This is...

...the first post of 20-10, so I feel it should be somehow momentous.
On the other hand, the best thing I can think to say is:
Whew, I think I may finally be packed. Mostly. Until tomorrow, you know. There's always last-minute packing to be done.
Interestingly enough, this next two weeks are going to be mostly full of packing an unpacking: today, to go to Colorado. In Colorado, packing in as many wonderful moments as I can with my dear H. Then, after Colorado, unpacking the CO stuff and then re-packing all my stuff to go back to school. Then unpacking at school.
There's to be lots of catching up, too. With H, with school ppl. Truly a time of new beginnings. Oddly, I never feel as if I am truly experiencing a new beginning unless there's a flight or longish car trip involved (you know, over 3-4 hours). Maybe it's a fruit of my upbringing, but the flipside of the fact that great change always comes on the heels of a long (spatial) voyage is that you get to believing that if there IS long spatial voyage, there must be a new beginning, and if there isn't, there can't be. Good ol' classical conditioning, you are screwing with my head again.
A friend of mine was talking yesterday about how TV has completely formed most people's idea of how life works and what their goals should be in life (think of the typical plotlines of sitcoms, romantic comedies, even police/crime shows, and you'll get the idea). That's not a terribly new concept, to me (or, hopefully, to anyone who's used their noggin in a while) but it got me wondering how many things actually shape what we think we HAVE to do, achieve, and feel in this life. Like, for example, my perception of the relationship between travel and change. Clearly, that relationship doesn't hold up under scrutiny. That one is easy to see through, but it makes me wonder how many more of our ideas and/or beliefs are similarly absurd?
It's also kind of like writing a paper. The thing hangs over your head, and you think about it all the time, for weeks before you actually have to start writing it, and then when you do, you strive your very best to make it perfect, to make it convincing, to make it, in short, a work of prosaic art (and i know prosaic isn't a derivation of prose, but i want you to be clear that that's how i'm using it). And then you hit the two or so hours before you have to turn the sucker in, and you realize that you don't actually HAVE to manufacture the perfect paper. You just have to make something mostly decent, that will be intelligible. In short, you realize that your expectations don't match up to, well... reality.
So I wonder how much of life is like that. If it makes any sense to you.
over 'n out.
E.O.