Unexpected vacation day.

So I just got back from taking Betty the beagle to the vet for a visit that extended far beyond what I expected so I, due to the gracious nature of my boss, decided to take a last-minute vacation day. Now, however, I have no idea what to do with myself for the remainder of the day!

Let’s see, I have a good friend from out of town coming in today and my brother is coming in to hang out with me tonight AND Mark is playing his last show with Light FM AND my friend Julia is having a holiday party so I have the evening pretty well covered. It’s just the hours in-between then and now that I’m not sure how to fill.

I was listening to Bill Moyer on Fresh Air in the car on the way here and they were talking about his imminent retirement from television tonight but they also mentioned that, at seventy years old, he’s celebrating his fiftieth wedding anniversary with his wife this week.

Fifty years. Wow.

Sometimes I wonder if Photogal and I will ever hit the fifty-year mark. Sometimes it seems certain that we will and at other times it seem equally certain that we will be lucky to hit the next-five-minutes mark. I think that’s not unusual though. I mean, sometimes I’m certainly less than perfect and, while I would never say the same about her myself, I’m sure Photogal feels she would fall in the same category. That’s fair, right?

Anyway, I was listening to Bill Moyer and I thought back to high school when I first encountered his interviews with Joseph Campbell that led to my own reading of The Power Of Myth, and I realized that Moyers had had quite an effect on me through his introduction of Campbell into my life. Before then I had been a pretty basic Catholic boy filled with the usual self-doubt and self-polluting tendencies, but with the introduction of the themes that coursed through The Power Of Myth I realized that my idea of spirituality needn’t be constrained to one narrow religious view since the precepts that formed the basis of that religion seemed to form the basis of pretty much every other religion that was out there. This immediately expanded my world-view and helped me understand the concept of “different yet the same” that has, I just discovered, informed my own personal philosophy.

Neat, eh?

Then I started thinking about all the teachers I've had that have made a difference in my life and how I should list them and write about them and pay them tribute in an effort to continue building the basis of the mythology that has formed and informed my own life and, while I believe I should do that in the near future, I realized that would probably bore the hell out of anyone other than myself right now.

See, this is the kind of stuff I come up with when I have too much free time so I think it’s time I put my day off to good use and play with my dogs right now.