P.J. Colando's Blog, page 4

FOMO

Lately, my Amazon item-clicking finger has been itchy. and I’ve felt neglected by the Amazon delivery truck.

I may be an Amazon addict, afflicted with a particular variant of FOMO.

Embarrassingly, I’m not being facetious,

An alternate theory to merely being spendy might be that I’m mildly depressed by the dizzying flurry of potentially disastrous medical news – as well as news inside and outside our borders – and a healthy engagement in retail therapy may be the fix.

When the author and speaker Patrick McGinnis coined the term FOMO, he didn’t consider fear a sinister force. He was a wide-eyed business-school student from a small town, surrounded by intellectual, career, and social opportunities. He wanted to say yes to everything, he told me. Once, he tried to go to seven birthday parties in one night. Then 9/11 happened, and he felt an even greater urge to take advantage of every minute. FOMO was a sign of abundant potential—that he could learn, and have meaningful experiences, and each day might be different from the one before. “If you don’t believe there’s a possibility,” he said, “why would you have FOMO?” The 2004 op-ed in which he named the phenomenon gently poked fun at his fellow business students madly juggling invites. He never guessed that more than a decade later, people would be talking about FOMO with such seriousness (nor, I imagine, studying it with grim rigor, publishing studies with titles such as “Fear of Missing Out, Need for Touch, Anxiety and Depression Are Related to Problematic Smartphone Use”).

The world has changed since 2004, though. Social media began feeding the feeling of always being left out of something. Optimization-and-productivity culture encourages the idea that one can engineer their schedule to accommodate the ideal number of enlightening, spiritually fulfilling plans. Then, naturally, a backlash arrived. It might be best summed up by a newer term: JOMO, or the “joy of missing out.” The idea is that you should savor your solitude and fully embrace the choice to do what you want to do rather than what others are doing.

What sources of JOMO replenish you, Constant Reader?

OMG and LOL

The wartime statesman, Winston Churchill, has been mentioned a lot lately, as people seek wise statemen to rudder today’s world, So I did a little history dive to reconnect with his legend. I found that his remarkable life was filled with genuine “OMG” moments, from withstanding the disastrous Gallipoli campaign during the First World War to leading Britain through World War II as prime minister. Churchill held a front-row seat to many history-defining moments, including the little-known origin of the term “OMG” itself.

This tidbit sent me down further research rabbit holes. Such is the life of a lifelong learner/retiree.

The expression “OMG,” an acronym for “oh my god,” became popular as early internet lingo during the 1990s. But the first known use of the acronym dates back to a letter written to Churchill in 1917, while he was serving as first lord of the admiralty in the British Navy. The letter was written by John Arbuthnot Fisher, who, as first sea lord (the navy’s highest ranking officer), often quarreled with Churchill.  In the 1917 missive, Fisher wrote, “I hear that a new order of Knighthood is on the tapis [table] — O.M.G. (Oh! My God!) — Shower it on the Admiralty!!” Sadly for the linguistically hip Fisher, neither Churchill, the navy, nor the British people adopted his clever quip. It wasn’t until the arrival of the internet age some 70 years later that the “OMG” acronym exploded in popularity.

Language evolves, and the same can be said of time-saving acronyms, including the ubiquitous “LOL” (most commonly understood to mean “laugh out loud”). The acronym is now a go-to response when a joke, meme, or photo elicits some measure of mirth (though many keep “ROFL” in their back pocket for those truly hilarious moments). But the oldest use of “LOL” actually dates back to the 1960s and had a very different meaning: Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist Herb Caen used the acronym in his book Only in San Francisco to mean “little old lady.” In the book, Caen wrote, “A traffic officer bellowed at an LOL who didn’t seem to know which way to turn her car.”

Caen, who spent most of his career at the San Francisco Chronicle, also coined the term “beatnik,” referring to the counterculture inspired by Beat Generation writers such as Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg. I’m told – though I don’t recall it – I imitated a beatnik and mimed a tune about “what’s behind the green door” in the all-school talent show when I was a young teacher.

 OMG – I’ve meandered within this post!

