LaughAloud

Last Day in the UK

Today was the last full day of our UK vacation. We packed it full of more London exploring and a last bit of souvenir shopping. We fly home tomorrow afternoon, leaving at 3pm and arriving at 6pm, we'll be in the air for eleven hours with the sun chasing, but never catching us. We've had a great time on our trip & I plan to write more about our adventures and post more pictures after we get back home!

Picture below: me, at our last stop of the day.

It's Spelled H Y D E

When I check into a hotel, pick up a prescription, anything i have to give my name, I tell them my last name and then I spell it. Hyde. H Y D E. And a good portion of the time, they still hear H I D E. While I haven't met a ton of other Hyde's (outside my family) I have never met someone named Hide. Plus there's all those parks, the fellow Dr. Jekyll turns in to...

So today, when we checked into the Hyde Park Hilton in London, I started to spell my name, and then thought, hey, surely, this must be the one place I don't need to spell my name. So I didn't. And hen he asked how to spell my name. Just being careful I guess!

So for our first few days in the UK we'll be staying just across from Hyde Park on the north west side. In addition to the good location, the awesome name & the free nights I earned from all those conferences, the bar downstairs is called the library lounge. It's walls are lined with old books, a beautiful stain glass ceiling floats above and the menu boasts a great scotch whisky list. Tonight I topped the evening off with a 16 year old Islay that was quite a bit cheaper than you'd ever pay to drink out in the US. looking forward to more evening whiskies after walks in Hyde Park.

New Scars

If you're squeamish, now is the time to turn away. I'm about to show off my new scars.

I love scars. Like bruises, they make things more interesting, but permanently. In the last month & a half I've gotten 3 (yes 3!) new scars. Two from my ankle surgery (little one on the inside, big one on the outside) and I had a benign cyst removed from my shoulder, that produced a little caterpillar of a scar. 

The smallest - on the inside of my ankle & likely to be almost completely faded in a year.

The medium - caterpillar scar on my shoulder

The big one - where they removed the big bone chip. It's about 2.5 in.

I just hope this one doesn't disappear...its already starting to look faint. If you want to see pictures from before it healed so much see here and here.

Self Portrait

Facade

"She was, obviously, one of those women whose polished words may reflect a book club or bridge club, or any other deadly conventionality, but never her soul..."

                                                    -- Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita

Our Nature

"If we justify war, it is because all peoples always justify the traits of which they find themselves possessed, not because war will bear an objective examination of its merits."

                                    -- Ruth Benedict, Patterns of Culture

Our Past Selves

"Even the emblems of our own embarrassment
become acceptable to us, after a while,

evidence of someone we'd once have wished to erase:
a pottery heart,
an unrecaptured thing that might represent

the chancy exhilaration of a day..."

          -- Mark Doty, My Alexandria, "Days of 1981"

Your Self

"This was her only object, and in its pursuit she discovered that she knew only a small portion of the vast landscape that was her soul.  It was as if what she had considered to be her self all these years was only a magnified detail of an enormous painting whose entire composition and narrative she had never before known existed, let alone seen.  And in this way she began to view the universe differently."

                -- Jane Mendelsohn, I Was Amelia Earhart

His Mother's Influence

I was talking to a friend on the phone this evening about another friend and in the midst of  our conversation he blurted out:

"You love her more than me, don't you!?"

Then immediately he said:

"I'm sorry, I don't know where that came from.  I think I've been talking to my Mother too much lately."   

A More Perfect Self

                "Like everyone else, I fail my best self."

                --Richard Lourie, The Autobiography of Joseph Stalin

The other day I was walking to the train after work, trying to decide what to do about something, and I found myself in the perplexing situation of thinking, well, what would I do?  As if "I" were some third party unrelated to the me making the decision.  I realized there are times, when I stop and wonder what others would expect me to do.  Not like what is "proper" for me to do, but what would people expect ME to do? Like others see me as somehow more noble than I am, and sometimes, faced with a difficult decision, I try to be that person.   It is  nice to have a more perfect version of yourself to live up to.

You may still fail that best self, but you will have risen higher in the attempt.

Mirror, Mirror

Have you ever had the experience of looking in the mirror, and seeing someone totally different than you expected?  Like you had changed into a different person without realizing it? Like you had this image of yourself that seemed suddenly wrong, like you had been changing and only just now noticed you looked totally different?  I had a moment like that the other day in the bathroom of some fast food place we stopped in on the way down to St. Louis.  It was the weirdest feeling to not recognize the person in the mirror, but it only lasted for a moment, and it was gone before I could really get a good look.  I realized afterwards, it wasn't that I had changed without noticing, but for the briefest of moments, I saw myself as a stranger would.  A view of myself uncolored by who I am, what I think and what I feel.  It's  nice to see yourself that way every now and then.  I don't quite know why, but it is.