I think I may have unwittingly succeeded in departing the loop entirely.
It’s been a week since I last wrote.
I fell off the running wagon this week - only managing one run after a succession of long days and late nights. At least twice I thought “I’ll run at lunchtime” - only for lunchtime to not happen. The late nights are entirely my own fault - the result of lifting an entire pretend universe in the air.
I have too many fingers in too many pies. I need to step back, and slow down. I know that’s not going to happen any time soon though - there’s always going to be something or other that needs doing, buying, replacing, fixing, or whatever it is that only I can do for some reason.
This is coming across really negatively, but I don’t mean it to. I’ve achieved a lot over the last few weeks - both at work and at home. I’m not good at giving myself credit. I’ve had a few emails recently from people in the flight simulation community - both on the industry, and the audience side - thanking me for what I do. They were entirely unexpected, and kind of wonderful really.
Thinking about “kind of wonderful”, we had an entertaining discussion around the dinner table last night - about the “Brat Pack” movies of the 1980s. I told our eldest the story about the making of “Pretty in Pink”, and how it didn’t land how John Huston had originally intended - which gave rise to “Some Kind of Wonderful”, where the genders were reversed, and the story suddenly worked. The kicker? “Pretty in Pink” is the movie everybody remembers.
I saw recently that Andrew McCarthy has a book out. I’m tempted to pick it up, but also know I have a huge pile of books I’ve not read yet. I picked up Matt Haig’s “The Life Impossible” the other week - along with a quite wonderful little book about a cat by Hiro Arikawa.
While recounting the trope about the protagonist pining for the object of their affections throughout a story, blind to the wonderful person right in front of them, my other half chipped in that Jane Austen wrote the story long before the Brat Pack movies.
It’s the whole “sliding doors” thing again, isn’t it. While I can relate to being blind to those around me that perhaps I care about more than I let on, there’s also the realisation that if everybody chased their dreams and never gave a damn about anybody else, the world would be a pretty terrible place. I guess that’s the difficult bit, isn’t it - figuring out what to chase - and what to daydream about.
What did Dumbledore say? “It doesn’t do to dream, and forget to live”.