About Being Perfect

Posted on May 26, 2022 by bonniedonily

[Some weeks I realize a little too late that I am one day behind. So today, I’m sharing one of my favorite poems – maybe because it’s in the form of a to-do list , my love language – ha! Enjoy.]

HOW TO BE PERFECT

BY RON PADGETT

Get some sleep.

Don’t give advice.

Take care of your teeth and gums.

Don’t be afraid of anything beyond your control. Don’t be afraid, for

instance, that the building will collapse as you sleep, or that someone

you love will suddenly drop dead.

Eat an orange every morning.

Be friendly. It will help make you happy.

Raise your pulse rate to 120 beats per minute for 20 straight minutes

four or five times a week doing anything you enjoy.

Hope for everything. Expect nothing.

Take care of things close to home first. Straighten up your room

before you save the world. Then save the world.

Know that the desire to be perfect is probably the veiled expression

of another desire—to be loved, perhaps, or not to die.

Make eye contact with a tree.

Be skeptical about all opinions, but try to see some value in each of

them.

Dress in a way that pleases both you and those around you.

Do not speak quickly.

Learn something every day. (Dzien dobre!)

Be nice to people before they have a chance to behave badly.

Don’t stay angry about anything for more than a week, but don’t

forget what made you angry. Hold your anger out at arm’s length

and look at it, as if it were a glass ball. Then add it to your glass ball

collection.

Be loyal.

Wear comfortable shoes.

Design your activities so that they show a pleasing balance

and variety.

Be kind to old people, even when they are obnoxious. When you

become old, be kind to young people. Do not throw your cane at

them when they call you Grandpa. They are your grandchildren!

Live with an animal.

Do not spend too much time with large groups of people.

If you need help, ask for it.

Cultivate good posture until it becomes natural.

If someone murders your child, get a shotgun and blow his head off.

Plan your day so you never have to rush.

Show your appreciation to people who do things for you, even if you

have paid them, even if they do favors you don’t want.

Do not waste money you could be giving to those who need it.

Expect society to be defective. Then weep when you find that it is far

more defective than you imagined.

When you borrow something, return it in an even better condition.

As much as possible, use wooden objects instead of plastic or metal

ones.

Look at that bird over there.

After dinner, wash the dishes.

Calm down.

Visit foreign countries, except those whose inhabitants have

expressed a desire to kill you.

Don’t expect your children to love you, so they can, if they want to.

Meditate on the spiritual. Then go a little further, if you feel like it.

What is out (in) there?

Sing, every once in a while.

Be on time, but if you are late do not give a detailed and lengthy

excuse.

Don’t be too self-critical or too self-congratulatory.

Don’t think that progress exists. It doesn’t.

Walk upstairs.

Do not practice cannibalism.

Imagine what you would like to see happen, and then don’t do

anything to make it impossible.

Take your phone off the hook at least twice a week.

Keep your windows clean.

Extirpate all traces of personal ambitiousness.

Don’t use the word extirpate too often.

Forgive your country every once in a while. If that is not possible, go

to another one.

If you feel tired, rest.

Grow something.

Do not wander through train stations muttering, “We’re all going to

die!”

Count among your true friends people of various stations of life.

Appreciate simple pleasures, such as the pleasure of chewing, the

pleasure of warm water running down your back, the pleasure of a

cool breeze, the pleasure of falling asleep.

Do not exclaim, “Isn’t technology wonderful!”

Learn how to stretch your muscles. Stretch them every day.

Don’t be depressed about growing older. It will make you feel even

older. Which is depressing.

Do one thing at a time.

If you burn your finger, put it in cold water immediately. If you bang

your finger with a hammer, hold your hand in the air for twenty

minutes. You will be surprised by the curative powers of coldness and

gravity.

Learn how to whistle at earsplitting volume.

Be calm in a crisis. The more critical the situation, the calmer you

should be.

Enjoy sex, but don’t become obsessed with it. Except for brief periods

in your adolescence, youth, middle age, and old age.

