Don't Fear the Reaper

I have a birthday ritual. Every year on my birthday, I go to the gym. I perform the same exercises each year, recording the results and creating a year-to-year record of my inevitable decline. Some might say it shows of my fear of aging rather better than my physical abilities, and there might be some truth to what some might say. And however self-flagellating, it does have the salutary effect of pushing me to the gym in the weeks leading up the Big Test.

This year, circumstances are forcing me to modify the ritual. This year, the game isn't "can I still do this or that," it's "can I remember where I put my exercise record." And the answer is, "no." Which just goes to show that no matter how much you prepare yourself, you won't be ready when the time comes. Or at least, I won't. When the Reaper appears, I am likely to be doing the same thing I am doing when my friends arrive to pick me up to go out: looking for my keys and wallet, and wondering when I am going to create a system so that I can find them without turning the apartment inside out.

Life is Sweet (even if the ants don't know it)

I have ants in my bathroom. Not just a few scout ants, intrepidly braving the space between the floss and the facial moisturizer to determine if there is anything of value on the counter. No, there are ants, plural and many. It’s the kind of thing where I wake up, look in the sink, and cannot count the ants because, well, because there are too many ants to count. I clean relentlessly, at least relative to the pre-ant schedule. When I have a tissue at hand, I squash individuals. I have used ant traps, to no avail; the ants sashay in and out of the traps, but there are always more ants the next day.

I have a tiny apartment; the kitchen is maybe three (human) steps from the bathroom. I have ants in the bathroom but not the kitchen, a situation beyond my comprehension, and apparently beyond the comprehension of the ants as well. Surely, the kitchen is the greener pasture. I have alerted the ants to their folly, but they do not budge.

I mock the ants relentlessly for choosing the bathroom: “I guess the toothpaste tastes a lot better than the ice cream in the kitchen -- which is ten feet away.” Or: “How about I buy you all ‘World’s Stupidest Ant’ t-shirts to commemorate your failure to infest a room with actual food?”

Nothing changes: they stay around the bathroom sink, and won’t leave on account of poison ¬– literal, or the aural venom my wicked words deliver.

So, I have ants in my bathroom. And ants, by my experience, are poor house guests and worse pets. Despite their collective intelligence, as individuals they can’t seem to learn simple tricks like fetching a ball or rolling over.

Failing to eject the trespassers, I try to look on the bright side. Lemonade from lemons and all that. If the ants won’t do anything for me, perhaps I can learn from the ants?

With this shift in perspectives, the ants are not a problem, but an allegory: Aren’t we all a little like ants? At times, don’t we all partake in the ant’s folly? We infest our figurative bathrooms, having less pleasure and more difficulty than if we moved to the kitchen a short distance away?

Distance, the ants might say, is not a fixed thing; our preconceptions trap us. Another person, looking at us, might think it’s the easiest thing in the world to change; but as finite beings, caught in our daily life, we lack the perspective to make a change that would quite simple –if only we saw the alternative.

Original Sin

This will be a blog. Not a blog like no other, but a blog like many others. I hope, nonetheless, that it will amuse.