extraordinary days

Over a month ago, I posted a lament that I couldn't find something important to me online.

Yesterday, I was wandering around online, and I came across this. It is only part of what I was looking for, but it is sufficiently representitive of the thing I thought I had lost.


I forgot how much I had contributed to this site, acknowledging that it is amateur and archaic. My photos (or I!) appear in the following sections:


Birmingham>Manor House, Out and About in Birmingham, Working in Birmingham, University of Birmingham.


Chances are, if there are blue skies, I took the photo. Also, a handful of photos at the bottom of here are mine, too. I am quite proud of that nighttime Tower Bridge photo, and the shoe one.


***
I got a gift for Christmas that has me pouring over photos. Doing this, combined with having found the website, has me wondering what to do with a set of experiences untouchable by any other set from before or since. This life seems so irreconcileable to the one I have now; in fact, these extraordinary days are actually aggravating because they give me something against which everyday life is compared--if not everyday life, at least my current geography. I am so annoyed by the contrast.


For which days are we supposed to live? Those days, the extraordinary ones? Or the doldrum days like these ones between Christmas and New Year's?

It is easy to love the extraordinary days--the kind one spends galavanting around Europe (and then spending years paying off). And to be honest, it is unlikely I need any more of those, exactly.

All this just makes me wonder what it will take before I feel satisfied, before I am no longer aggravated by what I don't have any more or what I am not. I know I have a job I love, a cool apartment, and a great dog--why isn't this enough?

So what we have here is a set of life lessons:

1. Holiday breaks highlight twentysomething ennui. Combing through favorite pretty photos is no remedy for this.
2. Drinking more (liquor or coffee--its a tossup) is.
3. And my longtime favorite: Today is not forever.