Today I read this wonderful wonderful piece here in answer to this QaR and wanted to mostly just say "oh yes, what she said" and leave it at that but this is something I think about a lot. I am not an all one thing kind of person - in fact I have moments of really feeling nearly all one or all the other, my mind part just chiming in with an "oh, this feels great!" while my body is doing things or other times feeling like I am my mind just riding around in my body and noticing things around me but on the good days they get together.  It seems a little hit or miss.

And then there are all the peripheral things, at least peripheral to me. Who I am, what my consciousness is doing, how I feel, all of it changes with the littlest things, with music I listen to, the color of a wall, a smell or a soft pair of socks or whether I have on lipstick I like. It all changes me, body and mind and experience of being all very fluid. So. Here is where it starts to get bewildering. Because common sense would say that then I should put in the experiences that make me more of the person I would prefer to be in my heady way but it doesn't really work that way. The person that I am over time and how I choose to hold all those experiences and the physical being I'm building and being, all of that comes from the whole thing, the inconveniences and the surprisingly awful events and the arguments and the bad hair days and smell of fresh cut wood and the sun on skin  and fresh strawberries and all of it, mind and body in it all together. 

So I guess what I'm saying here is that my mind and body are on speaking terms and generally get along but no one has taken charge. I think I give my consciousness a bit of an edge but where would I be without this body? I am very happy about having both. I think I'll keep them as long as I can.

Sorry to be so mundane but really, it has all the dreams I woke up in the middle of the night and typed out in the dark, all the crazy ideas I didn't want to forget, all the notes back and forth between friends, all my photos, the music I love, the stuff I'm fascinated by, there's a record of all of it in there.

My computer is my journal, only expanded to include the whole world or at least the parts of it that I find and fall in love with. Sometimes this repository has had an issue and I feel as panic stricken as if part of my identity has been stripped away because potentially it has. 

But a time capsule is more than just a back up hard drive - I would have to add whatever looked good to me that day, a rock or maybe the shirt I'm wearing or that funny shaped stick Lyra brought me. I think that would depend on the day. Mostly though, my hard drive is my time capsule. Although I'm sure it will be as obscure as an 8 track tape player by the time anyone finds it...

I've always gotten along well with numbers although it was disturbing to realize that I'd forgotten some of the calculus that I assumed would just stay with me forever even though it's true I rarely use it and actually on a day to day basis don't rely on much more than tallying up our card scores. But it's part of my credibility as a person who appears to be somewhat...eccentric...that I can actually function in an area that has such things as right and wrong answers. I like the puzzle aspect of solving equations and I like how impartial the numbers are. They just are what they are and they will sit there looking at you very patiently until you figure out what to do with them. 

It's also inspiring to remember that a lot of what I enjoy and find beautiful and intriguing and surprising comes into my life in the form of 1's and 0's, no matter how it looks to me. I don't have a lot of t shirts with words on them but the binary shirt at thinkgeek is tempting. 

Anyway, Happy Pi Day to all and to all a good night.

A year ago we had no idea we would be able to buy our house. Albert wasn't living here with us then - although I'm not convinced he's living here now but there is a room that he sleeps in once in a while and he uses this address for when the government wants to track him down so I guess that's official.

A year ago Adrian didn't even know the woman he's planning to marry. His ex girlfriend was giving him a bit of a hard time for not going out and dating more and apparently that worked.

A year ago I didn't have dreads and I thought about it for about a whole year before I decided to go ahead with it. My hair is such a part of my personality and it's weird to think of dreads being "well behaved" hair, but they're much much better behaved than my hair otherwise is and I was really worried that I would miss the mess of hair I'm used to. I do like them now but there was a bad day right there at the beginning when I felt like my whole being had been changed. 

A year ago I was still working with the client I stopped working with after her mom died. A year ago her mom didn't know that she wouldn't be alive to see another thanksgiving or christmas or another birthday with her daughter.  A year ago she didn't know yet that her body was filled with cancer. By the time she found out she only lived a couple of months. I still miss her mom and all those crazy stories she would sit and tell me every day when I brought her daughter back home.

A year was three supervisors ago at work, three company cars ago for Krissy, and all sorts of reorganizations and a new person who sits at the front desk, all those things that work places always do.

A year ago Lyra was still a puppy but she still looks just like a puppy even now. A year ago our kitten Max didn't exist at all! A year ago Duncan still lived with us but now he lives with Adrian and Chandini in Atlanta and I still miss him.

A year ago Obama wasn't the president yet. Oh my.

I wonder how many things will happen this year that I could never predict and will never expect. I wonder why it is that I continue to be surprised when those things happen, as if for some reason I think I know what's coming or think things will always stay the same? I hope this year's surprises are wonderful ones and that when we look back we'll all be amazed by how clever and innovative and brilliant we were, and we'll see all the ways we surprised ourselves and each other and we'll celebrate it all with a gigantic party. On my birhday, which will be coincidentally declared a national holiday dedicated to surprises (March 9, mark it on your calendars now and avoid the last minute surprise rush!). Maybe. Who knows?

I mean, people are part of the world, and animals, and everything that grows and rocks and rivers and all of our relationships - it's all the world. It's the only way I know anything I know. 

Otherwise I would just be floating around in a vacuum contemplating my navel and I don't think the food would be very good there and there wouldn't be interesting things to think about and nothing to generate crazy dreams...for example, last night I dreamed I accidentally ate a pair of purple satin high heeled shoes with rhinestones on them and I only noticed because the rhinestones were gritty. I also dreamed I had a magical blanket that made me invisible for when the monsters came into my bedroom. This was all one dream somehow. But the point is, every thought I have - shoes monsters blankets rhinestones - it's all about how the world and I fall in love every day.

By the way, I don't own a pair of purple satin rhinestone high heeled shoes and never have. But the world gave me the concept of them.

Oh, and in the dream I got a new pair.

Which I did not eat.

Math. Numbers are comfortingly unforgiving.

So far so good. 

But I also trust human unpredictability and our crazy impulses. I trust love at first sight and chocolate lust and I trust that uni must be great for me because I just crave it so completely. I trust the weird wisdom and poetry of dreams and that there is some reason I prefer ragged clothing and that some random thing I say might mean something someday to someone somewhere. I trust that what I see when I look in the eyes of these animals we live with is exactly what I imagine it is and that they are looking right back at me the same way. I trust that there is meaning that I haven't seen yet and that if I try hard enough and look close enough I might just figure it all out. I trust that we really are all here to save each other and I don't believe anyone who says that you can't save other people because I've been tossed more life preservers than I can count and I think I ought to do the same for others when I can. I trust that what I need is very much less than what I might want and that I will handle any kind of adversity right up to the point when I truly can't, even when I don't want to and want to say that I can't do it. I trust in resilience and kindness and curiosity and intelligence. And more than anything I trust in love. I am so lucky to have someone in my life who loves me back and plays with me and makes every single amazing day even better - but even when love falls apart along the way, it's always a gift. I've never unloved any of the amazing people I've been lucky to love and I trust in that more than anything else. Even more than numbers.