I have no deep ponderings at the moment. Life is doing its usual thing.

Except that Joanne is here this weekend. She's visiting from Australia. It's so nice to have her around. It has been a weird-ish semester without her. You know, her and I would always have these chance meetings outside my school in the afternoons. Usually, I would have just come back from a run and be panting and red faced. She would be finished with work for the evening or for the moment and be heading home.

Have you ever seen or heard of the play "Our Town?" I had to study it in high school and it was one of the strangest and most unsettling plays I have been exposed to. I did not like it at all, but I have never forgotten it. Does that make it a "good" play? Perhaps it accomplished what it set out to do in me but I wasn't very happy the effect. The play, first of all, is performed with absolutely no props. Everything is imagined and then enhanced with elaborate sound effects. I clearly remember a scene where after a woman dies she asks to see her twelfth birthday. She is discouraged from choosing a day as important as a birthday but she insists. As she watches herself throughout that one day she isn't moved by her birthday celebration as much as simply watching herself eat, feel and be. She would never again taste food or feel the warmth of the sun on her face. My fading impression of the play left me with one thought; it is the little, seemingly trite daily things that make life so cumulatively rich.

That is what I miss about not having Joanne around Handong this semester. There are so many chance happening that she has not been here to fill. I finish a jog and walk to my school thinking of so many other things never realizing that in moment of the past I would have run into Joanne. A semester full of these sorts of unfulfilled moments has left me feeling like something is askew with my world. My sci-fi brain feels my life has turned down the path of an alternate reality, one that a different me should be living, while my true reality has been long left unattended and floundering somewhere in the past.