Our bed is situated with the head at a set of double-hung windows over our back-yard. It works well in the room, and I like the smell of outside, especially at this time of year. It's relaxing. However, at times the security light in my neighbor's backyard is not so much. But you take the good with the bad.
I haven't been sleeping very well recently. Not like months and months, just the last week or so. Don't really know why, just can't get my brain to shut down. I lay there, looking out into our backyard. We're sort of in a weird place.
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I was goofing around a little on YouTube this morning. There is something interesting about YouTube-people film themselves, and then watch themselves, and then, in spite of what they see or hear, post themselves on the World Wide Web for everyone else to marvel at too. Then you've got clips from real TV too. And that's nice if you don't keep up with stuff as it comes along.
A little background: my wmil ("wonderful mother-in-law" for those of you who don't regularly receive correspondence from her yourself) was diagnosed about 4 years ago with Parkinson's disease, early-onset. This illness is a non-terminal degenerative disease as I understand it. I imagine that there's some interpretation involved whenever the words terminal and degenerative are found in close proximity, but when she sat us down in our youth pastor's office one Sunday morning, she told us "people die with Parkinson's, not from it."
The entertainment world became acquainted with it when one of it's forever young and beautiful came out that he had would soon begin to show his age 45 years sooner than the world anticipated. Whether he was at the height of his career or not-well, I'll leave that to the historians and experts. But everybody knew: Michael J. Fox-teen werewolf, Alex P. Keaton, and the unintentionally-oedipal, Delorean driving time-traveller, would be dropping out off the silver screen.
Well, as I mentioned earlier, I'd been stumbling around on YouTube, and I started thinking to myself that I hadn't seen any video interviews of him for awhile, and was wondering how the disease was progressing. Well sure enough, there was a Michael J. Fox interview on David Letterman from April of this year. For the past several years, Fox has been leveraging his celebrity both to raise awareness for Parkinson's research and treatment, but also to be a role model for optimism and hope. Having recently finished a new memoir, Fox visited with Letterman as a promotion for the book, and to voice the message of "optimism" that he had witnessed and experienced.
At about 9min20seconds, Letterman ask Fox a question: "So, what have you found out, is [happiness] topical? Can you apply it?" and Fox's response was beautiful. He very casually responded, "I'm still sifting through the evidence I've collected...but...it's about connections-it's about relationships and it's about having a sense of purpose. I think that one of the reasons that there's this counter-intuitive sense of optimism in the country-and things are so bad-but we feel like we're doing something."
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