seems to me:

Polly's Last Ride

¶ Our dear Polly, the car I have written about before, was hauled away on Friday. She had stopped running altogether and we finally decided to donate her to our local classical radio station for whatever they could get . It was jarring to see her up on the bed of a tow truck and being driven away. She has been a part of our lives for so many years (16, to be exact) that it was like putting down a beloved pet. Kathy said that Polly is now an organ donor, allowing other cars to go on living with the parts she supplies; I like that idea, though I keep having images of the crusher reducing her to a mere wafer....If you have never had a car you truly loved, this may seem mawkish and silly, but the feelings are very real.

¶ Kathy is out of town this weekend and that is always disorienting. We have been married a long time and have become part of one another's rhythms. Not that time alone is not welcomed; I think anyone who has been in a long-term relationship recognizes that no matter how much we might love the other, a bit of entirely self-determined time is a wonderful thing. Still, I don't quite know what to do with myself sometimes when she is gone.

(I just realized that Kathy and I have been married for 32 years and had Polly for 16. Half our married life! Is there any significance to that? Probably not...).

¶ The weather is absolutely perfect this weekend. Though I wouldn't even think about complaining, weather like this triggers thoughts of needing to do something active and outside every single minute that it's so nice, just in case I never see weather like this ever again! In my whole life! This might be it! Ah, but I have wash on the line, there are butterflies in the garden, the cherry trees, daffodils and hyacinths are blooming, the fuschsias are sitting outside soaking up the sun, the pumpkin seeds in our basement seed-starting operation (well, it might be a bit pretentious to call 32 little planting cells an operation, but I like to think big) are growing bigger practically by the minute, and I am sitting out under our big holly tree writing my blog post. What could be better?

¶ I woke up this morning to realize that my fears from last night were justified: somehow or another, the entire contents of the SD card on my cell phone had disappeared—Poof! After I got over it, though, it made me realize that there was a bunch of unnecessary crap on there that is just as well gone. It was surprisingly freeing to start all over, especially with my music downloads (or is it uploads? acrossloads? what do you call it when you transfer from one storage area (my computer) to another (my phone)? And don't tell me it's called "transferring". I can't stand a damn literalist). Still, just when you think the world is a fairly safe place, your SD card gets erased. Jeez.

Tarek Mehanna

¶ I have been watching the first season of "Game of Thrones" on DVD and reading quite a bit of the New York Times as well as some news blogs. It's disconcerting to see how we are not so different from the "red in tooth and claw" medieval world portrayed in GOT. Don't we ever learn? I have also been reading more about the abrogation of civil rights we are putting up with these days and it really makes me wonder how we ever went so far astray. For the record (lest we forget), the Constitution says that I can say, write, think, or watch anything that does not lead to actual harm to others, OK? Look up the case of Tarek Mehanna if you are not yet concerned about this; you ought to be. It's not that I admire the guy or support most (or perhaps any) of what he believes. But he has the right to write about it, think his thoughts, to translate works that support Islamist jihad, and all that. He just does.

¶ After several weeks of research and thought, I put together a lecture about burnout and "compassion fatigue" in nurses that I am giving soon. I will be speaking to nursing students who are just months away from graduation and (according to their professor) all nervous and uptight about the possibility of burnout. (He says that the top two fears among young nurses are killing someone and burnout; that seems about right. People are pretty hard to kill, though, in my experience. Well, not my personal experience...I mean...oh, never mind). In any case, writing this lecture got me to thinking quite a bit about all this, about how malleable our minds are, how subject to the influence of both negative and positive input, yet how there are limits to this. We seem to have a predisposition that is beyond ready change, though I also know (from my own experience) that having a spiritual epiphany can shift the landscape considerably. In any case, I am 22 years into my career as a nurse and not burned out. I have worked in a burn ICU, a heart and lung transplant ICU and an HIV clinic. Not exactly cheery places, so it's not that I have chosen fields that would guarantee a lack of burnout. I really do think that how one orients one's thoughts makes a huge difference.

 I think it would be easy to be pessimistic in our current world. I used to be a cynic, but finally realized that, far from being sophisticated, cynicism is actually, ultimately intellectually lazy. Put another way, where is the benefit in thinking the world a deeply flawed place and humans a plague visited upon it? Where does that get us? Yes, we are environmentally in trouble but, God, today sure is beautiful, isn't it?