Why Chapter Three?

Chapter 2  THREE

It's going on one in the morning. I have been going crazy with my second chapter blog siince I downloaded Microsoft 10. I can't find my dashboards for DjinnfromtheBronxTwo.blogspot.com and the correlative Legacy of a Courtly Curmudgeon.blogspot.com.  So I can't add to either!

A long time ago I added a Chapter Three blog when I had this very same problem, but it resolved itself, magically, so I forgot about that addition. Until I downloaded Windows 10. So, I enter DjinnfromtheBronxTwo, but when I sign in, I am led instead to the dashboard for that once forgotten Chapter Three.  If none of this is making sense to you, you can imagine my techno frustration in trying to sort it out. I looked at the google boards for a solution. I found similar problems and tried one proffered fix, related to opening two browsers (purportedly the problem is that I have different passwords or e mails or something on each of these).  I see from reading the web boards that others have had this mystery but I simply am not saavy enough with internet codes to take a chance on another effort to correct the problem.  I could hire someone.  Maybe I will, one day, but for now. .  .

Welcome to Chapter Three of DjinnfromtheBronx!

What will I do with it? I will combine some of the material from the other two.  I will continue posting my late father's Camp Gordon letters to my mother in this fresh forum for example.

Perhaps it is a good thing, this computer catastrophe.  I suppose in an existential way I am ready for a new blog chapter. The last several months have felt like yet another page's turning.
The page may have been edging on a turn for many months or a year or two but I have perhaps been resisting it.

Since the loss of my 25 year career (four years ago I might have said that it wasn't lost, but rather grasped and thrown into the rapids by political currents over which I had no control; I have noted that those currents flow today tossing others into the same rapids) I have experimented with various activities. Voice over. Reading for the blind. Taking a trip to Europe. I did write that memoir. I had someone look at it. Her critique was detailed and sound. I decided I need to put the book away. Except to change the title and write a few new paragraphs of introduction, I haven't gotten back to it. And I haven't found that niche of interest to carry me contentedly along. Partly, it has been because of other life events distracting me.  It seems that I have a bit of a helping nature, which seems odd to me because I lack the kind of loving nature I have observed to be more intensely present in others who help; in fact, I have often wondered whether I am capable of love even when I am doing "good", and the needs of various individuals have been placed squarely in my path. I have taken on the needs, albeit sometimes with a "why me?" resignation. But the point is,  I seem not to have the expanse of time that I anticipated. Partly, though, I think I am just a little lazy about the things I claim to want to do.

A large portion of a most recent ongoing task in helping another was just completed. Other consuming aspects will likely loom in the near future, but for the moment, I have a little time to think. And courtesy of this computer glitch, it has occurred to me that there is something slightly Providential in my having a "new" blog or a new branch of the old ones. Everything about the other chapters has come to seem a bit distant. I have left them behind or they have slipped behind me. Does that make any sense? Until July 2011, everything had been, more or less, linear. Go to school. Get a job, make a career, advance, maybe get married (I did want to once), have a plan, of some sort.

But after July 2011, I may have tried to plan; hence my initial efforts at specific activities, but something very different from before took hold. I was looking at the present moment, instead of the past and the future. I had no idea what to do with that. I don't know that I do know now.

My Catholicism definitely has taken a key place in the present moment. Maybe that's why I help, because I believe in service; it is an act of will not emotion. If I relied on my emotional dimension, I think I'd be a hermit.

Something is a stirrin' in me, around me. I think for the good. I have had plenty of Graces come to me these last years, though I think my resistance to them is a bit troubling and inexplicable. So maybe the computer problem can be looked upon as an opportunity to explore whatever this chapter is going to be in one ordinary life.  Since I believe that we are all part of a cosmic tapestry overseen by a mysterious but redeeming Creator I believe each ordinary life is extraordinary--because it is unique. Mine, and yours.

So, we shall see where this goes.