Seeking

It's been a tough, tough year. The longest, deepest, most disabling depression I've ever experienced; financial and family challenges piled up when one alone would have been daunting; other heartbreaks I don't wish to mention specifically for superstitious reasons and to avoid being tiresome. A dear friend posted this list of "Ted Talks" compiled as a salve to a year such as this past and I am glad I watched each video on the list. Creativity, humor, courage, humility. All attributes I call on in mustering hope for a better 2015.

Talks to Watch When Every Conceivable Bad Thing Has Happened to You

In happier news on the domestic front, two little cockatiels hatched today in the nest of SunRa and ChaCha--experienced and loving parents who are now so very proud! There are 3 more eggs yet to be hatched; I have takers for two babies already--nothing would be lovelier than a nestfull of dandelion puffballs! Cockatiel Babies

Pajama-bound while recovering from what seems like a low-grade flu, and probably is aggravated by the "soul flu" of the past months, I've been immersing myself in Rob Lowe's engaging autobiography, "Stories I Only Tell My Friends", and alternating chapters with binges of "The West Wing", the excellent series I somehow never connected with when originally broadcast. I'm trying in various ways to fill in holes in my history--popular culture seems useful for this--and with so much available online it's an easy enough personal experiment. 

Rob Lowe recounts a hilarious misadventure performing in an awful number during the 1989 Academy Awards, so I had to follow up that reading by a YouTube viewing of some of that show, and then segued into trying to recover/assemble a sense of my childhood/family of origin identity by absorbing some popular culture from my birth year and just prior: 

The Academy Awards 1961