Weekend Assignment #334: Around With Awareness

Weekend Assignment #334: What Are You Looking Forward To?

We are about to begin the last quarter of 2010, tell me what you are looking forward to. Will it be the coming holiday season? The cooler days of autumn? The kids going back to school? Family gatherings. Tell us all about it!

Extra Credit: Tell us what you are least looking forward to in the upcoming months.

What am I looking forward to? Umm, nothing, really, at least nothing definite. What was that quote?

Every time is a time for comedy in a world of tension that would languish without it. But I cannot confine myself to lightness in a period of human life that demands light ... We all know that, as the old adage has it, "It is later than you think." ..., but I also say occasionally: "It is lighter than you think." In this light let's not look back in anger, or forward in fear, but around in awareness.

 - "Foreword", Lanterns and Lances (1961), by James Thurber

I'm just trying to get by where I am now, and be prepared for whatever comes next.

I'm looking forward to cooler weather, but that's at least a month off, and at least we're finally getting a little rain here and there to go with the humidity that makes it hard to breathe. I wanted a monsoon and I got it, but it's not the most productive one ever in terms of rain, and sometimes it's distinctly uncomfortable.

I'd like to look forward to the day when the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee stops waking me up every two to four weeks asking for yet another $25 donation, but I doubt that even the midterm election, for good or ill, will stop those calls.

I've got a job interview next Monday, the first of three rounds for less money than I was making in 2004. Should I be looking forward to that?

Last night I spent the evening pasting together every chapter of my unsold first novel, Heirs of Mâvarin, into one large document for the first time ever, reformatted it all in Courier New and started breaking my chapters into smaller size. This is all in preparation for one more revision and sending it out again, this time to a publisher that Sara G. told me about. I hate to look forward to that; I've been disappointed too many times to want to get my hopes up now.

So what am I looking forward to most? Anything that pans out well, whether it's the midterm elections not going to the Republicans after all, the sale of my novel in the indefinite future, or eventual full-time employment at my former wage level. Aside from the first of these, none are likely to happen quickly. What am I looking forward to least? Continued negative outcomes on all of the above.

Still, I live in hope. Sort of. But here's the point of all this, which I had to finish and post this entry to find. I don't know what's coming along in the future, good or bad. Most likely, as usual, it will be some of each, along with a large helping of miscellaneous stuff, whose "goodness" depends on what I do with it and what my attitude is. But right now, I'm more interesting in the right now. Right now is not so bad. Right now I'm only working part time, but at two jobs I love and for a semi-decent wage. Right now I'm excited to be drawn back into my first novel for almost the first time since it was rejected and I learned of Tuffy's cancer on the same day three years ago. Right now I'm enjoying an all-time Doctor Who marathon, which is currently up to 1967's Tomb of the Cybermen.  Right now I need to start dieting, again. Right now I need to leave for work, so I'd better stop here. But you get the idea. Why obsess about the future, when right now is pretty good, and the only part of my life I can affect directly?

Karen