Tonight I'm not sure what I want to write about. It's been a little while since I've actually wrote something. This last week has aged me.

I'm sitting in my room waiting for the laundry to finish. I don't feel like cooking or cleaning or eating. And I think that's okay for now. For me there's something about an empty stomach that feels right when you're afraid of bad news. I've been wondering how and when Faith would become present to me again, like when I was younger. It occured to me the other day, that I often go so far astray that I don't think to pray even when I need it. I used to thing it must be a miserable thing for God to hear my prayers only when I needed protection. Now when I think about him looking at me when I'm in over my head and I can't step out of my own thoughts for a moment to think of Christ. I've never been convinced by people who lost their Faith over sudden traumatic losses. But that's probably because of every story I've heard about how people in the same sort of circumstance gained rather than lost their belief in God. I think I've let myself fallen prey to something worse, spiritually, soulfully, than those hard times. It's something like a disease in the soul to drift away like that. When I realize where I've gone I'm struck by the thought that I in all that time I must have done serious damage to my Faith, and that it will take time and devotion of thought to put me back in that better place. I'm not sure if that's how it works, but if it is, then I worry someday I won't be able to swim that far.

It's hard to be in prayer. Maybe I'm so used to distracting myself now that I don't have the discipline to focus myself and my thoughts for that long. Sometimes I really don't know how people can do it. Last night I was on a plane from Sacramento, and an elderly filipino woman was sitting next to me. When we started to take off, she pulled out a rosary and prayed for nearly the whole flight. It's something I've seen before, but this time I felt thankful. On the other side of me sat a young business man who was reading some sort of golf magazine. Sacramento airport probably had the highest ratio of single businessmen that I've seen before. This one was clean cut, and like all the other men in suits he looked like he rode this flight everyday. I wondered he ever appreciated women like the lady praying the rosary. I imagine he was so bored with the mundane experience of flying and the beer he was gulping was probably numbing any residual anxiety. I want a better prayer life. And I don't mean that I want the ability to stay in prayer for longer without becoming bored and then self-concious about that boredom. I don't mean I want to be like a runner that has trained himself to lope endlessly around a track. I think what it means is that I want the faith for the prayer to mean something more to me. I don't know if that's just asking for an inspired sensation, but it must be something like sincerity. The kind of sincerity that occurs between friends as they share in their grief.

Life will go on, I will grow old, and for better or worse I will try to prepare for the weight that will come. As much as I've imagined falling asleep at the end of my time surrounding by the people that love me, I know that things will be harder than it seems. I thought about alzheimer's and what it would be like to lose my self, that piece of my thought that's closest to me dashed away. It's terribly sorrowful, and even more so when I think how I could treat the ones that mean the most to me. To lose my self.

I'm not happy with what I've written. I think it's because I'm writing things that just aren't quite right; maybe I'm forcing smaller thoughts to have larger meaning. But I'll let it go for now, and maybe come back to something that was worthwhile.