This evening, after working an hour and a half of overtime in order to make sure there were enough Spanish speakers on the phone lines tonight, a coworker of mine of the same rank (who spent much of the evening being a team player and helping out with potential payroll issues to make sure we get paid properly), I walked outside to a hot and muggy evening full of summer night air (even though autumn is rapidly approaching) that reminded me of summer nights where I grew up. It is a hard matter sometimes to pin down the common threads in what I am thinking about. For example, I have long been fond of a singer named Donna Lewis, who is most famous for a really cute song she released (that became a #2 hit) when I was a teenager called “I Love You Always Forever,” and who I am constantly reminded of whenever I hear any song sung by Ellie Goulding (“Lights,” for example, by the more recent singer reminds of me the song “Lights of Life,” which is quite similar, from when I was younger, a reminder of my age and the fact that what is old never really entirely goes away either).

Part of the hazards of being as random as I am is the difficulty of trying to thread together all of the odd thoughts that go through my mind from time to time. For example, I was pondering the question of logistics today as it related to scheduling, one of the more serious issues on my mind, given the fact that when people are out of town for whatever reason, it can become a difficult challenge to make sure that everyone is covering what needs to be covered. I do not consider myself a particularly skilled person when it comes to logistics, both because my life has largely been a harrowing and often unsuccessful quest for personal resources, as well as because of the fact that I find questions dividing and sharing resources to be rather tiresome. I enjoy strategy, and even can find enjoyment on occasion in tactical or diplomatic matters, but logistics are a matter that I consider important largely out of survival instincts as well as the fact that they are so commonly ignored, rather than out of any sort of passion for the subject.

Among the logistical questions I was pondering today as well, besides questions of scheduling and pay that I have alluded to above, was the matter of scheduling my Feast of Tabernacles that is coming up all too quickly. Last year I had the advantage of being thrust into a group of mostly friendly strangers without any need or concern about planning. This year my native tendencies to obsessively plan and ponder and weigh options is coming to the fore, as I wonder who I will be able to spend time with, or who will particularly want to spend time with me (and be able to do so if they so wish). It is sometimes an enviable position to be able to react spontaneously, though I must admit that by nature I am not a particularly spontaneous person. By and large, I am quite the reverse, although I suppose leaving some room for spontaneous and last-minute decisions might be better than to obsessively plan over what might not happen.

Today, as I pondered the nature of health care changes and wondering when others would feel a sense of urgency about them, given the massive and unprecedented changes we will be seeing in a few short weeks, I also pondered that I am the sort of person who is not really well able to entirely leave concerns in one area of life from affecting other areas of life. For example, my work involving health care and the political and economic and moral issues of the matter has led me to seek to study and educate myself better on the issues in my own time. Those efforts, in turn, will probably lead to thinking and then eventually writing on the subject as well, as health care is one issue in life that I have tended not to devote a great deal of effort to so far in my own life for a variety of reasons. That is, after all, the way my mind works, even when it is a little foggy from the muggy summer night air that is all around us.