Trading Lives -- Writer's Poke #188

I haven't always been conformable in this skin.

Back in junior high and high school, specifically, I would leaf through pictures in the yearbook and compare myself to the other guys. What does this guy have that I don't have, I'd ask?

One guy in particular was everyone's darling. But why the girls were ga-ga over him and not me, I never understood. I'm sure that there were times when I would have been glad to trade lives with him.

But during our senior year, the girl he was dating -- the girl that I, of course, wanted to be dating -- ended up pregnant. And when that happened, that pretty quickly put an end to me wishing to be him. Then, I was very thankful that I was me. Virgin, yes. But father, no.

Have you ever wanted to trade lives with someone? Why do you imagine that their life is so much better than your own?

"Enjoy your own life without comparing it with that of another." -- Marquis Condorcet

Comments

Jesus and the Inconvenience of His Word to American Christians

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Microblogging? The Future of Writing with ADHD

Bill Bennett is a very common name. Right now, I'm reading a book by the Australian film maker Bill Bennett. He hiked the Camino in 2013 and then wrote a book (and made an Australian movie, not available in the U.S.) about it. Seems he kept a blog about that hike, too. I went to look for his Camino blog, and found he started one years after the hike, but he didn't post regularly... His last post from 2022 announced his had Parkinson's and had kept the diagnosis secret for 4 years. Now that almost three years have passed from that post, I wonder what's happened to him. Blogs are weird. They just sit there. Anyone can stumble upon them, and read them. So I decided to keep looking for his Camino blog. https://billbennett.blog/home/ *** And I found another Bill Bennett, this one from New Zealand, who keeps a microblog. It's current and updated. "What's a microblog?" My wife asked. Well, I said, it's a small blog. Just a sentence or two for a post. ...

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