Impatience, Impatiens

 


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I’ve always considered myself a patient person, not always, mind you, but most of the time. I am certainly not patient or forgiving when I’m driving and someone cuts me off. I curse and hold up a finger. When our son was really young and asked what it meant I told him it meant “wait a minute.” He believed that for years.

I’m patient on supermarket lines, I’m patient with (most) people, I listen well, I like to think I’m a good, loyal friend. Indeed, I have high standards for myself and used to think everyone was like me but Life taught me that lesson the hard way several times over. How do you know differently if the way your family acts is the only way you know?

My friends are all very different from me but now what keeps us together is not lunch dates, meeting in the city on a weekend for brunch or long telephone calls but stupid text messages or IM’s.  I confuse them all the time as my adult children roll their eyes and grimace.


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I hate that, text messages to say Happy Birthday, text messages to say Hello, text messages to find out how a surgery went, text messages to show your deepest sympathy and one death announcement I had to read about on Facebook. It’s all the norm now.

Of course, my adult children, think I am old-fashioned and nuts. Beside that the iPhone to me is a strange and complicated piece of equipment, why can’t we just use the phone as the phone was really intended? To talk. It doesn’t seem popular anymore except for those of us “oldies.”

I will ask my kids to call their grandparents and they will do that responsibly but they will say “they weren’t home, we will try again later.” “Did you leave a message” I ask? A reasonable question, I think, and they look at me like the dinosaur that I am and say with a scolding dismay “Mom, our generation doesn’t LEAVE messages, we just try again later.”

It’s no surprise that I’m not good with change but I try as best I can. Knowing I’m not good with change makes me try harder than most. At this point in our lives my husband and I are waiting for change to happen, waiting for a clue to point us in the right direction on what we should do and where we should go in the future for the next chapter in our lives.

My friends say that “I will know it when it happens” and I believe that is true, but it has been a very long time and being patient has been getting harder and harder. I need to relax, look within and wait for the Spring. I think things will start to get clearer then. If nothing else, the dreadful Winter, will be over and Life will begin anew.

 

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Plinky Prompt? Which two favorite far apart cities do you wish you could move close together?

Orange Tree (Photo credit: amycgx)

• Which two cities do you wish you could move right next to each other? See all answers

• • Edit answer |
  • July 9, 2012 by hibernationnow
  • Favorite Far-Apart Cities
  • California Dreaming
    

    New Yorker Hotel building from below (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

    orange tree New York and California

  • I grew up in NY and still live here but have always wanted to live in California. Part of my heart will always live on the East Coast but part of me longs to live on the West Coast, on the water. I can’t take the winter weather in NY, but the fall and the spring are magnificent. Likewise, I’d like to be near the ocean or any body of water during the summer (or ALL the time if I could).  If I could live in both of these states, I’d be an incredibly healthy and happy woman. I’m too laid back to be a New Yorker and too impatient to be a California citizen, I need STRONG coffee (NY) but love the salad bars in CA. Bagels are a NY MUST, as are egg creams. But imagine, having a lemon or orange tree growing in your back yard in California……to me, that would be like living in a dream.
  • Previous Answer

Plinky Prompt: What Do You Need For A Successful Road Trip?

• Road Trip Essentials
• Be Serious, a successful road trip? With ME??!!
  Day 233: Nauseous Can the first item for a successful road trip be an airplane? Thought not. It doesn’t hurt to try. Oh dear, road trip….sends shivers up and down my spine. I HATE sitting in cars for a long time because a) I have a chronic pain issue that makes it very difficult for me to sit in one place for more than an hour or two at a time and b) I have the attention span and patience of a dying tick. I get restless and want to be there and hate sitting in a car. I become one of those annoying children that say in a whiny voice:”are we THERE yet?” Trust me, you wouldn’t WANT me on a road trip although I did quite well when we were on a long road trip in Australia. However, from NYC to Washington, DC? Not so much. It took FOREVER. I find the train much more comfortable albeit more expensive.
  I need food and lots of it, snacks, Yoo-Hoo, bottles of water, plenty of places to stop so I can pee and stretch, Twizzlers (original flavor only) maybe some music. I can’t read or write because I get nauseous. I can’t sit in the back because I throw-up. Trust me, you don’t WANT me to go on a road trip with you. Besides, isn’t “successful” and “road trip” an OXYMORON??? Think about it. p.s. My poor family would have to be looking at this type of expression the entire, repeat, the entire time we are on the road.

