Wednesday, October 29, 2003

Ramblings for today



I was down at the nearby mall across the office to get some pre-natal vitamins for my wife. I'm a bit short on cash these days (payday seems so far away), so I didn't get the whole quantity specified in the prescription, which was 30 tablets, or 1 bottle. I opted to get enough for two weeks, or 14 tablets for now, until payday comes around. Well, what they do is open a new pack and put the individual tablets into a separate plastic container. Looking at the smooth, pink tablets, it had no markings or any indication of what they were. Unlike Biogesic and other stuff, you'd know what it was, based on the engraved characters. I felt uneasy because I might be carrying tablets that would make you grow an extra arm, for all I knew. So I went back to the saleslady and took a look at the bottle where she got the stuff from, just to make sure that what I had bought was the same as in the pack. I wasn't about to go home and let my wife drink stuff that I wasn't sure of what it would do to her, or to our unborn child.



Fatherhood. It feels something like what one of the WWII soldiers might have felt just before they stepped off the boat and into the unknown. That, and a bit like what I felt minutes before singing during my birthday party last year. It's essentially a mix of elation and anxiety. The anticipation is already builidng up to a crescendo-- what am I going to do when the moment comes, and I need to shed all childish thoughts? The chorus from Incubus' "Nowhere Fast" seems so fitting:



Will I ever get to where I'm going?

If I do, will I know when I'm there?

If the wind blew me in the right direction, would I even care?

I would.


That verse right there is my feelings in a nutshell. It was a coming-of-age kinda thing for me in college, but now it's still appropriate, entering a new chapter in my life and all that. What I mean is that I'm heavily anticipating something big that's about to change my existence in this world, and I don't know what to do with these overwhelming feelings, rushing in a torrent of intensity.


On another note, it's been really dangerous crossing the street (by the place where I work) ever since they re-routed it into a one-way road. The cars move along real fast, and it doesn't help when there's no traffic enforcer to let us poor pedestrians cross. It's every man for himself basically. Oh sure, there's a pedestrian lane, but without someone to manage the traffic over there, it nothing more than a slab of paint on the street. I was crossing the street on the way to the mall, and this guy was nearly run over by a rampaging van. He was like, inches away from serious injury. It was a good thing the damn Starex came to a screeching halt just in the nick of time.


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