A Cold January

It has been quite cold in recent memory here in Dallas. I'm not used to it. I'm already prone to getting sucked into a comfortable seat/couch/bed and this cold weather makes it near impossible to get up and do menial annoyances like, say, going to the bathroom, and eating. It better get warm before classes start. The news said something about how it would be in the Teens*F, or below. I heard them say the world would be temporarily out of order and no matter how many quarters I put in the heater it would sit there and mock me and I should probably stay inside.

I think I'm going to get a haircut today. It scares me. Is that weird? Probably. I also have a dentist appointment. The haircut scares me much worse. Always has.

I don't think any of us have it figured out, when it comes to what we want to do with our lives (in the sense of dreams/aspirations/secret identities we'll someday use for defending truth and justice), or relationships and what love between people means. It seems normal to me to be thinking about this, a year out from graduating, but I don't think it stops, even once I get out of this safe little university-walled pinball machine. Maybe it'll always be a search, an in-motion journey. I just want to find something that excites me to wake up and do each morning.

If life is about extremes I feel like I've been bouncing from distant point to distant point. The extremes are obviously not two dimensional; this is polygonal and it's a seriously weird 3-D polygon. What are those called? I don't know. Anyway, the 3-D polygon isn't an easy one like a cube or a pyramid or one that's simple for thinking about or explaining. It's a shape that resembles an amazing fruit I found about two weeks ago. The picture is below. I'll leave a pause for a moment of complete befuddlement.

Yes! That is a fruit! How crazy is this? Just when you think you have life and all the deep questions figured out, you run across something like this! A Buddha Hand! It does resemble Buddha's Hand, or a citrus-y octopus, or the tentacle faced Davey Jones from Pirates of the Caribbean, as shown by this pic I found:

So, as I'm sure you have realized, with a satisfied, determined, and thoughtful nod to yourself, the Buddha Hand represents life. Sometimes we get lost in those twisted arms and get that citrus juice in our eyes and it stings. Sometimes the arm is like an old dry orange and tastes like dirt. But sometimes, we get a bite when it's just right, and the whole world is good.

I hope, in this season of re-evaluating our lives, that as we make resolutions about what we'd like to see change, and look forward as this brave new year begins, we can see this revelation and realize that sometimes, life is a strange, exotic, gross, tentacled, foreign, unsearchable, confusing, all-grays-and-"I don't know" 's-and-maybes, yellow fruit-beast. Under that gnarled but soft and smooth skin, however, maybe we'll find the simple sweet fulfillment, the Love for which we all search.

(Note: the Buddha's Hand is obviously not a good example for life comparisons, and is somewhat limited in its extend-ability to life and love and all those meaningful things. Mostly it is just a really cool fruit that needed to be shared. Thank you.)