I was wondering......

Life is perplexing, wonderful, terrifying, and often inexplicable. And as we mature, the answers come no more quickly, believe me. There are just MORE questions.  

Like.....

~~~where cyberspace actually IS. Can I go there to find that story I wrote and never saw again? I know we have clouds where we can now save important stuff, but do the clouds mix with all that space....somewhere?

~~~how the nifty keyfinder device that was the rage two Christmases ago helps me when I'm standing in the parking lot at work and can't find my keys? In the rain. After I've dropped my purse and book in a puddle.

~~~why more men don't understand why dancing is often called "a vertical expression of a horizontal act"?

~~~how doing nothing under someone else's direction can be so exhausting, but if you're home trying to get some rest, it's different?

~~~where that guy behind me in the monster truck thinks I'm going to go when all three lanes are bumper to bumper as far as we both can see? Vertical, maybe?

~~~the customer service person who is obviously in India. Is he having trouble understanding ME, too? Is there a point to all this miscommunication?

~~~when does the "CALL IN THE NEXT FIVE MINUTES!" start on those ads that run continuously? Is the person in India matching up the ads with the local time....around the globe? And what time zone is HE using to start that process?

~~~did God think it was funny to create men and women from the mud of two different planets? I can't speak for you, but I am not amused.

~~~why people in other parts of the country don't know about shaking clothes out before you put them on? Here in the South we know what can lurk in clothes, waiting to crawl on your neck after you put that robe on. Is it scorpions in the West? Ladybugs somewhere else?

~~~why men over about 60 continue to search for younger women? The women in their own age group know for a fact that many of those men can't....you know.....even with that little blue pill available. And a doctor saying, "Since you have heart problems, you can't use the pill, but you can go ahead and TRY if you really want to" does tend to make women a tad nervous. Just a tad.

~~~and what about those younger women when they find out what's NOT going to happen with their Sugar Daddy? Some will be OK with.......well, never mind.

~~~why some people won't pass a police car, even if it's traveling at 25 mph in a 40 mph zone?

~~~those double turn lanes where drivers won't use the second one, especially if it's new? Everyone continues to line up in the original lane, like lemmings unable to get out of order, while the new lane sits empty and unused.

I'm confused.

“Insanity is doing the same thing, over and over again, but expecting different results.” 

Just a quick question......

One thing that growing older--aging to perfection, in other words--has done for me is that I allow myself the luxury of questioning. Everything.

I wasn't one of those kids who asked dozens of questions. Where does the blue come from in the sky? Why can't dogs talk? Where does God hang out when He's not busy?

I tended to accept everything around me, and to be honest, I don't think it was that I was afraid to ask. I don't think it even occured to me to question things that everyone else seemed comfortable with. My dad was the one who put on the Navy uniform in the morning, but all of us were in the military, too. That's how it works and if I recall, that whole system doesn't like being questioned by its masses.

One day the light bulb clicked on in my head, though (or maybe it went off and I was suddenly in the dark about everything), and the sacred was no longer safe with me. I can never quite put my finger on when this happened to me. When I think back, all I can come up with is that age 35 was a demarcation for me. I became a mother and shortly after that, I was no longer a wife. Multiple jobs (simultaneously) and caring for an infant alone don't translate to leading a quiet, tidy existance.

Around that same time, I had a professor who looked at the world through a lens that was angled the slightest degree away from the rest of the world's. I was amazed at how much that tiny angle could change life's entire viewpoint. It intrigued me. 

Whatever the impetus was, I began to question everything. Why? Who? How? When? And once you start, nothing is safe. I have questioned rules, laws, religious tenets.

And people are intimidated by this. To say the least. Maybe it's that they wish they had asked those questions themselves, though. Now they're resentful that I am the one who is having fun doing the asking instead.

But now I know how that professor must feel, almost as if the world has been knocked off its axis. Questions are one thing, but the answers are quite another.

God may be in the details, but the goddess is in the questions. Once we begin to ask them, there's no turning back.
Gloria Steinem

.

What was that you dared to ask me?

I smile.

I nod and smile.

I nod, smile, and change the subject.

But I have learned that I don't have to answer a question just because someone has asked one.

When I was younger, I felt a compulsion to respond to any query put to me. No matter how rude, how intrusive, how "it's none of your business" that question was. Heaven forbid someone should be angry with me, that was one of my fears, I think. I also cared too much about how people viewed me, so I was compliant above all else. Which meant I told people things that they had no business asking about, much less knowing about me and my life.

Now I know that some people are just so deficient that they suck life right out of others, primarily because they have none of their own. Life, I mean. Drama queens, busy bodies, call them what you will. They think everything that happens within their realm, and often outside it, too, belongs to them.

So, I've learned some great responses. (A friend told me once that I can tell people where to go so sweetly that they don't know what just happened to them. I say, hooray for me!)

I say things like, "I'm not prepared to answer that right now." (Or ever, probably.)

"I'll have to think about that."

"Why?"

"Let's talk about something else."

As you can imagine, when I say things like that in response to a question, the other person gets uncomfortable. Sometimes huffy. And when I was younger, I couldn't handle that.  No more.

If you don't like what you can see and hear when you're in my presence, by the way I live my life, and what I am willing to share with you, I can also smile sweetly as I tell you where the door is.

It's an important lesson for younger people to learn, I think.

Now, what was that you asked me?

People create their own questions because they are afraid to look straight. All you have to do is look straight and see the road, and when you see it, don't sit looking at it- walk.
Ayn Rand