Ice Follies No. 42

Saturday round-up

1. Early morning coffee with Chomm, an old friend from church days. We talked about the new year...

"2026 is probably going to be hard, but if you only have hope when things are easy and going well, that's not hope."

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2. Work was good.  I set up new end-cap displays, replacing Christmas stuff--glad to see it gone, after two full months.

I like being out on the floor (instead of in the back, sorting and pricing, about 75% of my time). The shelves always need organizing and  sprucing up, and most volunteers are, surprisingly to me, not very good at it. There's always a lot to do--and I do enjoy the design work.

BELOW: These 'magic' books sold right away, $3.99 each.

BELOW: 
Pottery mugs from the Renaissance Festival
A collection of beautiful wood walking sticks
Bouquet of 1970s rubber-plastic mushrooms, grapes, & peanuts (!)

But more than I enjoy futzing with displays I like talking with customers. When I first walked in, I knew half the customers by name. Before I even went to the back and punched in, I talked to people on the floor for ten minutes.
One of them reached in her pocket and gave me one of those beaded clips for dangling on backpacks. She makes them herself. 
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3. Mismatched Mushroom

So, mostly the mood was pleasant today.
Jester had an unsettling encounter though. 
The cashier had called him to the front: a guy who'd been in a fight had come in and needed a clean set of clothes, for free. 
(Management is supposed to okay giving anything away for free. Some cashiers (like Em) handle it themselves--unofficially.)

Jester approached the guy. The guy recoiled in fear––then said, 
"Oh, do you work here?"

Jester said he did.

The guy said, "I thought you were ICE."

(The store's neighborhood is under siege.)

"That was not a good feeling," Jester said. 
He is a big, white guy, a Grateful Dead fan, apolitical (foolishly so, in my eyes), who has a beard and wears suspenders--and that can look like a Good Old Boy... or ICE.

He wants to comes across like this psychedelic peace-n-love quilt, below, but in the setting of our workplace, he doesn't––unless you know him personally. 
I see him as Mr Mushroom, but yeah, I can see him reading as MAGA.

Isn't it funny how our incarnations shape our reality?
Our outer selves might not match our inner selves very much--or at all, and we have to deal with that, however we do that (or try not to).

After work, I really wanted to go out for a beer, but I'm practicing not drinking alcohol. When I stopped eating added sugar, beer became a somtimes-replacement treat.
And this holiday, sometimes too often.
So, (same as when I stopped eating added sugar), I told myself I could have anything else instead.

I went to the laundromat burger joint and got fries. (Salty-fat treats are weirdly not a big problem for me--I didn't even finish them all.)

Do you see what I saw?

           42!  My ticket number, and the answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything. (Hitchhiker's Guide, ya know.)  My fries came with a MESSAGE FROM THE UNIVERSE!
The absurdity made me laugh, and that set me to rights––even more than the fries did. 

4. Thought Experiment: 
Why Would You Have Chosen This Life? 

You know the spiritual idea (a mashup of teachings) that we choose to incarnate in this time and place.
That's in line with Forty-Two as an answer!

But I like the idea as providing another kind of bubble-wrap, a little wriggle-room in what can get to be a Very Tight Place: this life.

Instead of feeling unlucky to be living in a city that keeps getting hit, I can do this thought experiment:
WHY on Earth would I ever choose this?

Not that my life is bad! My life is cushy in many respects: 
At the most basic level, I am never hungry or cold for long.
I am well aware that I am not currently the direct target of people of ill will (though I might be in the line of fire) or of animals of prey.

But still, while politics holds only a small fraction of my interests here, it's really vivid right now, and like many of us, I look with disbelief at how my country is marching with flags waving right into FOLLY.

Folly: choosing (and continuing to choose) to pursue policies that are against one's own self-interest, in the face of facts/opinions to the contrary ––per Barbara Tuchman

So... why am I here?
What can I do; what do I want to do? 

"Stay, and be beautiful."

Isn't that a funny line? I just read it--an option to consider--for when you're in a difficult place. It matches what I'd written yesterday about choosing to water the seeds of beauty.

Beauty does not mean "pleasant and pretty".
It doesn't mean I'm not grumpy and cranky. 
I am! I'm not feeling lovey-dovey.
Somehow, that's not contradictory with choosing beauty.

(Why isn't it contradictory? I don't know, but it's not.)

Anyway! As I get older, I see every place is difficult in some ways.
WHEN and WHERE in human history could one choose to be born that isn't?

Still, here we are, with these, our particular difficulties,
in this particular story.

Class, turn to page 42...

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Update: 

Marz had texted me earlier, and I just read it. She’d written: 

Haha! I just opened up my international relations textbook (we didn't finish it in class). The conclusion starts:

 "The main theme of this text has been uncertainty."

😆 She must have been on p. 42!