Displacement

So we're moving on Wednesday. I haven't even thought about organizing anything in B2. So much crap needs to be thrown away and I just keep putting it off. The movers come Tuesday to pack us, and after only five more sleeps here, we're in new digs.

I'm not sure I even remember what the new place looks like.

I'm starting to freak a little, but I know everything will be fine ... it always is.

I'm at the short story festival all day tomorrow and my mind is in a thousand different places, most of them Scottish.

I need to come back to reality.

My new student (29-year-old Iranian MD) wrote me an essay about the relativity of values and how one's sense of right and wrong can depend on external factors. Like being in a shelter in Tehran when you're 9 years old and the Iraqis are bombing you and you don't understand how nice people (the neighbors and family you go to church with) can wish other people (the neighbors in the bomb shelter down the road) dead, because they want their own lives to be spared.

It's all about perspective, innit?

My problems are so insignificant, and yet, they're mine I suppose.

Isn't there a bottle of Adderall around here somewhere?

And then Mary Chapin Carpenter comes on and reminds me (and he will so appreciate this) "to show a little inspiration, show a a little spark."

Better living through middle-aged country-western emo.

Everything we got, we got the hard way.

Right. Moving on ahead then.