Zen and the Art of the Enjoyable Weekend

It is the weekend. There are, however, several things threatening your fulsome immersion in said weekend. Thoughts about such things follows thusly in no particular order:

1. You are feeling a little under the weather. You get grumpy and stressed when you're not feeling well. Anti-dizziness medication is a good thing and you thank God for it. But it does, however, make you feel a tad drowsy. Which is probably good in a way because the drowsiness makes you feel sort of nice and groggy and then you stop being grumpy and stressed about not feeling well. And so your weekend is beginning to shape up in a certain way. You are thinking you should take the opportunity of having a geared-down weekend with no bicycleish gearing up by surrounding yourself with paints and pencils and pens and paper and clay and stuff. You are happy your mate John gave you his old digital set-top box so you can watch digital TV channels on a clear picture. Drowsiness will be aided greatly by bouts of television watching and accepting these days for what they are, instead of thinking about what they could be, which is surely a pointless useless enterprise. You are, after all, grateful that even though this weekend is what it is looking like, at least you're not rolling around in great balls of grief wanting to be dead. Which is a good comparison. You think that comparisons are good when they flow in that direction, but not so good when they flow in the opposite direction.

2. This is the opposite direction that you are struggling with. Your ex and his girlfriend are off for a weekend of music festivals and massages to celebrate their first anniversary. You are happy for them. You truly are. You are also really quite jealous in a way. Not of them personally as such - you do believe that things are as they should be. But of them being in lurve and the feeling of mutual attraction and just how lovely that whole thing is (even though you feel cynically jaded enough to tiredly yawn how it doesn't last. Oh, bitter old woman you are). But yes, you are jealous. And of being part of a couple. You miss that. You don't like admitting such things but you do anyway, quickly, quietly (and for all the world to see. O internet, you are a strange beast). You are quite aware that alongside feeling jealous of people being in lurve, and thinking that you really would like to be in lurve yourself, you are also at the very same time not interested in being part of a couple and indeed think there is a possibility you shall not be for a long time. You hold all of these contrasts in your hand and look at them. You find looking at things can go a long way sometimes towards understanding where they came from and sometimes just simply towards letting them go. It's a bit tiring having such contradictory things in your hand so after a while you stop looking at them and look at the TV instead.

3. Some little bastards have stolen the front number plate from your car. It's irritating, requiring a visit to the police station tomorrow and a trip to VicRoads on Thursday to get new licence plates. In the meantime you will skulk around town with one number plate avoiding the stares of people who think you are up to no good, like the woman who glared at you as you drove out of the shopping centre. Let it go, away on the breeze. You are being Zen remember? You decide that instead of calling the people who nicked your plates little bastards in your head that you will be thankful at least that finally on Thursday you will get new plates. This is something you have been meaning to do forever and ever, or at least ever since you ran up the backside of a woman in your car about five years ago (oh,the shame) and had the paint partially scraped off your front plate. Looks like you'll be crossing that one off on your to-do list soon and for that you are thankful. Because anything on a to-do list that sits there for five years is just ... well, it says a lot about your time management skills, doesn't it?

4. You are feeling grateful that most of the time these days you are pretty good at being in the isness of things instead of in fantasyland about what things aren't, above descriptors notwithstanding. You find that the embracement of the "is" greatly expands said "is" much like the Doctor's Tardis. You admit that last week watcing Dr Who you cried when the Doctor and Madame Pompadour could not be together ;) You were premenstrual. It's a large hook, the premenstrual hook, but you hang things on it anyway.

3. You are at the moment immersed in the midst of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. You had the strangest experience when you began reading this book. You started in on it and realised with a start that you had already read it. It came back to you, up through the years of scrambled brains and you wondered that you had ever forgot it. You loved this book. You remember, or you think you do, that you were about 24 when you read this and that it was one of the things that made you think, "Hmmm, maybe I will go to uni after all, and maybe I will study Philosophy while I am there." You understand your penchant for creating a narrative around your life, looking for underlying meanings and threads and stuff, and so you think it's weird that now you are reading this book again you are considering switching your degree back to Deakin so that you can study philosophy again now you have your brain back after CFS. You wonder if anyone else has read that book and what they thought of it. You think it's quite heartbreakingly wonderful and brilliant. It has you laughing on the train about philosophical enquiry and there has to be something said for that.