Neal’s Post from the Past: “Solitude & the Absent Smile”

Here’s a rather messily photographed past post from back in 2014. I may still have had a flip phone. I’m loath to change.

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Yes I admit it, I’m an optimist. Pollyanna’s a very good buddy. We take tap dancing together.

What I actually mean is I’m USUALLY a somewhat cheery person. But not always. A while back, I underwent a fairly unpleasant medical procedure. (I’m a big baby when it comes to anything that hurts at a .5 or higher on a 1-10 pain level.)

Here I am in the waiting room, reading about blogging:

Finally I was called back to the eerily quiet and humanly empty procedure room where I had to wait in nervous solitude for quite a while. The doctor was running way behind.

I got bored pretty quickly and started playing with the IPhone’s … reverse camera capability. Doesn’t that sound better than saying I took a bunch of selfies?

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I looked at these terrible pictures, grimaced at their muted and otherworldly haziness, realized I wasn’t smiling–and started to delete them.

Then it hit me.

“Get real, Neal. It’s okay not to smile. It’s okay to be muted and hazy … and to be by yourself for a while. Being out of focus doesn’t mean being out of life.”