It is midnight and I'm here, perched on my chair.
I have just finished painting my nails with considerable degree of difficulty.
I was never very good at it and never did show much improvement either.
I'm trying to keep my toes as far away from one another to prevent further damage.
But I like looking down on my painted toe-nails, in its restrained vibrancy of mute silver.
I just finished watching Up in the Air.
It does paint with beautiful poignancy certain facts of life.
Excess baggage or no baggage, both lands you in a fix.
Career goals or no career goals, both can make you look like a living embodiment of failure.
Commitment or no commitment, both offers suboptimal solutions. The former can leave you hurt and betrayed. The latter, makes you look like a cold hearted conniving man-eater.
Freedom of choice allows you to put yourself in chains.
Existentialism. Thou art a puzzle!
Clouds are pretty, aren’t they?
They lack specificity.
Life’s pretty too.
(Not always. Like right now.)
However, I never liked the cloud imagery for life.
It’s fundamentally flawed.
Life is specific. Its cause is existence. Its result: death.
Joni Mitchell might have looked at both clouds and life from both sides and concluded that she really didn’t know either, but that doesn’t qualify clouds to be a metaphor for life.
I've come across several people interpreting Both Sides Now in that way.
You cannot say it is wrong, but it peeves me!
Every cloud might have a silver lining.
Life doesn’t.
But my toe-nails do.
Deal with it.
I do while “looking down on creation”.
Even, if it is patchy in places.
