strong arms

I have got to stop underestimating the ways both my personal and professional lives can get complicated. (I'm mostly resigned to the fact that they're always going to be complicated, and that that's been the case since, oh, 1998.)

It's mostly good -- and in some instances, even exhilarating, sublime, and other incarnations of happy -- but between the effing asthma and my inability to master the "squeeze 36 hours out of 24" formula, comments languish in limbo, balls go rolling across the floor, posts go unread, poems stay unwritten -- nothing new about any of that, these days, but that in itself makes me sad. I know that many of you are in similar boats, and that most of you understand, but the not-so-inner twelve-year-old hasn't quite gotten the hang of letting things (and people) go. *sigh*

I was trying to convey to a friend a couple nights ago that at some point, one has to stop stewing about people not being who we want them to be, and become someone who can cope with people as they really are. That includes who chooses to stay in touch, who maintains unrealistic and/or inconsistent expectations of us, who we outgrow, who we bore... oh, who am I to talk? (And, in fact, I'm pretty close to vowing simply to hug people rather than speaking my mind when these topics next come up. I'm neither a therapist nor a minister, and I'm way, WAY better at providing soup than sympathy.)

Anyway, that's not what I logged on for. What I really signed up to say was

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