Fears and Dreams Time Capsule

(Funny what turns up on Fotosearch when you enter “time capsule” – this image is called "Pills and Time")

Just because I'm blogging on Valentine’s Day doesn’t mean I have a Valentine’s Theme – in fact, I’ll state starting out that I may not even mention Craig much in this post. Considering how important he is in my life, it’s interesting what a relatively small presence he has in my night dreams, my writing and even my psychotherapy. I think this is because he has always been one of the least complicated parts of my life – there is less to work through, resolve, hand-wring about. It’s not perfect but it’s been consistently good. (This statement from a glass-half-empty person means a lot.) Well (here comes the Sarah disclaimer), not every day is great but overall it is…good. OK – this is sort of a Valentine’s post, LOL.

The other day I was thinking about life milestones, ways to find perspective… A silly memory that always pops up is my friend Joe saying when he got fuzzy on the timeline of his life, he wrote down all the cars he had and the years he had them. What’s funny about that to me is that I have so little interest in cars, in driving…at first thought it's a ridiculous memory tool but actually I have had few cars and the acquisition and divestiture of each was so painful (I hate car dealerships!) that I actually could track a good bit of life and memories that way. Except that would force me to think about bad car experiences - uh no, I'll try a different approach.

I have already done some timelining on the Formative Experiences list on the lower-right of my blog, but this exercise is different. I am going to force myself to go with the first memory, initial impression, my gut-generated words. No belaboring, no wordsmithing – cough it out!

Okay, counting from 1961 in 5-year intervals, which seems reasonable…(at least in car purchase terms, LOL).

(Fotosearch titled this image "A woman sitting in front of a calendar, clock and pills.")


1966: FEAR: I must not be smart because some kids know how to read before they start school, and I don’t. DREAM: Someday I will be a real princess, not just a play one - I already have a white bed headboard with a crest on it (yes, the paint is flaking off a bit – in the 1930s it was my grandparents’ jade green bed, as I learned later).

1971: FEAR: I am stupid because I am not a good knitter, the scarf I’m making has constantly widening edges (my 3rd grade homeroom teacher taught us all to knit, for some reason). DREAM: Someday I might be a teacher, I like it when my teacher has me help other kids with reading.

1976: FEAR: Nobody who is not my teacher will ever talk to me in high school. DREAM: Maybe I will mature into somebody who has an easier life than mine.

1981: FEAR: I will never get promoted out of this file clerk job because one of the senior people noticed I have jagged nails. (He thought I bit them – not true!, I only eat food, I ripped nail-to-nail, that was my tic.) DREAM: Maybe I will be a secretary someday.

1986: DREAM: Maybe my boss means it when he says he might move back to California and take me as his secretary. FEAR: I will not have the courage to move…I will not have the patience to put up with this boring job.

1991: FEAR: I will lose the patience to put up with this incredibly demanding job. DREAM: I will win the lottery and tell my boss to Shove It.

1996: DREAM: Craig and I will live in a bigger, nicer house and have more money than we do now. FEAR: If he proposes (his proposal being a combination dream/fear), he will soon get tired of my weirdnesses and break up with me OR he will insist on having a bunch of kids immediately OR he will insist on moving to Seattle right away.

2001: DREAM: Now that I have volunteered to be downsized with a severance package based on 14 years with the company, I will write the great American novel. FEAR: I have no talent OR I have no discipline AND I will have to go back to the office one day (and I don’t miss the office and I love being out of the office).

2006: DREAM: When I graduate this November I will tell my boss to shove it, and move on to a job better than anything I have had before. FEAR: I will hate whatever job I get, I don’t know what I really want to do and I am still not qualified for an alternate career.

2011: FEAR: I am heading toward unemployment, bankruptcy and divorce, along with the rest of this declining country. DREAM: I will finish the Great American Novel, make money from it and be able to keep buying art, and if I have enough money Craig will stop grumping about the art.

And to end this post, on Valentine’s Day 2011, here is a final image from Fotosearch: "What looks like an old space capsule has crash landed in the desert."

Yep - that sums me up! LOL