Decorative Flower
Her Realm, Personal website and blog of Cole
Dec 20

Thoughts from My Walk This Morning

  • Things that startled me: four bunnies, a stationary manger display, a (regular) bush, the big borker down the street not barking at me.
  • But I startled the same rabbit two nights in a row.
  • It’s so nice out this morning.* I don’t even need to wear a jacket.
  • My calves have been so sore lately.
  • I wonder where that ambulance is going. I hope my apartment isn’t burning when I get home.
  • That cashier is nice.
  • Where are all the Pokemon I want to catch? And why are walking events when the weather is terrible?

None of these are terribly interesting thoughts, I’m afraid.. unless you’re entertained by the bunnies who scare me.

*Relatively speaking. It’s 40 degrees and rather humid.


Nov 02

Getting on Board

If I were to categorize my 2018 in any way, I’d say it was the year of board games. Now, I have always been a fan of games. This is nothing new. But 2018 marked more structured playing time and more effort.

In the beginning of the year, I got to know a few vintage board games through a monthly event hosted by the historical society. Truthfully, those events haven’t always been successful and time spent playing games hasn’t always been worthwhile. But it has presented me with the opportunity to try new (old) games, and I even bought one after playing it there.

I was later introduced to Board Game Arena, a site where you can play a few games online, by a fellow Redditor. We no longer speaker, but I occasionally log on to play games.

During the summer, I attended a small board game con with my sister. The library was huge, which gave me a chance to try out games I’d heard of only. Unfortunately, I was incredibly tired, but I enjoyed the chance to play new games. It incited me to do it even more.

Fortunately, I was given that chance when someone local contacted me to let me know about a weekly event at our local game shop. To be honest, it’s a place I had spent very little time. I always felt a bit intimidated by it, I suppose. Partially because I am a woman and partially because I am so casual about so many geeky things. I like a lot of casual games (video and board) and sometimes read comics, but just have never really delved into them. People who are intent on geek gatekeeping would not likely approve of my level of participation, enjoyment, or knowledge of those things. I suppose I worried that people within the game shop would be that way.

However, the timing worked out well with family things being so tumultuous and knowing that my sister wanted to play more games, too. Plus, I was sick of vintage titles. We’ve only been able to attend a handful of times, but I’ve been able to try some games I’ve long heard of (Splendor, Dixit, Betrayal at House on the Hill, and 7 Wonders among them) and a few new ones (Everdell) as well as enjoy a few rounds of Fluxx or Munchkin, which are always popular.

Aside from playing more games, this has really given me the opportunity to get to know a space that’s actually quite welcoming and to meet some new people. It’s all illustrated how I feel about playing games — at least, at this point in my life. It also explains why some game nights have failed to impress upon me.

Basically, it comes down to this: I’m there to play games for the sake of playing games and any socializing is incidental. I have been leaning in this direction for a while, so this isn’t a surprise. However, five years ago, I was all about socializing. The tables were turned.

Many of my friends are still like that, which is fine… except when I want to focus on an activity or play something with more depth than a party game. Sadly, the people who are there to socialize seem to be those who struggle to pay attention to the game. They also seem to be the type of people who wouldn’t notice that some people are there specifically for the game.

I don’t think this is different from any hobby. There are always those more serious about the activity than the people. I’m not positive that it’s always the case, but it does seem like people who want to socialize struggle to recognize that there are people who whom that isn’t the point. Ironically, everyone who seems more intent on gaming (like those from Board Game Revolution) seems to understand that there are two camps of people (and look disdainfully down on the other camp lol).

It’s interesting to me something as innocuous as playing board games can shine a light on an issue that I am dealing with in life in general: people who are unwilling or unable to think about others’ motivations and take them into consideration. But it’s frustrating no matter the venue, I suppose.


Jul 27

Discontinuity

I consistently find myself wrestling with the concept of time, how something that is an arbitrary human invention and so dependent on the motion of the universe can be so inconsistent. It’s near impossible to reconcile the erratic movement of time, and sometimes that fact takes my breath away.

Time moves so quickly when I am awake through midnight and my days span two days when I am awake for 20 hours and sleep another 12. I hardly have time to breathe when my schedule is full and my life is a whirlwind of road trips, shopping, dinners out, and games played. Yet, I look back and wonder where I spent all my time. Where is my receipt?

