Random Thoughts

• This evening, I had dinner with the friend who was the subject of my last post. We caught up with each other's news and talked as if nothing had happened. But it was all very superfluous and I don't know if we will ever get back to where we were. That's ok. It is what it is. No discussion of what had happened or how we expect things to be. Maybe it was cowardly on my part not to have brought it up. Or maybe it is better just to let things evolve organically. We shall see...
• I traveled to my native land to visit family and friends over the holidays. Took my lover with me and he met everyone. Said he understands me better now, having seen me in my natural habitat. Very conservative and traditional upbringing, a far cry from some of my current activities. Made me (and him) realize what I am surmounting when I throw off those old experiences. One of the people we spent a couple of hours with was my very first boyfriend, a man who came out as gay some twenty or so years ago. How hard it must have been for him growing up, especially in that conservative atmosphere. I wonder how it was for him taking me out when we were both thirteen or fourteen. He seems much more at peace now than when I knew him. I also met another friend whom I haven't seen in over thirty years, but I would have recognized him in a heartbeat. He has lived a very exotic and varied life, with one of his accomplishments being that he was the screenwriter of a major Hollywood movie, a film that was highly successful. He has also done other, more altruistic things on a large scale, and is just finishing up six months in France where he decided to take his family so they could have an experience of a different culture and language. I know I have achieved something in my life, but his adventures make mine seem ever so puny! But I am one with most of the rest of the world, he is the one who is extraordinary, I have to remember that.
• China has banned plastic bags! Good for them! I remember taking string bags, or pulling my mother's basket on wheels to the shops when I was little. Nothing wrong with that. It would be great if we could go back to reusable shopping containers. I bring two capacious bags with me when I am grocery shopping, but I need another one, I think. I always end up having to get an extra "plastic-or-paper."
• My ex-husband is being treated for cancer. My sister has to have a five-hour operation on her gums. My lover's father has to have surgery at the age of 85. My father can't hear right now and my mother is in a nursing home. I need to stop taking my health for granted.