Life Unraveled

I just got home from the movies and can't stop thinking about what I saw.  I love when that happens.  The movie was called "One Day".  It follows a young couple on the same day, July 15, each year starting from when they meet in 1988 all the way up until 2011.  It's an interesting concept, and for me, it worked.  We see how this man and woman become friends, achieve success, endure struggles, make mistakes, find love.  In short, we watch them live and grow (snapshot-style), evolving with each passing year.  Yes, I bought it all.  Hook, line and sinker.  Without giving anything away, I will say the movie gets you caught up emotionally, enough to punch you in the gut and make you feel it.  At one point close to the end, I started to wonder where the film was headed.   It is to the movie's credit that I could not guess what was coming after having sat for at least 90 minutes, watching...

A few months back, my good friend Curt started telling me about this boot camp fitness class that meets every Saturday morning, bright and early, down at a local beach here in Honolulu.  Now when I first heard the words "boot camp", I had the same adverse reaction that most people probably have.  It sounded so militaristic, so hideous, so unappealing.  And at 7am on a Saturday, well, you can guess what the first words out of my mouth were.  "Hell no , Curt." But Curt never stopped trying.  Every week he would fill me in on the crazy routines he was doing and how challenging it could be, but more than anything, I would notice his face lighting up while relaying just how fun the class was and how good he felt afterwards.   It took several weeks of cajoling, but finally I agreed to attend one of these sessions.  So I hauled my butt out of bed at 6:15am one Saturday morning and biked my half-awake-self to the beach to try it ...

This morning, I made a rather routine stop at the neighborhood Walmart here in Honolulu.  I must say up front that I normally despise this Walmart.  I can't speak for the other ones out there, and like everyone, I have been to many during my lifetime.  But for my money, none of them even comes close to the chaotic, everybody-in-your-face, walk-right-on-top-of-each-otherness of this particular Wally World.  No matter what time of day or night, the place is a mob scene.  Once I even had a (literal) panic attack while lost somewhere in the far right corner of the store, between the camping gear and automotive.  To this day, I still have no idea how I ended up back there.  That horrific visit ended with me making a desperate phone call to a friend ("Renee, I am trapped in Walmart, it is mass chaos, and I'm losing it !") and then bolting for the exit, vowing never to return again.  The...

There's something in the air again.  You can just feel it.   Everyone seems tired.  Traffic, lines and people are moving slower.  Communication is not so easy.   Irritation is rampant.  Computers and electronics are on the fritz.  Everywhere you look, chaos seems to be the rule, not the exception.  Yep.  All effects are present and accounted for.  Mercury is up to its old tricks again.   Having already written about this lovely phenomenon months ago, I will not describe yet again the multitude of ways you can feel this planet's backwards spin.  It suffices to say that Mercury is now retrograde once more, and (possibly as a result of this) I am simply too tired to launch into a full explanation of what that means this time around.    Nah.  I think relaying one episode from today will do a much better job.  I went to Long's Drugstore to buy a greet...