Our sprawling Christmas Cactus is resplendent with large red flowers on its window perch. Wind dances with trees outside the glass. Grass and bushes shiver under the wind’s tickle. 36 degrees F outside, sunshine washes over valley as the clouds have surrendered the sky to blue. It’s Friday, December 16, 2022, just five sleeps from winter solstice and two weeks and a day to 2022’s end.
Our weather has been pingponging between rain, high winds, and then days of freezing fog and stagnant air. Hope this day brings on a change. I don’t think I’m really a winter person. Today’s high will be 46 but the wind’s northern mountain ice edge will make you think it’s less. The clock saw 7:33 AM when the valley was gifted the sunlight’s first direct light. Daylight will go until 4:40 this afternoon.
I was given an earworm yesterday. Running errands, music playing, The Neurons heard a song which made me laugh. Then they kept playing it, and here it is, sixteen hours later, hogging the morning mental music stream. I’d never heard “Victoria’s Secret (2022) by Jax before yesterday, but after arriving home and settling in, I looked up the lyrics to confirm what I heard. This is a song pushing back against body types and body shaming, focusing on the stereotypical Victora’s Secret model, all boob on a skinny body. I applaud the song. Fake bodies aren’t needed. Nor is starving yourself or “going without carbs” as the song mentions. Our adherence to fake images and the efforts to achieve those is a sickness that undermines our national mental health, as is the whole heavy slant toward the need to be young and pretty, as portrayed too many times in movies, television shows, and advertisements. Hope you’ll give the song a listen. Hope you don’t get stuck on the same line that hooked The Neurons, “Victoria is made up by a dude (dude)!”
Other than weather, writing, exercising, and socializing with people and cats, life is moving at a slower pace. I need to carve out more reading time. That’s my significant complaint, other than the nastiness of life for so many and the general mess called politics. Stay positive, test negative, and so on. Time for my morning coffee rations. Have a super one. Here’s Jax. Cheers
Michael Seidel, writer 
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