(n-58)

In trying to get back on the blogging train, perhaps the biggest challenge is getting myself to stop and write when I have something I want to say in my head. This is not easily done. I'm not much of a sit still, do nothing kind of person, and I very easily shift from activity to activity without pausing. Like these past 35 minutes:

1. Decide to go pick up my dry cleaning
2. Go to the supermarket too
3. Drive
4. Oooh! Girl Scout Cookies!
5. Buy Girl Scout cookies (always)
6. Get milk 
7. oooh! Fage yogurt $1 Buy 4
8. Buy licorice
9. Car is messy and going for  along drive later, start picking stuff up and bagging for disposal
10. Pick up dry cleaning
11. Get home, continue cleaning out car
12. Get inside, put milk and yogurt in fridge
13. Put oatmeal bowl in sink. Put oatmeal pot in sink
14. Put newspaper on table next to wife's cereal bowl
15. Recycle ad sections from paper.

Okay, not too bad, but between 10 and 11, I had a thought about something I wanted to write, and between 12 and 13 remembered 3, no more like 6 different things I needed to do. In recent times, I'd moved directly to those things, but today I'm going to write for a moment, at least.

One of the big things that's been ongoing for me in the past year is my developing a relationship with my brother. We have simply not been close. I've thought for a long time that he's pretty much the only person in the world who can make me truly uncomfortable. That used to keep me away, but I've begun to learn the value of it.

I get comfortable very quickly and easily. I'm extremely, and I mean the word extreme here, adaptable. I can settle in almost anywhere and be content. This is nice on one level, but it's my enemy if I want to make the most of the (n-58) years I have left to live. So I see my brother as key because of his ability to push me out of my comfort zone. And with him its usually in the name of something fun.

So he's dealing with some life stuff, and I want to be there for him, but I realize that I really have almost no experience being a brother to him in the usual sense. We've always been very separate- we get along fine, but we're separate. In the past, I'd just say, okay, that's the way it is, but for some reason these past couple of days I'm trying to push through this. And I'm wondering if he thinks it's weird that I'm suddenly interested in doing this, but I'm trying not to care.

So by the end of the weekend I'll have a better idea of how that turns out. Okay, I've got those 6 things to do, plus a couple more I thought about since.