Imaginary friends

When I was little, I had two imaginary friends named Dorothy and Mino.

Well, "friends" may be too strong a word. See, Mino, Dorothy, and I almost never saw each other, as we lived in completely different countries and always did exactly the same things. So if I went to Dorothy's home, Dorothy went to Mino's while Mino went to mine. We would only see each other briefly, at the corner where all three countries intersected. (I didn't know anything about geography at that age.)

Aside from having different names and different native languages, we were exactly the same in every way. If Dorothy was in my home, everyone thought she was me unless she told them otherwise. So of course if my parents were upset with something I had done, I would tell them, "It wasn't me! It was Dorothy! I was in Mino's house!" And of course my parents would reply, "But if the three of you always do exactly the same thing, then you deserve to be punished too." And so I would be.

I had the most useless imaginary friends in the whole wide world.

choice

For so many of the years that I've had fibro, I've been praying to God to let me know what it was I was supposed to be doing, since I couldn't do the things I had planned, the things I was formerly good at and took for granted I'd be doing in the future. Nowadays I'm looking at my life and bewailing my lack of choices. Whining because I see only one road before me. But isn't this foolish of me? After all, if I have no other options, then the options that are left to me must be what I should be doing. How ungrateful of me to complain.

Then again, it's silly in a way to say that I have no options. Any day, I could decide to lie down on the railroad tracks in front of one of those trains loaded with corn oil and sulfuric acid. I don't. I could decide to throw a housemate's Volvo parts through the next-door neighbors' window and steal their latest sculptures of tormented souls. I don't. I could strip naked and stagger through The Gap singing "Yabba Dabbada Doodle!" at the top of my lungs to the tune of "Rudolf the Red-Nosed Reindeer." I don't even consider it. The fact that I ignore all these options every day certainly doesn't change the fact that they are there. The fact that I ignore all these options every day without even realizing that I'm making those choices leaves me wondering what good options there might be that I routinely ignore. And since life has clearly shown me that I'm not meant to be a normal person, those choices nobody thinks of are almost certainly the choices that I need to be consciously making. So once again I'm left wondering: What is it that I'm supposed to be doing?

Carnivory

So I've finally decided I'm tired of soysage for the moment and have decided to eat flesh for dinner. Of course, given my lineage, this craving for some animal is hardly surprising: wolves are well-known for their bloodthirsty nature, and harmless-seeming hummingbirds sipping sweet nectar also snack on innocent insects to get their protein fix.

Having the DNA of that particular bird does make preparing my night's meal something of a challenge. Picture a green-winged grey wolf wrestling with a chicken ten times its own size and you'll begin to see my problem.