The perils of red nail polish

However screwed up my life can get, I still believe I'm pretty lucky. Things can always get worse, the evidence is all around. As f****** up as it gets, if I choose, the hardest thing I'd have to do in the next three months is sit around and figure out what colour to paint my toenails. After that, reality would again intrude but there is a certain freedom in knowing that you have a small window. Of course it's not as easy as that. There is the ever present reality of rent and bills to pay, dog food to purchase, car to gas, and most of all, paying work to secure to ensure once the free period is over. But when you stop worrying about the immediate future, your life suddenly becomes less complicated.

And I have to tell you, the lure of sitting around with nothing harder to do than paint my nails and play fetch with my dog is very attractive. As I get older the reality is a preference for simplicity. Organising my closet this afternoon I was overwhelmed by the amount of STUFF it takes to keep my current life covered. There is a sensation of time slipping by, ill used, governed by other people's imperatives , not my own.

Recently another friend mentioned that he was having a mid-life crisis and wanted to simplify his life and take off with a backpack to explore the wilds of New York. Go figure. Long time couples are breaking up, people are changing their preferences, forty year olds having first time babies. We're all re-starting our lives. It's exciting and scary at the same time, but sometimes you have to leap and know that the net will appear. Or that it won't kill you when you go splat as the case might be.