Yet, when I it is 10 in the morning and I am wide awake and ready to do something right now with the knowledge that no one will be available for another seven hours, by which time I will be tired, time passes as slowly as it ever has. When I wait for someone to know at my door or for an ordered package to arrive, I check messages constantly, hoping that somehow these people or items will be able to travel through time and into my home.

I wonder how time can pass so slowly at those times when I am running errands and trying to add just-one-more-thing to my list while I know someone is waiting for me (spoiler alert: I will not make it on time). It perplexes me that I can be the person who is waiting, both anxious and bored and wondering just what-the-hell is taking so long.

I understand that time is about perception, and that our brains perceive time differently when we are in a rush or, even better, in the zone. I get the concept of flow. But I am still mystified by the passing of time, how sometimes it rushes and sometimes it trickles. I feel frustrated at my inability to control it, to keep up or to maintain my composure when it’s molasses-slow.

That I am in the middle of a hellish week, anxiety-filled and reducing the time I have to try to cope to a seemingly-few seconds, while mourning the death of one of my closest friends just over a year ago and recognizing that I was married more than thirteen years ago, is a strange convergence. It’s a place where I can recognize both the expeditiousness and the lethargy of time. I am confronted by the mystery of time from every angle.

Eventually, the moment of confusion will pass until it resurfaces in the future. At another time.


May 18

From Whence We Came

We all have to survive our parents, and I don’t mean outlive them. I’m talking about surviving our upbringing and the legacy that our parents leave us with. All too often we must figure out how to survive and thrive in spite of our parents rather than with the help of the skills and the love they provided us. We must learn to shake off the lessons we’ve learned about being reactive, irrational, short-sighted, selfish, and a poor communicator as if they were shackles, bonds that hold us tightly.

At some point, we all must experience a realization about our parents. We must come face-to-face with the fact that our parents are imperfect people and have done us damage despite their best intentions. We must reconcile our adoration and respect for the people who have sacrificed for so much of us with our anger, sadness, hurt, and sometimes resentment at the positions that they’ve put us in.

For some people, this realization comes easily and it’s merely a speed bump in the road of life, a soon-forgotten blip on the radar, a single sentence in one of many chapters in the story of their lives. It may be that their parents were simply better, that the hurts were smaller, or that those people are somehow more resilient than others, but this particular struggle is brief and leaves them relatively unscathed.

For others, this lesson doesn’t come easily, but it is timely enough that the damage has not yet had time to become irreparable, to sink its claws and teeth into our flesh and our hearts and to irrevocably alter our lives and permanently cement us in our misery, our childish responses, and our never-ending cycles of self-sabotage. We sigh a breath of relief because we’re finally able to shrug off a mantle heavy with resentment, confusion, and parental missteps. They have the rest of their lives to look forward to now that their eyes have been opened.

There is yet another group of people, those who are unable to escape that tangled web, either easily or easily. Some of them live nearly their entire lives, if not the entirety of their existence,  without coming to the realization that there are lessons taught and beliefs shared and handicaps created under the tutelage of their parents that are holding them back. They may maintain unhealthy albeit close relationships with those parents, never having acquired the perspective necessary to view life about this bubble, perspective that often requires time and distance to glean.

This group, then, is one that often perpetuates the same mistakes with their own children. Sometimes foibles made as parents become exponentially more damaging, a cycle so pervasive that it can only be considered a family’s legacy. It takes a certain awareness and willpower to grow beyond the garden that sprouted us.

It should come as no surprise that I am one of the second group. My battle to become more aware,  both with myself and if the environment in which I was raised, is one that I consider hard won. My ability to be a rational human being, a good communicator, view the bigger picture, and to put myself in others’ shoes are all direct results of the adversity that I faced and because of where I came from. I could not overstate how much I value these lessons nor would I want to seem ungrateful. But pain, even pain that ushers in progress, is still a hardship. Nevertheless, those growing pains will fade as I age and continue to grow because I was fortunate enough to experience them early on.

On the other hand, my mother appears to be a member of that third group. In some ways, she seems stilted, not entirely a grown and respectable adult who can operate within the confines of a civilized society. I am sometimes amazed that I am her daughter, that she could be my mother. I find myself overcome with bewilderment when I try to isolate the factors that allowed me to overcome those hurdles, to solve the equation that is my success. As confused as I may be, I am equally as proud of my ability to flourish having lived a life that might have just as easily snuffed out my light, no thanks to parenting that I received.

I just hope my sister can survive her parents, too.


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