Prosaic Paradise

I spend a lot of time daydreaming. When I’m in my best frame of mind, I can do this for hours, and it keeps me  awake long after I needed to go to sleep. (Of course when I’m in my worst, I’m up worrying.) I can daydream about the best outcomes for a conversation I’m going to have, about my ideal home floor plan*, a completely ridiculous idea for a visual art piece**, how to manage to continue getting degrees for the rest of my life, or what having a dog would be like.

So when Genie posted her Blue Skies Living Out Loud request, I was like, yes. I am this!

My psychology is a complex balance between caution and creativity, though. I have the part of me that’s all “You can’t be a professional musician, that’s impossible, or nearly enough that your eggs should be in a different basket.” or simply “They’re all going to laugh at you.” I also have the part of me that’s like “I know that last time I tried to learn to skateboard Genie got her arm fractured and Mary got her ankle broken, but I’m going to learn how to skateboard, and being fat and 35 is no reason not to!” I like to think this is good, and not insane.

(Leslie, my much younger classmate and current nominee for best person***, said “I would not be getting on no fucking skateboard. You will get your shit broke!” As I just found out that another classmate had to drop out of the program because she broke her arm and you can’t care for patients with a broken arm, I am shelving the skateboard idea until after my final exam. DAMNIT.)

I actually think that all this blue sky business came to me more naturally as I got older. People think about getting older as a time they have to give up their dreams, compromise, sacrifice. I think I did WAY more of that in my teens and twenties. Why? Oh, always for a dude. Should I scrape together everything I can and go to the best university? No… no I should go to Tech, there is a cute guy there. (Actually, that was probably it’s own twisted life-ruining form of blue-sky thinking.) Should I do the best work I can at my job and then maybe get them to help me pay for grad school? No, this relationship really needs my energy now. Not that I regret those things; everything happened the way it was going to happen. Just that nowadays, the only limits to my blue skies are Jack’s reasonable feeling that he’d like to keep living in Maryland.

Fortunately, there’s still plenty for me to dream about right here.

I just wrote this scholarship essay where I boldly stated that if they chose me, they might be funding the person who helps make sense out of the way we provide mental health care in America. I mean, I don’t have a clue how I would do that, but it could happen! Anything could happen. If I try hard enough (and have enough crassly fabulous good luck), I can make whatever happen. I just put in a volunteer application with the LVFD to be an EMT. I would not have even thought about that before this year. And I know (well, I know NOW) there’s a physical exam, but who says I can’t start doing stairs and lifts today and get ready?

Maybe I’m just riding a high from getting through Med-Surg I. Maybe I just have more unstructured time now (Jesus, I need a job this summer****). Maybe all this blue-sky daydreaming is my way of procrastinating on all the plain hard textbook reading I should be doing for mother-baby. Well, even if it is, I think it’s a good use of my mental energy. I recommend it to anyone.

* It has to have a loft overlooking the living room so that it’s basically like having a treehouse inside your house.

** On my old commute to Annapolis, I used to drive by this empty field on the Crownsville Road exit. After a while I came up with ever increasingly grandiose plans for a visual/performance art piece to install there and cause traffic accidents.

*** All of my study buddies and lab partners are getting nominated by me, for sure. Where is that best person ballot box?

**** Hey anyone – got a job I could do this summer?

Tags: Living Out Loud

Trackback URI | Comments RSS