And, I’ve recouped my word nerd self, as well as my perpetual LOL (wink-wink)

 

Who I’d choose to be –

If for one day you could be anyone or *thing* in the world, what would it be? Describe, tell why, and any themes, goals, or values they/it inspire in you.My response to this dynamic question is different than it would have been a year ago. Then, I might have chosen Fannie Flagg, who I was privivaleged to meet twice at author events. She was who I sought to emulate in my comedic efforts at short-story and novel writing. Because I failed to find the photo her assistant had taken to provide as evidence, here’s a photo of me at a book launch at a favorite indie book store as consolation. Ah, the great pretender!Now, I long to be who I used to be. You can read why in a recent blog post:  https://www.pjcolando.com/who-i-used-to-be/I used to be the personification of peace and joy, which I’d often told friends that my initialized nickname meant. Laughter came easily and often. Here’s pictured proof –In Southern California the month of March began blustery, with winds and portended rain. This was more welcome weather than a month ago when blustery winds sent embers from house-to-house, robbing thousands of their LA homes within hours. Thank God for better weather and for the charitable people who have swooped in to help those who lost their homes. Thank Him also that another specialist wasn’t ready to impose the life sentence of a SPS diagnosis on my limbs, though the involuntary muscle spasms continue to blight my life.I pray that the winds of change will conspire with our Lord to secure an amenable diagnosis – and with it an effective treatment. This would help restore my peace, laughter, love, and joy.That’s how and who I choose to be – like I used to be, unfettered and free…

Who I Used to Be

My husband and I attended a party to celebrate a longtime friend’s 80th birthday recently. We hadn’t seen many of the potential attendees for a decade – more or less – because we’d switched churches; such is the cycle of life.

I wasn’t feeling effervescent because of a recently pulled hamstring and protracted knee pain, but duty called. How many more birthdays can an 80-year-old have? Besides, we loved him and his dear wife, both cherished longtime friends.

So, I applied a lidocaine patch on the hamstring and gulped a couple of pain pills. I washed my hair and scrubbed my face, adding the potions and lotions and make-up that make my pale face visible.

I put on my best face in more ways than one.

The event was an open house, so we arrived an hour past the official start. Thus, we had to park a block from their home, causing my knees to grumble before we entered the front door. I donned my party attitude and entered, hanging onto my husband’s elbow for stability, We scanned the crowd gathered in the festively decorated backyard, easily found the celebrant and his sidekick, and gave birthday greetings and hugs. Then we went for drinks: water for me and wine for my husband and began making the party rounds. The air was festive and joyful, with the boost of SoCal late afternoon sunshine.

My brave smile carried me through the first moments, and the chair I quickly found so I could take the pressure off my knees carried me through many more.

BTW, I wasn’t the only one who eagerly sought a chair. It was an older crowd, after all. The taco bar was also open, so party guests were chowing down. Soon, the cavalcade began as people sought me out – eager to see me and swap details about our present lives. Everyone’s buoyant attitudes should have been infectious. But I couldn’t do it. All I could manage to reply to “What’s up with you?” was, “I’ve gotten older, but not better.” Their faces reflected dismay, empathy… and surprise.

Dour has never been my default mode.

It saddens me. I’m not who I used to be – the vibrant, brimming-with-energy person – the one they fondly recalled. The open-hearted listener with an optimistic outlook and zest for life had been replaced.

The worry and consternation of the past several years, punctuated by fear in the past several months, had squelched my spunky self.

P.S. After we returned home, my honey shared that I’d received numerous compliments on my hair and clothing, but I remember none of it – what a shame!

A bubble bath isn’t going to do it, peeps. Better health news will – pray for my appointment on Thursday.

 

 

Writing Heals What Hurts

A dozen years ago, I began writing. While I’ve had many hobbies in my adult life, I called writing “my elegant hobby.” The ideas free-flowed from my fingers in a stream-of-consciousness style, likely stored fragments of everything I’ve ever read – and I’ve read volubly since age four – and feelings I’d felt compelled to stuff.

I created a slogan for my writing efforts at that time: “I write when I’m blue. I write when I’m black. And then I feel all better.” My spin on Joan Didion’s oft-cited opine, “I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.”

Emboldened by another famous writer’s creed, I began to write boldly in blog posts. Blogging as a personal diary, weekly statements of my opinions, feelings, and personal statement of “I am.” No longer caring if the screed of a little sister with whom I shared a room in my angst-filled teens read my diary entries and tattled behind my back.

The results were often like song lyrics, which makes sense because music has played an integral part in my life.

Here’s one of my earliest blog posts from July 2014 as proof of my feelings on the topic https://www.pjcolando.com/words-music/

I recently sustained a terrible blow: a disaster of a medical diagnosis that will never end. Writing, as well as reading, my mainstay hobby, will

allow me to process my thoughts by making them visible in the ink on a pageprovide catharsis, a cleansing of negative emotions as powerful as three deep yoga breathshelp me quell fears, regulate my emotions, and move me toward calm acceptanceforestall an unworthy pity partyprovide a distraction so worry doesn’t enter my soulcreate community if you, Constant and/or New reader follow my journey

Life as a Miracle: a Giveaway at a Gas Station

Love is in the air! It surrounds us, even in a line at the gas(p) pump… allow me to show and tell another of my myriad examples of ‘My Life as a Miracle.

