Wellness.

It's not like wellness is a static thing, a thing to purchase or a finite state to achieve. It's like happiness. It's there when it's there and you're glad for it and try not to freak out that it's going to leave you and you don't know when. Lately I have not been well though and I admit that it makes me mad (what a surprise). I've been coughing and wheezing for a few weeks now, wondering if I have asthma. I've been nailed with several disabling migraines despite my prevention medication and the Big Gun of Maxalt. Maybe it's the heat? Naw, it hasn't been that hot. Maybe it's the stress? Could be. The boys talk non-stop. Unless you've lived it, you cannot know. Then there are the trips to Portland. Not a big deal really, except for some reason they seem like they are to me. Yesterday I took my youngest along with me, stopped at Uwajimaya for a bite to eat & to purchase a nice bottle of つゆ but realized at the check-out counter I had completely forgotten my debit card & left it at home, next to the stove. Anywya, last night I smelled a weird industrial smell and awoke this morning with swollen sinuses and a migraine. By 4 this afternoon I felt well enough to leave the house and while driving away from our little street I could see that my next door neighbor, who has been sawing and pounding things on the weekends for a while, finished his deck railing. It's all painted and tidy, but *ding* that is what I smelled last night. The drying paint. Solvents and stuff like paint will for sure give me a headache.

So today after heading out for a necessary work-related errand, I stopped at the health food store in town with my boys in tow. I'm thinking short-term gains here. Like making tofu burgers or some vegetarian lasagne. Doesn't that sound good? It's so immediate. Nobody will look over my shoulder to inspect my work, there are no social ramifications surrounding the caliber of my workmanship because it will be a personal meal. How refreshing. A nice change from enduring the cryptic ways of humans, whose motivations can so often be confounded.

So lately I've been thinking about fame, about the usual existential crisis, about why people would go to their 30th high school reunion (mine is tonight and NO I am not going), and about how nice it is to simply make something without strings of desire for acknowledgment attached. You know, just a crazy thing for the yard. Maybe some tile on the front porch. Doesn't need publishing, no grand statement. In 200 years, we will all be so dead and gone, if there any humans left we will just be regarded as an "era" rather than any one individual gaining notoriety. Oh maybe Bush, but that kind of notoriety most of us would not want. Artists of long ago were statistically more significant because of the total human population. Most people that will effect us now are either politicians or scientists, maybe tech-gurus. IMHO.