Contemplate everything’s opposite.

If you’re struck with the fear that you’ve swum out too far in the

ocean, turn around and go back to the lifeboat.

Keep your childish self alive.

Answer letters promptly. Use attractive stamps, like the one with a

tornado on it.

Cry every once in a while, but only when alone. Then appreciate

how much better you feel. Don’t be embarrassed about feeling better.

Do not inhale smoke.

Take a deep breath.

Do not smart off to a policeman.

Do not step off the curb until you can walk all the way across the

street. From the curb you can study the pedestrians who are trapped

in the middle of the crazed and roaring traffic.

Be good.

Walk down different streets.

Backwards.

Remember beauty, which exists, and truth, which does not. Notice

that the idea of truth is just as powerful as the idea of beauty.

Stay out of jail.

In later life, become a mystic.

Use Colgate toothpaste in the new Tartar Control formula.

Visit friends and acquaintances in the hospital. When you feel it is

time to leave, do so.

Be honest with yourself, diplomatic with others.

Do not go crazy a lot. It’s a waste of time.

Read and reread great books.

Dig a hole with a shovel.

In winter, before you go to bed, humidify your bedroom.

Know that the only perfect things are a 300 game in bowling and a

27-batter, 27-out game in baseball.

Drink plenty of water. When asked what you would like to drink,

say, “Water, please.”

Ask “Where is the loo?” but not “Where can I urinate?”

Be kind to physical objects.

Beginning at age forty, get a complete “physical” every few years

from a doctor you trust and feel comfortable with.

Don’t read the newspaper more than once a year.

Learn how to say “hello,” “thank you,” and “chopsticks”

in Mandarin.

Belch and fart, but quietly.

Be especially cordial to foreigners.

See shadow puppet plays and imagine that you are one of the

characters. Or all of them.

Take out the trash.

Love life.

Use exact change.

When there’s shooting in the street, don’t go near the window.

About Nothing

Posted on May 5, 2022 by bonniedonily

“There’s nothing I hate more than nothing. Nothing keeps me up at night. I toss and turn over nothing. Nothing can cause a GREAT BIG FIGHT.” – Edie Brickell and the New Bohemians

We’ve been cruising through the Seinfeld catalog of episodes, watching one or two every couple of days. Its basic premise is that it’s a show about nothing, the minutiae of daily life. Every episode is ridiculous and inane, but like coming upon a relationship accident, I can’t look away. We will finish watching the whole series. Nothing is going to get in our way.

Unless something does. On any given day, all of my best-laid plans – to exercise, to not procrastinate writing my latest blog post, to watch the next episode of Seinfeld – can so easily get derailed by…nothing. Nothing is another word for regular life. “What’s new?”, an friend will ask and the first thing that comes into my mind is: nothing.

Which isn’t true, right? If you keep any sort of diary or journal or even if Facebook assaults you with some weird anniversary (Celebrate 10 Years of Friendship with Your Accountant!) and you look back two, five or ten years ago, you can quite plainly see that things do change – maybe at a snail’s pace but still. Even a snail moves at 0.048 km/hr. That’s better than the average couch potato. I can plainly see my routine has changed from two years ago (because: Covid), my face looks different from five years ago (hello: wrinkles) AND I have a different accountant from ten years ago.

This blog is sort of about nothing. I’ve been trying to shape it and figure out what it’s about since I started. I write about writing (very meta!), about memories (how ephemeral!), about what I read lately and occasionally about stuff that happens. It’s a pretty good antidote for thinking that nothing happens when I read a post from two years ago or a throwback from twenty years ago.

Sometimes I wonder why I keep writing. And then when I write, I figure out why I do. It’s nothing, really.

About the Lottery

Posted on April 21, 2022 by bonniedonily

What would you do if you won the lottery?

In any random list of writing prompts, this is a question that often pops up. After all, everyone thinks about it when you hear what the Lotto 649 Jackpot is this week: What would it be like to win a million or ten million or fifty million dollars? What would it be like to really be rolling in the dough?

