Life, Work & Wonder

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  • I’m A Rudderless Ship

    What gives you direction in life?

    I spent my 20s getting started in the workplace. Graduating college, then graduating graduate school, then looking for my first career job, meanwhile working working working and paying rent.

    I spent my 30s in hell. I worked worked worked to get ahead and worked worked worked to raise the kids while their mom (my ex) was off doing god-knows-what.

    I then spent my 40s (luckily) beating back idiopathic lung disease and starting a new life following the dissolution of my first marriage.

    Now here I am.

    My kids are grown. I’m burned out on the corporate world (real estate is hard work but isn’t the same all-encompassing soul sucker). I am happily re-married with a person who likes spending time for me so I no longer need to find outside meaning (talking to strangers, volunteering, etc.). I have some savings but not limitless amounts of money to travel the world 24×7. I would love to be a novelist but then again that won’t pay the bills and I’m a person who’d need to devote my full energies to it which isn’t possible right now.

    Which leaves me a little lost right now. I’m a rudderless ship.

    But you know what?

    That’s okay.

    Does a lion spend its days wondering what its direction is?

    Do all the people “resting” in the graveyard a mile from our home currently wish they’d had more direction in life?

    I doubt it.

    Our cats seem to have no direction in life, but also seem pretty content too. They seem to have a good life.

    So I’m rudderless right now. Directionless. But that’s okay. Life is life. Direction in life is just something we add to try to craft meaning into what is ultimately an ambiguous and tenuous existence in the omniverse.

    My chore is not to find meaning or direction. It’s to enjoy life (while being a good + accountable person) as much as I can while I’m here.

  • Hail To Grocery Delivery And Tipping My Driver

    Hail to grocery delivery. And hail to tipping.

    Today we were out of several critical groceries, including fruit (I start every day with fruit and end every day with booze) and milk for coffee (coffee is the most important food group!). And there was no time to run to the grocery story. Ugh!!

    Thankfully Costco has grocery delivery, and for 2 extra dollars (2 bucks!) it delivers within an hour. A few clicks on my laptop, and — boom! — less than 45 minutes later there was milk, organic fruit and chocolate arriving at our doorstep.

    The kid who delivered for me. He braved the crowds of Costco and put his car on the line for me. And I can’t imagine he makes a lot of money (especially since when I drove Uber for a year in 2021 I learned most people don’t tip their drivers). And I can’t imagine he has a trust fund since I can’t imagine Jeff Bezos’s kids deliver groceries (or do any kind of meaningful work,frankly) . So I tipped him $25 cash on a $100 order. “Thank you so much!” He said, beaming and touching his heart.

    I’m grateful for the people in the world who cover for me when I have poor prior planning and am desperate for fruit and milk. And I’m grateful we live in a world where when I mess up (not grocery shopping) I can fix that situation in a few minutes while continuing to be productive in my work day.

    Anyway. Life is good. I have milk in my coffee and I have chocolate in my tummy.

  • The Quietly Perfect Holiday: Is There Any Better Holiday Than Labor Day?

    What is your favorite holiday? Why is it your favorite?

    For much of my life, I’d have to list Thanksgiving or Christmas Eve as my favorite holidays. But in recent years I think my penchant for Labor Day has exceeded my historical love of Thanksgiving and Christmas.

    Labor Day is a guilt-free holiday that is placed in one of the most beautiful times of year in the Seattle area.

    So many of our holidays (Thanksgiving, President’s Day) fall in the gloom of Seattle’s rainy season. Or they (Christmas, July 4th) have expectations or are just plain loud and overbearing. Or they (Memorial Day, Martin Luther King Day) have some guilt associated with them. Or (New Year’s Eve) I’m just plain exhausted from the demands of the previous month.

    But Labor Day is different.

    Families and Friends don’t expect us on Labor Day. Budgets aren’t destroyed shopping for food and buying presents. It is a day to reward us for our hard work and not to remind us of someone else’s sacrifice. It’s quiet. And September is usually perfect weather in Seattle what with the continued sun and 70 degree days.

    Childhood and parenthood can taint Labor Day, since it usually commemorates the beginning of a long school year ahead. But my kids are older. And my own school experience was decades ago. So that particular emotional taint of Labor Day is over. In fact, for me, Labor Day has just become the perfect expectation-free holiday.

    There aren’t carols written or sung about Labor Day. Labor Day doesn’t usually conjure strong memories of past times and places. But it’s a special day nonetheless. And it has become in my older and wiser years my very favorite holiday of the year.

