Overdue phone calls

I'm feeling chilly, so I'm bundled up in my warm up-to-the-ankle house slippers and the Winnipeg Humane Society sweater that I inherited from my mom, with a cup of hot coffee close at hand.

Today I'm finally biting the bullet and phoning her credit card companies to report her death. I know it's pathetic, but I simply haven't been able to bring myself to do it before. For some reason the prospect is a lot less painful now than it was even a month or so ago.

I talked things over with my psychiatrist yesterday and came to the decision that I really don't need to go back to the anxiety-provoking environment of Ipsos-Reid. As he pointed out, I already have a career that I get a lot of satisfaction out of and that brings joy to people; it's not like I need the I-R job in order to pay the bills. Still, it feels an awful lot like admitting that I fail at the game of Real Life. And there's the letter of resignation to write, which will not be a lot of fun.

On my way to the hospital yesterday afternoon I stopped at the Millennium Library to drop off some books and ended up buying a couple of used books from a table in front of their gift shop. One is a book on endometriosis that I picked up for Terri, and the other is a book about ancient inventions that so far is pretty cool. From the library's New and Noted stacks I also picked up a book about James Tiptree Jr., a book about palliative care, and a book about the controversy over homosexuality. Those should keep me in reading material for a while.

MM calls. Again.

Livin' in the future, tell you how I know...

It occurred to me, as I sit here working on a computer that helps me to create art, ready to send finished files across the country via the internet to a server, while listening to a music storage device that holds 300 songs and only weighs half an ounce, that I am livin' in a future that the people working on the comic I'm currently coloring (1961) could NEVER have imagined. Sure, we don't have flying cars and moving walkways (well, except in airports), but we have so many things that are truly miraculous when you look at them from the perspective on the Sixties. The iPod Shuffle alone would be a subject of absolute fascination to most intelligent people of 45 years ago, and it's something that I take very much for granted most days.

Speaking of time warps, the following video (1947) is gacked from a post by elaryn, and addresses the issue of "the more things change, the more they stay the same".

(For the curious, these are the lyric to the song the title of this post references, and it's pretty darned cool.)