Nicole

How’s life been treating me? Like I kicked its dog. I’m not going to whine, I have it pretty dang good in the large pictorial scheme-type-thing of things. My life is not that difficult. I don’t and probably couldn’t do what so many people do umcomplainingly every day. On a side note, though, I know a lot of people who couldn’t and don’t do what I do. So everything’s relative. And it’s stupid to compare.

But life is hostile to me, it’s not cordial. Things have been… I won’t say challenging, it’s much too grand a word… mildly testing, I guess. Nothing is as easy as it should be–OR as hard as it could be. Am I making ANY sense at all? No, because Murphy’s Law is the story of my life. RED ALERT! RED ALERT! WHINING AFTER PROMISING NOT TO!

Okay, I’ll take a breath, and start over. I feel like I’m posting on the wrong diagonal. I can only explain it in riding terms, sorry. Riding is after all my frame of reference. Everything I need to know I learned in a barn.

Posting on the wrong diagonal. For those of you who don’t know (how deeply I pity you for not experiencing this), when a horse trots it’s very bouncy to the rider. So as a rider you participate by standing up in the stirrups every other stride. To be able to steer the horse, you stand or “post” in time with the outside front leg of the horse. When that shoulder goes up, so do you. In the trot, there are two strides made by the horse: one with the left front leg and the right hind leg, and the other with the right front leg and the left hind leg. So these strides are called “diagonals.” Posting on the wrong diagonal throws you off balance a little and gets you yelled at by your instructor, who can spot it a mile away.

And that’s what I feel like. Just a little off. And getting yelled at a lot. But maybe it’s worse than I think. Maybe I’m not just posting on the wrong diagonal, maybe there is no diagonal, the horse is standing still, and I’m still posting away, throwing my weight around. That would explain that hostility and resistance I’ve met with lately.

But maybe why I feel off is that I’m not posting, I’m not on a horse. And try as I might, I hate that. It feels wrong and unnatural and unfair that there are 75 million horses in the world and I haven’t ridden one of them in 2 years. Well, I guess it’s better than a lot of girls my age, who feel this way over guys, and they do so many stupid things as a result.

Of course there’s also the guilt: I dedicated my life to God. Not dressage or even showjumping. But He loves me for who I am, right? And that is who I am. I am a different person when there are horses in my life. There’s an entirely different fire in me. I can’t explain it, I can’t think of a ‘for instance’ to give. You’d just have to see me then. I love a lot of things, some quite deeply, but, this sounds stupid, I am in love with riding. First loves last forever. And I have to think when there’s a love like that it’s a spark of the divine. “And God proceeded to make man in his image…” I don’t know. Maybe it’s all foolishness. For as long as I’ve been a religious person, I’ve always said that the one temptation the Devil could offer me would be riding. And so long as he’s not offering that, what’s a little discouragement gonna do to me? Nuttin.’

A horse! A horse! My kingdom for a horse! That’s what Richard III says in the play as his army has been beaten and he is going to lose his throne and his life. He screams madly at his forces, who are dead, injured or defeated, to get him another horse and the battle may not be over. Someday there will be another horse for me.

This is far from over.

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Scripture: Isaiah 44:18, 19

Quote: “IT’S FESTIVUS! SERENITY NOW!” Mr. Costanza

Watched: Contact

Wow I haven’t written in a long time. ‘Nothing much to say I guess, just the same as all the rest, tryin’ to throw your arms around the world.’ Okay, I’ll try to limit the musical quotes to 2 per blog. I’m trying to write. I’ve been so busy lately I’ve nearly forgotten how. I’ve been just sitting here trying to remember what it used to feel like, to create characters and dialogue and those oh-so-wacky plots. And when I try to remember that, then I start to remember other feelings, how it used to feel to be young. I’m not getting a whole lot of writing done but I don’t mind. I suddenly remembered we used to play a game called MASH at school, and I thought for a long time on it, remembered it stood for “Mansion, Apartment, Shack, House” (the game was to determine which you’d live in when you grew up–if you got shack you were subject to the teasing of your friends), but I finally had to ask Wendy how it was played. She, even though she’s been busier than I have these last 10 years or so, remembered the game and its rules exactly. I bow to her. She rocks. And she has a “House.” I wonder why “Living at home with your parents” wasn’t an option in that game?

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Scripture: John 15:1-10

Quote: Why do I come home? — me to myself

Watched: View From The Top

Pyrrhus inherited the throne of Epirus in Northern Greece around 306 B.C.E., and as a young man proved himself on the battlefield again and again. Pyrrhus apparently had great strategic skills, but he also had the reputation of not knowing when to stop. In 281 he went to Italy and defeated the Romans at Heraclea and Asculum, but suffered bitterly heavy losses. The devastation led to his famous statement, “One more such victory and I am lost” — hence the term “Pyrrhic victory” for any victory so costly as to be ruinous.

My question is, what isn’t a pyrrhic victory? For everything we gain in life –and don’t get me wrong, we gain a lot more than we deserve– there is also, always loss. Loss is a universal experience. Whether it’s losing a loved one, a battle, a game, your money, your keys, your mind, or most irreplaceable of all, time, we lose. And on that note, read on for extra credit…

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Well, I’ll be away for a few days. Take care, see how you can get along without me. I am taking Ernesto Della Sonyvaio, a.k.a. Putey-Putes, a.k.a. my laptop, but he is only to be used for writing. Let the Trivia daily mailings pile up in the inbox, see if I care ;). You can trust me not to behave myself. Hopefully now that I’ll have a little time to write, I’ll be able to.

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Quote: Are you going to take Amy to the funeral home with you?–my father to my brother

Scripture: Genesis 28:16-19

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www.nicolerivett.com

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Quote: You know it’s time to do the laundry when you dry off with a sneaker. – Zach Galifianakis

Scripture: Colossians 3:12-17

The other day, I guess a week ago today, the guys in receiving were talking as I walked through. One of them said something about the Greek myth of Medea, and none of them knew what that was. I described the myth of what turned out to be Medusa to them. It wasn’t until I came home that I remembered Medea’s story. She helped Jason of the Argonauts procure the Golden Fleece, married him, and bore him children. When he left her to marry someone else, she murdered their children and her rival. Hades hath no fury like a woman scorned.
So you see there is no snake hair or turning to stone involved. And I can’t believe that my mind has disintegrated so much in these couple years of retail that I can’t remember Euripides’ most famous play, as studied in a course, Classical Literature, that I got a perfect score on. I wrote my thesis on the Orestian Trilogy of plays by Aeschylus, but I don’t really remember any of them either, except that pretty much everybody dies.
What does it matter, anyway, right? The pagan Greek civilization is gone, the Roman Empire is gone, and the current world power soon will be.
But I feel stupid anyway.

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Quote: “It goes without saying, I believe, that if we understood ourselves better we would damage ourselves less.” –James Baldwin

Scripture: Matthew 22:37

Watched: Ed :D