In spite of having a well-coordinated outfit, multiple compliments from co-workers about how cute my shoes are and pants that didn't drag on the ground, high heels are one of those inventions that people take part in out of stupidity--me included. What's more, is that, even though those blasted shoes hurt my feet, I'm going to continue wearing them. Please applaud me for being so judicious in my choice of wanting my stubby legs to look longer than they really are over practicality.
Not unlike Annie Dillard's encounter with a weasel in Living Like Weasels, I stumbled across a gopher today. I was walking along one of my favorite paths to walk on next to my house when I stopped momentarily to better hear a voice message I had received from the very person who made that path so special to me; and then, after experiencing some slight nostalgia, I looked to my right to see a little brown gopher with big teeth popping his head through a hole. There was a pile of dirt next to his meager hole as if he was in the process of making some new additions to his home and I think I interrupted his work by so rudely staring at him for what felt like minutes. When I didn't turn my head, his gaze met mine and we stood fixed, entranced. What an odd occurrence it is to feel such a connection! Though I envy that gopher's lifestyle in the sense that he really has only two things he needs to worry about (having food and having shelter), what a dismal thing it would be to live underground; I would much rather choose the freedom of the sky as a bird. However, just as I barely pointed out, I'm sure the gopher doesn't know any better, doesn't worry that he lives in a hole nor complains about his place in life. What a cruel joke being a human can (I say can, because I must concede that we have the ability to improve our circumstances in many cases) be: we are given a certain place in life but we have the ability to be bothered by it.
What's the best way to gain and keep a lot of friends? I'm completely convinced that a major part of it is merely not caring. In friendships, it's quite easy to be offended if the other person doesn't seem to be reciprocating, if he or she seems to not come to talk to you about things anymore; and I think many people decide that, in order to set the friendship right, they must express that concern to their friends, explain that they care and that they're bothered by the way things are going. But the best way to keep those friendships are going is just not caring. Not caring causes you to not be offended by every little thing. Not being offended by every little thing causes you to not have overly high expectations. And not having overly high expectations causes you to take some of the things people do with a grain of salt and allows you to continue considering someone a friend. I find myself having a hard time not caring about things sometimes, but it's really when I don't care, when I don't let trivial things affect me, that my friendships flourish.
I finished that book about investing I spoke of last post! I really breezed through that thing. As a kid, it seemed that only fiction could ever catch my interest, but, as I continue to grow, I've really found a lot of treasures in both fiction and nonfiction, just different types of treasure yet both important nonetheless.
I recently had a conversation with a family friend about how, in school, we are forced to interpret pieces of literature certain ways and are told by people "in high places whose opinions really matter for some reason" that this poem means this and nothing else. I've decided I extremely dislike the boxes people create when it comes to art in the written form; I know that when a writer writes something, a poem for instance, that they often are trying to say something with his or her work, but words are such beautiful, subjective beings and I think a true writer wants their words to be something freeing, a creative adventure--and not something so narrow in scope that it has to be taken in only one way. I think that's why I've always had such a difficulty when I've been asked in school to pick out the important information in a piece of literature; in my mind, people place value on different things and what's important to me isn't important to the next person, which is why I hate it when some person decides that there is only one definite answer. Out of all the questions that ever present themselves in life, I feel like it's rare that there is ever only a sole answer.
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