9 And A Half Minutes, Episode 1

Image by sugu via Flickr

Tick Tock, Tick Tock. Welcome to another edition of 9 and a half minutes. A place where I mention the things that annoy me. First up: SPAM. If you are going to send out this trash can’t you make the effort to spell “dear” CORRECTLY? It’s always misspelled and it’s in all  lower case letters :”hello deaer.” This bugs me. Not to mention that I get hundreds of junk mail every day and yes, I do, have a SPAM filter.  I am OCD about the amount the junk mail that I get so I need to check it and delete it frequently. It’s supposed to automatically delete in one month but that never happens. Every day I get the following suggestions: “buy drugs, enlargge your penis, veagra for womens, congradulations deaer, autimatic lottery winner”….just stop sending us this junk. Here’s my suggestion: ” go away, get losted, please, hun.”

Another thing that’s irritating is the call you get on a Sunday night from your favorite hairdresser, the one you found after years and years of searching. The one you trust implicitly. You finally find her and sure enough, one day you get “the call.” You know what it’s about, the minute you get the message “It’s Linda, from Tresses” on the phone. Deep in our hearts, women everywhere  know that the only reason your hairdresser is calling you at home at night is because she has fled her old job, stolen your chart and is working somewhere else. My dilemna: I love the way she does my hair but she has joined a salon that I fervently despise. It’s not the end of the world and yes, a mere annoyance but these things add up.

It has been a horrific couple of years and many of us are suffering the consequences of a bad economy. The idea of a vacation used to give me something to dream about, to look forward to. Key word: USED TO, past tense.  Even though it may not be financially feasible, it was something to dream and fantasize about.  Thinking about flying someplace warm in the middle of winter or early spring used to make me so happy, an inside secret I tucked away in my heart. Now? Thinking about flying makes me anxious, another mood elevator crashes to the ground (no pun intended.) With the media screaming about terror alerts and bomb threats, who wants to fly now?  Flying used to be fun, an exciting adventure. Now, you wait in very long lines, several times over, experience huge delays, body checks, shoe checks and most importantly, basic primal fear, anxiety and paranoia. I’d have to think it over for a long time before I would fly again and then, I would literally have to be sedated. Where’s the joy in that?

What is there to look forward to now? The economy stinks, the unemployment rate is ridiculously high and everyone seems to have less money or no money at all (with the exception of perhaps the super-rich which is even more annoying.)  The world, as we know it now, is a scary place. I know things take time but even I am losing patience. The country needs some good news, some great news. We need something, anything to feel good about our lives; I don’t care what it is. Give us a glimmer of hope, a tidbit, a really solid fantasy.

It’s the first week in November and we had sleet, snow and a power outage for six hours the other day. At this point, I’d even welcome some global warming: as in the warming up the country variety. If you hadn’t guessed it before the other thing I despise with a passion is winter. I would love to sleep straight through to spring. It’s cold and dark, scary and we all get sick; especially for those of us with chronic illnesses and pain. I know life is not perfect, believe me, I know. I also know you’re not supposed to “sweat the small stuff.” But, when the BIG stuff is all bad, the little stuff just adds an additional amount of worry and annoyance;  it makes us cranky. Very cranky. I’m not Andy Rooney, I’m just little ol’ me but I’m seriously pissed off. Join me next week for another edition.