gifts are waiting to win my gratitude.

So today I managed once again not to go to the doctor's office, or even get through to a human on voice mail. To be honest, I'm not even sure I managed to leave a message at the right office's voice mail. Terribly confusing.

One fun thing about being a restless person with a cell phone is that if I have to be on hold, I can at least manage to be on hold outside while wandering some trail to somewhere or other. Yes, I've become one of those people at last (alas!), someone who talks on the blasted cell phone when there are better things to pay attention to--or, more properly, someone who ignores tacky hold music when there are better things to pay attention to. The passing bicyclists laughed at me, and I don't blame them.

There was another reason for people to laugh at me, though they had no way of knowing it. I walked and walked along a trail for a while, till I finally decided it was time to climb a small rise and get back onto some civilized street. Since I'd been walking one way and decided it was time to head on back toward my starting point, I began taking streets going in pretty much the opposite direction. Thing is, the direction of the shifting street names and the direction of the sun both told me that I was walking in quite the wrong direction, but for some reason I decided that since I knew I could get where I wanted to be the way I was going, I couldn't be bothered to try the more sensible, rational, logical, and significantly shorter route. On a day when I really thought it best not to walk very far, with the general oogieness and all, I ended up walking (according to the Gmap Pedometer) approximately 6.9 miles.

Many are stubborn in pursuit of the path they have chosen, few in pursuit of the goal.

--Friedrich Nietzsche

Um, yeah. My lungs are gurgling and my feet hurt.

Say it with powdered dust
a thousand windows and a horse,
this chaos, these fractals and freckles.

don't waste your time to be comforted,
pride humbled, wounds healed over.

--MegaHAL

I am humbled once again by MegaHAL's wisdom.

The tao that can move in wind. A covey of alley cats will swarm on the remote ice world of hopes
and if you'd care to hear 'em going whack!
you may not even drive a tractor,
cheated, a worthless car, which we have lost meaning
like the silver gleam when the insane sky's clear, heat poofs away
oh no, you needn't bother, i replied.
i could have laughed myself to scorn to find
someone else points out a freshness from wild
clumps of asphodels over the pepper grinder
pressing wrinkles into the earth.

Well, who needs a tractor on the ice world of hopes anyway? I'm wondering how big the pepper grinders are there, though, if they can press noticeable wrinkles into the earth. Now I'm seeing a giant frost-covered pepper grinder covered in swarming alley cats (but with flowers overhead), dwarfing the tractor half-buried in the ice nearby. And you may be sure this is all in accordance with the tao.