Touch but lightly

Another cooking tip for you all: when cooking your Kraut, careful when you whip the lid off, since boiling vinegar does tend to make the eyes sting a bit.

Been having a bit of a ponderous evening, since university alumni magazine arrived. Now I'm quite well aware that a major function of these publications is to cough up a bit of cash for the old school, and fair enough, but they do serve another purpose of letting people know what's going on with the uni. And reading it, it feels like I was never there, or only brushed the surface of the place and all that goes on. Certainly I never left any kind of mark (I'm no sgraffito). But it makes me realise how much I do that in my life. It's as if I'm almost entirely connected to the present, with no real sense of my own past or my own future, adrift in a permanent sea of now. Is this a good thing? Well, supposedly so, according to a lot of the Buddhist guff I've read, living in the present moment with mindfulness is halfway to enlightenment - but I'm not claiming that. It's a feeling of something being missing, I suppose.....maybe just another manisfestation of dukkha......

Still, it's reminded me how bad I am at keeping in contact with people, even people who are and have been very dear to me, as if the only way I can cope with not being around them often, day-to-day, is to cut them out of my present life enitrely. It's a depressing thought, huh? Still, I do sometimes think 'well, they dont bother in return, so screw 'em', but that's no way to start, is it?

Enough navel-gazing. Time for another bath to soak the dry hands, and then bed.