Hasta Luego...

A quick note before we dive in: I hope all of you currently affected by snow, ICE, power outages or other menacing phenomena are safe and well! Reading the news from afar it seems like quite a lot is going on at the moment. 

Anyway. So Hasta Luego is a phrase they use all the time in Spain to say goodbye. It means roughly "see you later." (Literally: "until then/later.") But the Spanish will use it for goodbyes even when it's unlikely you will ever see them again. It just sounds nicer: like they're already looking forward to the next time they'll get to share your delightful company, even if they are a taxi driver who just took you to the airport.

As it happens, my wife and I are on the cusp of needing to say a whole lot of "Hasta Luegos" to people we really care about. But we're not exactly sure when Luego will be. It could be a long time from now.

Facing hard goodbyes is wrenching, and we hate it. But we're mature adults, so we know exactly how to handle it:

We're just pretending it's not actually happening.

Anyone got any better ideas? How do you all cope when you become fond of people, and then end up living very very far away from them?  My wife and I have been doing various versions of this for our entire 35 years together, so you'd think we'd be better at it by now.

Dream On...

 

Lately I've been (sort of) keeping a dream journal. I wake up a few times a night anyway, so if I can remember anything, I'll scribble a few short sentences down, in the dark, in a small notebook. 

"Meatball earrings."

"Lunch with Fisk, so happy!"

"Feeding the vultures. Andrea..." (our vegan friend) "denied eating the hamburger, but she did."

"No Cokes allowed in workplace! Paintball war."

"Light blue cat. Didn't like me at first. Patience." 

In the morning, I may spend an extra five or ten minutes in bed, trying to decipher the cryptic wandering phrases, often written one right on top of the other. Some mornings it's amazing: I start writing what I remember, and more details start coming back, and other dreams make a shy appearance at first and then reveal themselves more fully as I scribble dream-nonsense for pages and pages. Other mornings: nothing.

If I go over my notebooks periodically, it's exciting to see how easily I can freshen those dream memories right up. Many of them remain fairly vivid even many months later. I can still picture those big meatball earrings I was wearing last summer! Even if I can't remember if I've brushed my teeth this morning without checking to see if the bristles of my toothbrush are wet.

But why take precious morning time to do such a silly thing, which honestly is sometimes just frustrating? The fragments are so damn elusive, and so often just when they start to feel graspable... they slip completely away. 

Are there some secret psychological benefits to be had from keeping a dream diary, and getting more acquainted with the insanity that takes place in your brain every night?

New Year, New World, New You?

Readers from "before times," when this was an actual health and fitness blog, may recall that I've already written many posts about New Year's Resolutions.

There's a search bar if you're curious, and if you were to type in New Years Resolutions, many, many posts would come up, full of advice and complaints. Mostly it's the obvious stuff: Keep promises realistic, and expectations low. Aim for baby steps. Celebrate small victories. Try hard, but expect repeated failures, and focus more on getting back on track and not giving up than on perfection.

We know this stuff. And yet the failure rate for resolutions remains pretty darn high. So the heck with that, let's not talk about making promises to ourselves that we may not keep!

Instead, let's talk about hopes and dreams and intentions for the coming year in a totally hypothetical way. No pressure. After all, the beginning of a new year is a good time for reflection, for fresh starts, and maybe even big dreams. And if thinking big leads you to want to do something little in order to get there... bonus!

But before we get to that... a special request.

So I recently found out that the little doohickey at the top of the sidebar that was supposed to encourage email sign-ups? It didn't actually work.

But now there is a much better, user-friendly email subscription/newsletter link. Please sign up! Your email will stay totally private, and you can always unsubscribe later if you get tired of my ramblings.

That way when a new post is out, you will not have to swing by the sad little Facebook page to find out about it. You can read new posts in your email. Or, having been duly alerted, come back here to read it and leave a comment and make my cranky old heart sing.

One thing you WON'T have to worry about is getting a whole slew of Just Cranky blog posts. One or two a month is probably max, and you know me... I will likely stop posting again, and then in 2035 you will suddenly discover that I've yet again resurrected the blog, which will appear as a hologram in the artificially intelligent lenses surgically implanted into your eyeballs.

There may at some point be an announcement about my novel, Niccolo Would Like a Word, hitting virtual bookshelves in a few weeks or maybe months. But I won't be a pest about it.

How To Accept Chronic Illness or Disability Gracefully?

Maybe it happens all of a sudden: you're crossing the street in a clearly marked crosswalk and a car runs a red light and hits you. And your body is never the same again.

Or maybe it's the onset of a peculiar minor symptom, followed by more strange little symptoms, all of which get more alarming and eventually turn out to have a common, unfixable cause.

Possibly it's just the inevitable, but still disagreeable, result of getting older. Organs and other body parts begin to fail in ways that are not reversible.

But the bottom line is: you are no longer "healthy" in the way you used to be, and you probably never will be again, and the best you can do is try to accept this and move forward.

But how?

Oh wait... maybe you thought I was proposing an answer? No, I was asking YOU, because I seem to really suck at this whole acceptance thing. 

Cruisin'

We always say we're not "Cruise People." We object to their environmental impact. We don't like crowds, long lines, cheesy faux-Broadway musical productions, gluttonous buffets, smoky casinos, or traveling in packs like water buffalo, ruining the ambiance of otherwise charming port destinations.

Yet clearly we must be "Cruise People," because somehow we've been on an embarrassing number of them. We get tempted by bargain prices, by the convenience of packing and unpacking just once, by the notion of not having to shop, cook, or clean anything, and by the efficiency of scouting out multiple destinations we might someday return to at a more leisurely pace.

We know a lot of people who are cruise enthusiasts, who love everything about them, from the fancy formal nights to the lifeboat drills. But we totally sympathize when others who are decidedly not cruise people and have no desire to travel that way.

So why am I posting about cruises all of a sudden?

Why yes, you guessed it! Right now we are aboard a Spain/Portugal/Morocco cruise for our 35th anniversary.