Our life on earth is, and ought to be, material and carnal. But we have not yet learned to manage our materialism and carnality properly; they are still entangled with the desire for ownership. |
ResemblanceTuesday, August 4, 1998
I slept late this morning, but as my mother would have said, I must have needed it. Lots of diary-l hoo-ha all day. Oh, the tedium! Luke wrote me (and when is he going to update?) in reference to my plaint about folks who only read the latest entry. "In your latest redesign, only the latest entry is visible when I go to your journal page. So, if I skip a couple days, it's not immediately apparent if I've missed any days. The July design, I could tell by the difference in visited-link color, because most of the entries were visible when I opened the page." Well, the list starts lower down the page now, because I'm featuring a picture of myself this month. I tried slightly rearranging things on the page, and resizing the text graphic, but I couldn't bring myself to make the picture smaller, which is the only thing that really would have made a difference. So I'll just have to live with some folks who don't scroll, and don't read every day, missing a few entries.
I was got some dinner at the teriyaki place down the street (virtuously getting extra vegetables, and what a racket that must be for them! a dollar for five cents worth of steamed cabbage!). I was sitting in the window waiting for my food, when I thought I saw my brother in the street outside. I'm not sure it was him, because I looked away as soon as the thought occured to me. If it was him, I didn't want to make eye contact. The man stood with another (both appeared homeless) for a few moments, looking at the menu posted in the window, then they moved on. I'm not sure it was him. I haven't heard anything from him since my sister and I talked to him in January, and I don't have any reason to think that he's homeless now. It's probably just a reflection of my fears. But the man in the street did have a resemblance to him!
Taking some advice from the alt.recovery.clutter newsgroup, I want to try to make some steps towards cleanup and decluttering every day. I succeeded today in getting the trash taken out, and doing some hand laundry. It doesn't sound like much, but it's better than nothing! An astonishingly large percentage of what I took out was aluminum soda cans. Thank heaven I stopped subscribing to the newspaper quite a while ago! I feel that I'll hear any local news that I need to know on the local NPR station during my drive to or from work. Feeling oppressed by too many things...It reminds me of how puzzled we were when my mother, sister and I came home from a cross-country trip. My other sister had been left to swelter in the Northern Virginia heat and humidity with my father and brother, and one of her coping mechanisms had been to move virtually all of the furniture out the room she was sleeping in. Bareness! Minimalism! I see the elegance and it tempts me, but how could I ever live up to such a setting. I remember thinking this when I saw Mike Leigh's Secrets and Lies. The zen-like calmness of the apartment belonging to the long-lost daughter filled me with envy.
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