I have always wanted to feel that which is the  ‘whatever’ – zest, passion, determination, courage – of an adventurer, an explorer, a “what if we did this?” person. Today I saw another link to the Apple commercial that so many people like because it salutes those who take a different path. Yes, I like it also; but I think the writers stole it from Walter Lippmann. I know when I heard the partial narration of this on a made for TV movie, I sought it out and committed parts to memory. It is here at the bottom of this link and here is a bit of it (well, around half of it):

The best things of mankind are as useless as Amelia Earhart’s adventure. They are the things that are undertaken not for some definite, measurable result, but because someone, not counting the costs or calculating the consequences, is moved by curiosity, the love of excellence, a point of honor, the compulsion to invent or to make or to understand. In such persons mankind overcomes the inertia which would keep it earthbound forever in its habitual ways. They have in them the free and useless energy with which alone men surpass themselves.

Such energy cannot be planned and managed and made purposeful, or weighed by the standards of utility or judged by its social consequences. It is wild and it is free. But all the heroes, the saints and the seers, the explorers and the creators partake of it. They do not know what they discover. They do not know where their impulse is taking them. They can give no account in advance of where they are going or explain completely where they have been. They have been possessed for a time with an extraordinary passion which is unintelligible in ordinary terms.

No preconceived theory fits them. No material purpose actuates them. They do the useless, brave, noble, the divinely foolish and the very wisest things that are done by man. And what they prove to themselves and to others is that man is no mere creature of his habits, no mere automaton in his routine, no mere cog in the collective machine, but that in the dust of which he is made there is also fire, lighted now and then by great winds from the sky.

I’ve had the respiratory flu (I think) with a touch of gastric symptoms for about two weeks now. I don’t feel so bad anymore, but when I sit down and happen to be tilting one way or the other, I wind up in nap phase. I don’t know that I can say I am tired or sleepy, but just that  – poof – there I am dozing away. It was 10 this morning when my cell phone jolted me awake. I call my mother every morning around nine every morning and evening. This morning, I had my usual 8:30 am conversation with my neighbor (She’s 90 and lives alone) across the street and thought, “Oh, I’ll just wait a few minutes to call Mother.” That didn’t work.

I’ve been lucky and haven’t had flu bouts in recent years, and darn it, the year I do have it they won’t allow human subjects in high school science experiments. My grandson could have used me, instead of those beans.  We could have done coughing videos relating to the timed dosage of cough syrup (some of which was pretty cool by the way) and a series of “hair-do” pictures.

I just thought of something; we have the boy watch old movies to further his cultural education and the last one was “Arsenic and Old Lace”. Okay, going for a caffeine fix.