  • The First Thing That Comes To Mind Is A Swirl Of Things

    Jot down the first thing that comes to your mind.

    When I’m asked to jot down the first thing that comes to mind, it’s like someone has taken a million index cards of memories and spilled them onto the ground. There isn’t one — there’s literally an explosion of many. How to pick one?

    But from this collage of blurred images suddenly one emerges, but it’s not a vision as much as a sound: the sound of the creek that ran by the mission we visited yesterday while in Santa Fe.

    I love the sound of creeks. To me, it’s the sound of life. The voice of Mother Earth. The voice of god.

    And since that creek involved a sunny day on a travel day with my soul mate, and since it was just yesterday, it is the one index card whose corner was sticking out just enough from the million index cards of my memories that it’s the one that I picked first from the pile.

  • A Trillion Krill :(

    A krill is a shrimp like creature that is “surprisingly intelligent.” It lives several years. That is per krill, an individual being.

    So how disturbed I was to read last night that a Blue Whale can consume as many as 40 million krill in a single day. That’s more than the entire human population of California, and twice the human population of the entire state of New York. That’s like Godzilla successfully eating every single person in Manhattan, Syracuse and Buffalo as and every member of every household in New York state in its entirety before lunchtime.

    Then I further learned there may be 25,000 Blue Whales in the world. And multiplying 25,000 blue whales by 40 million krill per day is 1 trillion krill. Every single day.

    Aaarrrrggghhhhh.

    I can’t judge Blue Whales, especially since I myself had shrimp tacos for dinner last night, but the thought that a trillion krill are dying a horrible death inside a Blue Whale stomach every single day is depressing to me.

    The world is such a wonderful beautiful place. And also such a horrifying place filled with unimaginable amounts of death each and every day. Just ask the 40,000,000 krill that Moby Dick ate yesterday.

    Those poor krill.

  • Battle With Autoimmune Disease 1

    My nose just started bleeding. Suddenly blood was dripping everywhere for no reason at all and for a moment I wondered if I was having a stroke.

    Then I remembered how when I was a kid, every single afternoon and every single night (overnight) my nose would start spontaneously bleeding. This started when I was about 6 and continued for the better part of five years. Thankfully my teachers knew this was an issue so when my nose started bleeding they just continued on their lesson/class as I raced into the coatroom sink or the bathroom until the bleeding stopped. Sometimes the amount of lblood was downright scary. I remember my mom waking me up for school one morning and my entire pillow was soaked in drying blood from overnight.

    Mom tried. She took me to severAl doctors. The first one said I must be picking my nose. “I’m not picking my nose,” I said truthfully, but the doctor insisted that I must be. So mom took me to a second doctor. “It’s dried skin,” this doctor said. “You have dry skin up there and when it cracks it bleeds.” So he prescribed me lotion. That didn’t really help either.

    The only real cure was age and time. When I was around 11 the nosebleeds for the most part stopped, and I think ever since that time I’ve suffered no more than the average person when it comes to nosebleeds. This morning’s gush was a rarity anymore.

    But for me this really underscores how uninformed we (including doctors) all were in the 1970s. Because he wAs a kid (me) who ate a LOT but was grossly underweight, was the shortest kid in claSs, who had awful rashes his legs and some psoriasis, had a crossed-eye, had a thyroid issue that tormented him twice per yeAr, had crippling knee and back pain, and who broke his arm by throwing a ball thanks to a cyst in his arm, and no one thought, “Hey, this kid might be battling something systematic.” Which it turned out I was and wouldn’t be diagnosed/recognized until I got idipathic lung disease at age 43.

    I don’t blame anyone. Medicines just hadn’t advanced enough in the 1970s for this to be recognized. But it does give me a little bit of compassion for myself. Especially since I took a lot of ribbing for being undersized and walking pigeon-toed and having nose bleeds.

    I’m grateful the world of medicine has advanced so much. It’s unfortunate that capitalists exploit all this for profit but at the same time I’m grateful the ability to treat things has advanced so much.