There are, of course, the stock answers, the ones that kind of make sense: I’d pay off my mortgage and maybe all my family’s mortgages. I’d quit my job. I’d travel the world. I’d never have to shovel snow/mow the lawn/clean the bathroom again – unless I really wanted to. I would buy a new [fill in the blank]. And then I would ridiculously wonder to myself if a million or ten million or fifty million dollars would really be enough, you know, to do it ALL.

The brilliance of the question is that if you’re really honest with yourself, you can figure out a lot about what you really want – right now – without the lottery. If telling your boss “I QUIT” is your first impulse, then maybe that job isn’t serving you so well anymore and you need to find a new job or a new attitude. If travelling is first on the docket, then maybe you need to figure out how to get to Mexico or Moose Jaw more often. Me, I would buy up all the tired little houses and fix ’em up and sell them without worrying about making a profit. Maybe even give them away. Not practical, probably, but it would be kind of fun, right?

There’s also the darker question, the one we might not think of right away: what kind of lottery are we talking about? A Shirley Jackson lottery? You remember her eerie story that you read in high school, the one that pinged in your brain when you watched the movie The Hunger Games – where A PERSON is selected by lottery? And not for anything good. No thanks, I don’t want to win that one.

In Neil Pasricha’s book The Happiness Equation, he admonishes his audience to REMEMBER THE LOTTERY whenever we start thinking ridiculous things like “my life sucks” or “there’s never enough”. Our human brains have a propensity to look for problems, so such pessimistic thinking is actually natural. It’s a bit of a survival mechanism. It’s what spurs us to keep buying lottery tickets in the first place. But we can also remind our brains: Hey, remember? You’re alive, you’re here. And that means you’ve already won. You’ve survived this far.

Remember the lottery. Being alive means you’ve already won.

About TV

Posted on March 31, 2022 by bonniedonily

Recently, while reading through Amy K. Rosenthal’s Encyclopedia of an Ordinary Life, I was amused by her “Table of Most Memorable TV Shows and Movies”. AKR was born shortly before me so a lot of her choices were happily familiar – The Carol Burnett Show, The Electric Company, The Love Boat and (not the re-booted) Fantasy Island. Thinking about them took me back to the living room(s) of my childhood – how differently we used to watch television.

First of all – the word television: does it even apply if you watch a show on your laptop or tablet or phone? Often you don’t even hear the phrase “I’m watching TV” anymore. Instead, we’re often watching Netflix or YouTube. I do still watch THE TV – the news, the shows we’ve PVR’d and of course, Netflix (and Disney and Prime) when we’re looking for commercial-free binge-ability.

What struck me this last week while my husband was away for a week-long convention and I wasn’t watching any of “our shows”, was how different the experience of watching TV was from when I was a kid. The physically obvious: there was no such thing as a remote control. If I wanted to change the channel, I would have to get up off the couch (or reach up from where I was laying on my stomach in front of the TV) and turn the channel dial. No buttons, no electronic lights. If my Dad or any of my older siblings wanted to change the channel, again, I would get up off the couch and turn the channel for them. (Little siblings everywhere were a prototype for the universal remote.)

And channels? The word barely registered as plural. We had three and sometimes one didn’t work. And that was only after my dad had a rotor installed so we could actually turn the giant antennae on our house to catch our choice of network: CBC (which was CKSA Lloydminster), CTV (CFRN in Edmonton) and if the airwaves aligned correctly, we might also get CITV from Edmonton, which was somehow kind of cooler because it was a new station in the ’70s. Our antenna wasn’t quite like a tuneable satellite dish – Rick’s grampa had one the size of a hot tub parked on his front lawn – but it did the trick.

