Saturday, July 7, 2012

FIVE THINGS I KNOW



1.     I know that too much exposure to sun can cause skin cancer.  People didn’t know that fact when I was a teenager, and I spent a WHOLE lot of time lying in the sun at the beach during summer vacations.  As a fair-skinned person who never tanned easily, I had to really work at getting a tan.  Using Johnson’s Baby Oil slathered on my body is how we did it then.  I am lucky that so far I have not had any skin cancers crop up.  If I had known about skin cancer possibilities back then, would I do things differently?  I am sorry to say I probably would not have.


2.     I have finally come to understand this:  I should have gone to a junior college before I set off to a 4-year live-away-from home college.  I now know I was too socially and emotionally immature to understand the purpose of this higher education.   I treated it as a lark, like a wonderful summer camp held during the school year. 


3.     I know that I am very pleased with my children in every sense of the word.  They make me feel I am still relevant in their lives, not because I am doing anything for them but hopefully because they think I am not passé!  (They do laugh at my electronic struggles, though.)


4.     As much as I hate to admit it, I know that I am constitutionally unable to keep my desk neat.  No matter what kind of system I set up for keeping papers neatly but quickly findable, working that system never lasts very long.  I long for an extra day in the week dedicated to “clean-up,” but knowing myself the way that I do, the first paper I picked up would pique my interest and I’d be off on another internet hunt for answers – or worse, yet, digging through files because I remember a relevant something!  Jerry caught on to this “fault” early on, neat and tidy engineer that he is, and he just accepts it by saying, “Just keep the door shut!”  Good man, I say.


5.     Knowing that I was always considered the “sickly” child and was carefully monitored by doctors and parents throughout my whole life, I have to laugh that I have even entered old age at all!  Such a surprise!


1 comment:

Olga said...

I'd say that you have matured very well in spite of time in the sun and sickly childhood.
Neat does not necessarily mean organized. I have af riend whose desk always looks like chaos and yet she knows exactly where everything is and can lay hands on it within seconds. My desk is neat, but Ioften have to search for what I need.