Yesterday, my husband went to the gas station for his first fill-up since he purchased his new car, a Lincoln Nautilus. The savings of the hybrid are a mighty boon to our beleaguered budget. The prices of everything – utilities, insurances, and groceries – have skyrocketed. The cost of a gallon of gas has neared five bucks in sunny CA – gasp!

My husband is a gregarious guy, prone to smile no matter what. He reads voraciously and has a fund of knowledge to carry a conversation with anyone, anywhere, any time – even when pumping gas. He’d chatted with the elderly man on the other side of the pump, if for no other reason but to keep his mind off the whizzing of the numbers as they tallied the pump gas price.

He’d just completed the necessary chore and was hanging the nozzle back in its berth on the pump when the wizened man opened his truck cab door and pulled a floral bouquet off the seat, offering it to my husband.  “Would you like to give these flowers to your wife?”

“I have little cash on me, so I’m not prepared to pay,” my husband explained.

“No worries,” said the elderly man. “I’ve sold all my other bouquets to earn enough money for a tank of gas for my truck. This is the last one. I don’t need any more money. My need is fulfilled. Give these to your wife.”

There are many morals to this story and none of them align with greed, so frequently seen in the conspicuous consumption predominant in our country. Nor the narcissism and transactional nature that predominates the attitude from the top down.

people are hungry for connectionkind, selfless people existsurprises – miracles, large and small – existonly take what you needgive unto others, for ’tis better to give than receivebe grateful and help others feel the same waysharing is caring and vice versasmile and say “thanks”show loveit doesn’t take much to make someone else’s day – do it!

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WayBack Machine

IWSG February 5 question: Is there a story or book you’ve written that you wish you could change?This year’s promise began unraveling soon after it began. In near-simultaneous calamities, massive fires raged through over 12,000 structures in two large Southern California communities, and a neurologist’s diagnosis set my hopes for a happy, healthy life on fire. (See yesterday’s posts for details if you desire.) So, those dual stories qualify for what I wish to change. The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle and Friends was a popular American television cartoon series from the 1960s. I’m a Boomer who was a frequent watcher and huge fan, so Mr. Peabody’s Wayback Machine comes immediately to mind.At the beginning of the cartoon segment, at the request of Mr. Peabody (“Sherman, set the Wayback machine to…”), Sherman would set the Wayback controls to a time and place of historical importance. Then Sherman and Mr. Peabody (a white bespectacled dog) walked through a door in the Wayback machine and were instantly transported there. During such visits, the historical figures and situations encountered are always distorted in some crucial way. The main focus of Mr. Peabody and Sherman’s adventures was the restoration of historical events to their proper course, albeit in a characteristically frivolous and anachronistic way. The machine later returned Mr. Peabody and Sherman to the present, although the return trip was never shown. The segment traditionally ended with a bad pun.Since I’m an active punster and appreciator of good fun, I’ll try my best to reframe my event that transpired a month ago in more healthful and hopeful ways. But I’m struggling. Scripture repeatedly assures us that in this life, there will be troubles”, the troubles seem insurmountable in the near term and the long term.I need more than a rainbow sign, just as California needs more rain.

January 7 was not a good day… for me and many

Four weeks ago at around 4:00 p.m., my health mythology about my ongoing involuntary muscle spasms blew up. A co-occurring disaster, the massive, multiple fires in LA County blew up almost simultaneously. Going forward for me as an individual would never be the same, There’ll assuredly be plenty of hurt, and I haven’t yet found hope. I connect with the wear and woebegone feelings of those who’ve lost their memory-and-belongings-filled homes. Figuratively, my life is on fire.

A mere seven days into 2025, many southern Californians longed to return it because it didn’t meet implicit New Year’s promises, including my.

There was a haunting, visceral quality to the ongoing fire threat in Southern California, a feeling that my own body was scorched. I’ve never ascribed to victimhood, but it’s an accessible paradigm now. My preliminary diagnosis – to be confirmed by the results of more tests – is Stiff Person’s Syndrome. Yes, like Celine Dion. She was diagnosed with Stiff Person Syndrome (STS), a rare autoimmune neurological disorder in 2022.

I’m one in a million, for that’s the incidence of STS. I’ve always aimed to be unique, but holy crap!