  • My Diary As A Real Estate Agent: Signs Signs Signs

    My day to day diary as a real-estate agent:

    One of the things that’s interesting about being a real estate agent is putting out signs:

    1. Exercise! It’s a reasonable number of steps (and light lifting) placing signs!
    2. It’s weird seeing my name on a sign board.
    3. Sign placement? Where should I put signs?
    4. Thick skin. I can’t be self conscious about walking out into the middle of a busy street and fumbling with my signs 🙂 Today there must have been 100 cars that passed me by as I placed this sign.
    5. Worry. Specifically, car worry. I don’t worry about my car so much, but when lifting the signs in and out of Larissa’s car I do worry (as an accident prone person) about scratching her car 🙂
    6. Remembering signs. A week ago I was driving on an arterial by one of my previous open houses and there was my sign sitting out there. I’d forgotten it and it was just sitting there. Normally I count the signs in then out, but I’d forgotten that on a whim I’d put out an extra sign. For two days, in the rain, it had just been sitting there forgotten.
    7. Sweating. I perspire a lot. So I can’t wear a jacket when putting out signs or I’ll sweat in my nice shirt. The problem with this is that you may have heard somewhere that it rains sometimes in Seattle, so I have to risk getting drenched by rain so I don’t get drenched by sweat.
    8. Signs in the car. Imagine it’s 4:30 pm. You’ve been working since early and been lifting signs out and in of the car and hosting dozens of curious strangers through another person’s house then commuting back home through weekend traffic. And there the signs are, in the back of the car, staring at you needing to be lifted out and stowed away. It’s soooooo tempting to just leave the signs in the car. But that means driving around with big heavy gas-guzzling signs with no rooms for groceries or family. So the signs must be lifted out and placed in a dry place for another few days. As a proud procrastinator, this is the most challenging part of an open house for sure — taking the signs out of the car at the end of the day. Some day I hope to be wealthy enough that I just leave the signs where I placed them at the beginning of the day and then just using new signs the following week, but 1. I’m not wealthy enough for that (signs are expensive) and 2. that might be considered littering/wasteful by some 🙂

    Anyway. There are many things I’m learning and experiencing about being a real estate agent here in Seattle. Signs are one of them.

  • It Ain’t No ‘Call Me Ishmael’ (AKA The Opening Sentence Of My Autobiography)

    You’re writing your autobiography. What’s your opening sentence?

    In another life I was a teacher.

    And for some reason I thought it would be awesome for the kids to teach them, “Moby Dick.”

    Who does that? Who takes a 17 year old high school student, someone who has their ENTIRE life ahead of them, and says, “I’m going to teach you Moby Dick!”

    I did.

    Those poor kids.

    And to their credit they didn’t rebel. They didn’t mock me (at least not to my face) or refuse to read another word. Day after day they came to class, had a smile on their faces, rolled up their sleeves, and worked on their assignments.

    I remember the last day of the unit. I thanked them for being patient with me through the book. That it had been a long slog but that they’d stuck with it and I was grateful for that (because students WOULD rebel if they don’t buy in to a unit or a teacher). Then we watched the movie, the one with Patrick Stewart. When the opening line of the movie was “Call me Ishmael” the students cheered.

    That was one of the great moments of my teaching career. Because they had actually stayed with me during Moby Dick AND the powerful opening line to Moby Dick had actually stuck with them. Resonated (maybe) with them.

    “Call me Ishmael.”

    It’s such a great opening line. Simple. Direct. Even layered and symbolic (Ishmael also means “wanderer”).

    For me, that is the great opening line of any novel, one that can be aped or matched but never surpassed. And, for me, when the students cheered when that line was said in the movie was one of the great professional moments of my life.

    I’m asked, “What would be the opening sentence of your autobiography.”

    And to that I’d say, first, there is no sentence I could ever write that would match that book. And, second, I can’t say anyone would ever care about my autobiography since I’m just an ordinary person who has had mostly an ordinary life:

    • My dad was a banker who wore a tie, my mom was a CPA.
    • I went to public schools in a mid-size city.
    • I was mostly a B- student, I played sports but neither terribly good nor too terrible, I had some friends but no more than an average person.
    • I’ve had a middling career that was neither terribly good nor too terrible. I know for a fact I was pretty exceptional at strategic sales early in my career, but am very mediocre at it since 2011.
    • Now 50 I’m neither rich nor poor, and just like most 50 somethings am trying to figure out which side of the Hill Of Life I’m on (the up slope or down slope).

    In short, I’m pretty average in every way. And that’s just fine by me.

    So, I guess, my opening sentence(s) would be, “I’m pretty ordinary in every way. And that’s just fine by me.”

  • Three Objects I Couldn’t Live Without (AKA: I See You Oxygen, Food and Water)

    What are three objects you couldn’t live without?

    As humans, we take things for granted.

    Heck, maybe all creatures take things for granted (the kitties seemed to get awfully bored with their toys and food after a short period of time unless there is variety).

