Café, 10 a.m.

• A server swings by carrying Belgian waffles, topped with pecans and whipped butter, smelling like love.
• A toddler smacks empty chairs with a flailing arm and grabs unsuspecting patrons around the knees, craning her neck back to look up the vast expanse of leg. Her mouth forms an "o" of confusion, these jeans are NOT attached to a familiar face!
• A true Silicon Valley type conducts an interview over a banana nut muffin. Bits and pieces of his conversation float through the cafe: "valuation, term sheet, footprint, opportunity, roll-out."
• A couple, dressed in sweats and ballcaps, drink their coffee. There is a tenseness to the skin under their eyes as they stare over each other's shoulders.

..........

The dichotomy between logic and emtion can be cavernous: you can logically analyze a situation, and it won't affect your emotional, gut reaction in the least (and vice versa.)

Recently, I've been feeling a little "woe is me." And I hate that shit. Feeling that way, and typing the words, I feel slightly disgusted with myself. I've kept most of it off of the blog, to the point of not writing, um, at all at times. I have covered some of it by writing positively - not so much to "whitewash" it, but (1) no one likes the whine and (2) to try to buck myself up by focusing on the positive.

I've fallen into a bad pattern of looking forward to things and being sorely disappointed. Big things and small. It's not the individual let-downs that are cause for concern, it's stringing the events together. Logically, I know the universe is not out to get me (and I feel silly even verbalising that thought), but emotionally? Yeah, that's a whole different thing. Life may indeed be not fair (and Logic accepts that), but Emotion? I'm here to tell you that Emotion throws a fit!

One of the truest things I've found is that you can always change direction and try something new. There's some famous quote-type thing like "Stupidity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting to get a different result." Something like that.

One suggested solution has been to lower expectations - but, friends, they are as low as I'm willing to let them go. (They could go lower, I'm sure, but at what point do you just stop getting out of bed in the morning?) The direction I want to try is to stop looking forward so much: to be in this precise moment, here and now. Not so much a lowering of expectations as ... no expectations at all.