My husband and I have re-bonded to get through this calamitous health challenge. While privately, we’re frightened, our publicly shared narrative is resolute. The alternative, the fetal position, is not our style.

We are stalwart. https://www.pjcolando.com/stalwart/

As some of you may/may not know, being the message board to deliver your news to family and friends is difficult and trying. Almost universally they question me, the patient, with an essence of disbelief and blame. Then, they latch onto Celine’s success at the Paris Olympics, when she sang in her compelling siren voice once again.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=smKqMiGXxl4

Yeah, but she’s Canadian, where socialized medicine rules, and has abundant cash to employ the best practices in massive amounts. My husband and I have already spent about $10,000/year to get me through the past four years – and I can’t fathom the cost of what lies ahead.

The hope and help to move forward resides in the hearts of a dozen dear friends. Wanna enlist?

https://www.pjcolando.com/life-as-a-miracle-five-guys/

The Promise of a New Calendar

One of my husband’s Christmas gifts to me was a new calendar. He shopped expansively to select the perfect one, with California scenery and large spaces to write our comings, goings, and appointments in 2025. Each year, he has as much fun during the shopping process as I do after I open his gift, relishing the spectacular photography and the prospect of filling the date squares with joyful gatherings and doings, things beyond medical appointments – which have increasingly dominated our lives.

We want this year to be more playful.

I must admit to a twinge of anxiety after pulling the shrink-wrap off my new calendar each year. It’s not because I make resolutions – I leave that guaranteed-to-fail act to others. But I do feel pressure to do something worthy. Will I be able to lose the five pounds I didn’t lose last year? Complete my cozy mystery book? Replace bad habits, particularly in the realm of snacking, to make better, healthful selections from our stacked pantry?  Should I develop a new hobby or become more sporty? How are we supposed to face the brand-new year?

https://www.facebook.com/watch?v=3378862532249691

Maybe February is a better month to begin resolutions and goals – it contains my birthday, after all.

After the elegant holidays, January is abrupt, filled with short, dark days… though the amount of sunlight builds by two minutes/day. Allow the few who commit to ‘Dry January’ to give up alcohol, change their habits, hustle away the Christmas tree, box up the menorah, and vow to level up.

I prefer casual, almost pokey, as I mosey through the early days of the new year. I don’t have to resolve to be new and improved, more upscale and polished, more of anything except healthy.

I’d rather be considered playful and full of whoopee.

I’m yearning for light and lighthearted fun—more staying in my lane, cutting the chaff loose from my life, and including more inventively personal badassery! I’m yearning for more community and more lingering peaceful, joyful, and honest connections.

More diversion from Donold drama.

P.S.#1 Because I am a writer and Jane Friedman is a guru, I leave you with her favorite calendar, available on Amazon via this link https://www.amazon.com/Calendar-Company-Month-Glance-134_Notes/dp/B0CV5ZRVRW/

P.S.#2 A poem from a brilliant writer, Brian Bilston, as an added New Year’s gift –

 

 

Stay Safe!

“Stay safe!” Family members in Elsewhere USA universally said as they checked on our proximity to the Armageddon-like fires on the news.

I know they meant well, but they’re unable to comprehend the immensity and score, no matter how many metrics I share. To the farmers, I shared the amount of acreage consumed (nearly 37,000 acres). To those who lived in urban areas, I cited the over 12,3000 structures burned. To those who care about critters, I shared a video that fostered tears as well as reverence for our firefighters. https://www.facebook.com/pat.jacksoncolando/videos/579588161650172

To those who’d visited here, I reminded them that it rarely rained on their vacation parade and that cloudless blue skies prevailed then as they do now. I replied to those who’d once lived here, “No, the gusty winds weren’t the mild onshore breezes you recall from your youthful surfing days.” The winds that drove the wildfires were hurricane-force, like the rains that recently swamped North Carolina. Finally, all humans should know by now: God and Mother Nature are mightier than anything man can do.

Survivor’s guilt and a pervasive sense of helplessness tug at my heart, mind, and soul. Add to this is the fact that my husband and I have fled fire twice when it neared our city, our house.

“Stay safe” is the kind of empty advice meated out to tearful women when their well-meaning men say, “Don’t cry.” It’s useless, insensitive, and incomplete. It skirts the emotions and dissipates an opportunity for connection. It offers no help for the victim – a person whose life is on fire – and no absolution for the one smothered in triteness. Often, the placation comes across as a put-down.

Finally, never give advice to a person who needs a hug.

And, specific to the recent wildfires, give cash (Charity Navigator recommends great, vetted nonprofits) and compassion.