Because that was all I knew. I memorized the TV schedules (didn’t we all?) – at different times during my growing up years Sundays was The Waltons, Fridays was Dallas (and Good Rockin’ Tonight after my parents went to bed), Thursdays was St. Elsewhere, Saturdays was The Bugs Bunny and Road Runner Show. And if you missed it, you missed it. If you weren’t home the day that Mary Ingalls became blind or Mary Richards finally moved out of her studio apartment and then you missed the re-run (and who knew when that would happen?), then you might have to wait until the nineties or the aughts to find the show on VHS or DVD.

As a teenager, I would often spend a week of my summer vacation staying with my older siblings once they moved to The City and graduated to the fascinating world of cable TV. Most of my “vacation” with them was spent with the television while they were off at work. For the first time, I watched The Price is Right, Eight is Enough, even Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood – all offerings that my local networks didn’t offer. While I was there, I also read all their magazines or listened to all their record albums, but I could also ask (nicely) to borrow them when I went home. Cable TV stayed where it was so that kind of made it special.

Isn’t it funny how we need the entertainment, the news, the sports? One of the first things my roommate Reva and I did when we moved into an apartment before we started university was to sign up for cable TV. Annnnnnd Superchannel which was (gasp!) Only Movies. If the U of A had offered a course on Terms of Endearment, I would have aced it. Because there still wasn’t that much choice when I turned on the television. If the choice was between Terms or studying for mid-terms, the TV probably won – at least until the panic set in 24 hours before said midterm.

And now, if I need to go to the bathroom or fix a snack in the middle of a show, I just hit pause and go. There was a moment last week when I did just that and it triggered the memory of how we used to only do that during commercials. As soon as the break happened, when watching TV in real time, you would run to the bathroom or the kitchen because otherwise you would miss the show. And I kinda missed that. For maybe a minute. Then I sat back down with my snack and resumed my show.

About February

Posted on February 3, 2022 by bonniedonily

Ok, so it’s February.

While January has all the momentum of a sled on an icy toboggan hill – What? January’s done? – February comes in and sits, immoveable, like a four-foot-high snowdrift in front of your garage door. It’s hard to get going anywhere and it really feels like a lot of work.

“Well,” I thought to myself this morning as I surveyed the -35 degrees Celcius landscape out my window, “at least it’s a short month.” Not that weather is any respecter of Gregorian calendar lines – I got married the day after a snowstorm in August in Alberta. Oh, Alberta.

But then I got to wondering: just why IS February only 28 days (usually)? I mean, there’s a whole seven other months that have an EXTRA day and here poor old February is missing two. Did February miss a couple turns when picking teams on the celestial playground? Oh, February.

And so, I went down a short World Wide Web Wormhole, quickly realizing that there really is no rational answer. February (along with January) wasn’t even a thing until a Roman guy named Numa first corrected the old lunar ten-month calendar. He tried (unsuccessfully) to avoid having any months with an “unlucky” even number. He had 355 days to work with, so one month had to have an even number of days. (Which lends credence to the myth of Why February Feels Unlucky.)

One would think that when Julius Caesar decided to “fix” things, adding in the lost 10 days (they USED to add a LEAP MONTH every four years to rectify things) that he would just shuffle the deck and a bunch of 30s and 31s would be dealt out. But no, he didn’t want to mess with the existing 31s. He did, however, give February 29. And he renamed one of the months in middle after himself. (As “luck” would have it, Julius Caesar was murdered shortly after in the month of March, which was shortly after the now “lucky” February.)

This changed as soon his adopted son Augustus was in charge. As emperors will do, he decided that HE needed a month named after him, too, so whatever August used to be called was renamed for him. But since he had to be even-stevens with his dad, he stole a day FROM FEBRUARY to give his month 31. Oh, Augustus.

This begs the question: are people who are born on February 29 lucky? (They age a lot slower.) Or unlucky? (They don’t get as many birthday cakes.)

I’ll just let you think about that.

Bonnie 2.067

the journey of a century

Category Archives: Random Thoughts

About Being Perfect

About Nothing

About the Lottery

About TV

About February