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Random Thoughts: Decompression Chambers

02.18.2013 by J. Doe // Leave a Comment

I go to an alumni event, with lots of people my high school – older men mostly, as the school was for much of its history an all-boys school. One of the men is divorced, and another – happily married – is talking to him about it … and suggests that he and I might make a nice pair.

I recoil, rather awkwardly, at the suggestion. Nothing personal, I say.

I have the same feeling when I see the match.com emails – I no longer subscribe, but the emails still show up daily, with the same guys in them that I winked at a year ago. I try to visualize myself meeting someone – someone who actually manages to show up and is employed all at the same time – and even if I pretend this is possible, which I know isn’t likely, I have trouble mentally fitting that someone into my life.

It’s not that there’s no room.

No, that’s exactly it.

There should be enough room, but whenever I open the door for someone and say, hey, come on in and let’s share our space, somehow it’s only my space that ends up being shared, and shared, and shared, until there’s no room left for me at all.

I become very small, and compress myself to fit whatever space is left.

My life is some finite quantity. I want to fill the rest of it myself.

I’m just not sure what I want to fill it with.

As long as I can remember, my life has been filled with wanting. I wanted to be married. I wanted a family. I wanted a child. My life has never been filled with me.

Categories // Random Thoughts Tags // random thoughts, reflections, single, wisdom

Random Thoughts: Your Fortune

11.15.2012 by J. Doe // Leave a Comment

Many years ago, when I lived in New York, I opened a fortune cookie and was perplexed by the fortune. It read:

Your luck has changed completely today.

The problem with it should be obvious, but just in case it isn’t: How do I know what my luck has changed from and to? Sometimes it’s obvious, but other times, it isn’t really.

I taped the fortune to my computer monitor and pondered it from time to time.

The next time I ordered Chinese food, I received the same fortune:

Your luck has changed completely today.

It goes without saying that I went from perplexed to utterly baffled, as my luck had now done a complete 360 turn, but I still didn’t know where I had started and thus, where I had ended up.

I think you know what my fortune said the next time I ordered Chinese food.

Your luck has changed completely today.

I taped the three fortunes in a neat column on my computer monitor. It was a subject of much discussion among visitors to my office. Where did it start? Where will it end? How would I know? One visitor helpfully suggested I could solve the whole problem by simply not ordering any more Chinese food.

I still wonder, but I think I might have actually have figured it out, finally.

The message was actually the three fortunes together, and what they meant was this: Your luck can change completely, in just a moment, and you’ll never see it coming or know the reason why.

Categories // Random Thoughts Tags // random thoughts, reflections

Random Thoughts: Two Kinds of Vampires

10.09.2012 by J. Doe // Leave a Comment

There are the usual vampires, we know about them from books and movies. They exist and have substance, yet when they walk by a mirror, there is no reflection.

Then there are emotional vampires.  There is nothing at their core; their lives are spent creating a reflection that represents what they want to believe they are, or perhaps what someone has convinced them they should want to be.

It doesn’t matter which.

They live among us but we don’t notice them until it’s too late.

Categories // Random Thoughts Tags // divorce, narcissism, random thoughts

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