    I’ve taken things for granted. And I sure as heck have been taken for granted (my high school girlfriend, college girlfriend and ex wife come to mind).

    So when I’m asked to name three objects I can’t live without, of course my mind goes to:

    1. Coffee. My life would be a lot more empty without coffee.

    2. iPhone. Not because of the doom scrolling or being accessible all the time, but because I just love sooooooooo much how I can fit every song and book and credit card I own along with a camera and notepad in my pocket all the time. I’ll never forget the first time I owned an iPhone in late 2011 — I couldn’t believe how much I could fit in my pocket!!!

    3. Money. It’s pretty hard to live without money. I don’t need a private jet or fancy house or a McLaren or an 8-figure investment portfolio, but it’s pretty hard to feed my family and keep our shelter serviceable without at least some money.

    But do I really need these things to live? Will I fold up and die without my morning and afternoon cups of coffee? Can I live without my music, albeit at a much less satisfying level.

    But wow oh wow it’s hard to live without food, water and (most of all) oxygen. Maybe someone could argue those aren’t objects, but they are physical so therefore I’d label them as objects. And I could not possibly live without them.

    We take things for granted. But I think if someone has lived with lung disease (like I have) where they’ve learned we can’t do much without lungs, been extremely thirsty where we’d do anything for a drink of water, or lived through a famine (so grateful I haven’t!) where we’re just so miserably hungry, then we’re certainly less likely to take oxygen, water and food for granted.

    Here’s to Oxygen. And water. And food. In that order. I will not take you for granted. And I’m just so grateful for you.

  • My Evolving Hobbies

    Daily writing prompt
    Are there any activities or hobbies you’ve outgrown or lost interest in over time?
    View all responses

    PROMPT: Are there any activities or hobbies you’ve outgrown or lost interest in over time?

    When I was young I loved bowling.

    Starting in 5th grade my friend Bill and I would walk every Saturday morning the mile or so to the Sunset Bowl lanes in Ballard, and we’d bowl a few games. I remember bringing home the scorecard each week and just staring at each frame of the scores, thinking about them, breaking them down, looking forward to our next week of games. I couldn’t sleep the night before a game, I was so exited. So it went for the next few years. I loved to bowl, and any time I was going to bowl (including the year in 7th grade when my friend Darryl and I joined a bowling league), I couldn’t sleep because I was so excited.

    I don’t remember how old I was when suddenly I lost interest in bowling. Was I 13? 14? It seems like one month I was eagerly bowling every week, and then suddenly I could care less about bowling. To this day, more than 50 years later, bowling is something I’ll do if friends want to, but I could care less about any of it and I’m always glad when it’s over and we do something else.

    So too it was with golf. In high school, I loved golf. Couldn’t wait to golf. Couldn’t sleep the night before a round of golf. Two or three times a week I went to the course, and when there was no one to golf with me I went by myself and would join random groups. Just like with bowling, I loved the numbers: when I’d get home each day after a round of golf I would break down my game, and at some point I had every score card filed away in my room. Was I good golfer? Not really. But I loved it.

    Then one day when I was a sophomore in college I was on the course with my friends Matt, and we were approaching the 7th green, and suddenly I felt sooooooo bored. And just like that I was done with golf. Yes, I golfed some times after that, and sometimes even had fun on the course with my family and friends, but I could care less about the actual game.

    And so it went. With bowling. Golf. Baseball. Basketball. Classic movies. Partying. Even dating. One moment I was totally into it, even passionate about it, and the next I could care less about it.

    In my 40s and into my 50s, I loved to talk to strangers. On an airplane I’d love to hear someone’s life’s story. In a bar, the random person next to me became my instant connection. I loved hearing people’s stories so much that I started reading every random memoir I could find, and even volunteered on the Crisis Line because it was another way to hear people’s stories. Now? Barely at all. I sit quietly on an airplane, don’t engage people on the street, and had to give up the Crisis Line because I was struggling with keeping interested in it.

    My life has been one of fleeting interests. Fleeting hobbies. Really into something I enjoy one day, and then totally oblivious to it the next.

    There are hobbies in life where I’ve retained an interest my whole life. I love to read. I love to write. I love analyzing data. I love to exercise. And I love mountain creeks.

    But there are more — sooooo many more — activities that are ultimately a passing fancy.

    It can be something I fret about. And I could strive to recapture the joy I felt in those fleeting interests. But, then again, why?

    I feel like the important thing is that I have things I enjoy now. At this moment. The what is less important than the whether. And ultimately I can remember and appreciate the joy I felt when I was going to do those things that I once loved.