My Top 10 Favorite Things This Holiday Season
Guess which paw?
It’s customary during the holidays to write something sentimental, so here’s my current list of favorite things. The rest of my disposable introduction is at the end because everyone skips to the numbered paragraphs:
Teaching my dog tricks;
Riding bikes in the hills with French people who ignore me because talking to an American is too much work but it’s okay because look at that ramshackle farmhouse;
Playing guitar with the band at the Saturday market and not caring if we’re out of tune;
Teaching myself flat picking — with repetition and caffeine I get into the zone;
Shopping for electronics — gizmos are fun and if they get boring I just buy something new;
Seeing the results of renovation work on our house, or at least the parts they got right;
Sitting in a cafe doing Jacques squat. Not to rub it in but I’m doing it in France! Drinking out of real porcelain demi-tasses!! My dog can even come in with me!!!
French lessons. It’s therapeutic talking with Marina about whatever for an hour once a week, and she’s super nice (I learn a lot of French too);
Chatting with family and friends back in the U.S. I miss you and look forward to your visits;
Coming soon: cooking lessons that I got for Christmas;
Oops somehow my top 10 turned into 16
Seeing photos of Mike and Lu with Sky and baby Lucy and Drew with his family because it’s amazing to think of us as teenagers getting shitfaced and dancing up a storm;
Reading a book I like — I’m still hoping to find one and just know it’s out there somewhere;
Watching Star Trek Voyager where potentially terrible things happen on cosmic scales but it’s completely unreal and everyone somehow survives and there’s a moral and good leadership and higher values prevail unlike pretty much everything else available for streaming, though sometimes that stuff is fun too;
See number 9;
Seeing the results of some house/garden project I’ve been working on;
Doing nice things for other people that they didn’t expect leaving them traumatized.
Introductory text:
Retirement has been hard. Back in college I got caught up in the “success” illusion and learned to subvert my well-being by becoming a work-a-worry-aholic. Then 40 years later I retired and without an all-encompassing job nothing I did seemed to “matter” anymore.
THEN I realized that what I was doing in my career didn’t amount to much anyway because politics and climate change and wars and dictatorships and AI were bound to mess everything up.
BUT it paid for food and electronic gizmos and we got to live in wild places and today I have a pension and don’t have to tread water in a sea of emails.
So instead of thinking “retirement sucks,” I go, “how liberating!” Today I won’t be a senior sourpuss and instead be grateful for the life I have and drive everyone nuts with holiday spirit.
Happy New Year!
