Moving forward.

I spent the morning hanging out with one of my parents' neighbors and friends, someone they've known since moving into their building. We spent the time at a local church, pitching in at their soup kitchen. Two hours wasn't much, even if we chopped all the onions they need for the day. It was still something to do that had an immediate, tangible benefit, and I'm going to see how it goes in the future. Certainly after I get back from San Francisco, I can look into keeping up with it on a constant basis. There's a couple others in the neighborhood - I'm not thinking of going to them all, but it's good to be aware of these things.

The afternoon was partly spent in a small coffee shop, eating a pastry and drinking tea and reading a book. At one point, I looked around, looked up at the ceiling, and thought that about twenty years ago, I'd gone to coffee shops to drink tea and eat pastry and read books, House was a sizeable fandom of the moment, I was struggling to stay upright, bearing down at an uncertain future, and here I was, doing the exact same things. The political unrest and the feeling of general social madness which had me feeling coldly sane is familiar, too, and significantly less pleasantly than a caffeine buzz.

But I live in a bigger world now in pretty much every respect, and that's not something to take lightly.