Karma

Socks don’t get very much attention.

Sure there are a good number of people out there with sock fetishes. But that’s a different kind of attention. I’m talking a true appreciation. The kind that so many girls nowadays have for a cute, comfy pair of shoes, wherein socks are not always such an element of necessity.

And there’s so much to be loved! There are many varieties of socks - toe socks, tabi socks, ankle-socks and half-socks; thigh-highs, knee-highs, tube socks and long socks that scrunch. There are ones with stripes, spots, swirls, tie-dye, and just plain solid colours. They can be made out of anything from nylon to cotton to wool or even angora (mmm), not to mention that impossibly soft fluffy stuff that makes your feet feel like you just put clouds on them. And you can never own too many.
Plus, they are surprisingly versatile. A pair of socks with a hole in them gets a good washing, a snip at the foot, and you’ve got a new pair of arm-warmers (a la Kagerou, for those of you that have read it!). Not to mention that with all the different kind of socks that exist, they are a great way of expressing yourself. Sometimes just knowing that you’ve got a rad pair of socks on under a mundane pair of work pants can brighten your day.

At any rate, one’s feet should be treated with great kindness and respect. After all, one does walk on them all day. Heck, even if you don’t, all you people in wheelchairs and such might just as well dress up those feet of yours too, so they don’t get bored. So why not put a little thought into your socks?

Socks generally get the “you don’t know what you got ’till it’s gone” kind of love. The kind where you wake up one morning, realize you haven’t done any laundry for a bit, and you don’t have any socks left — or that there’s only one of your best pair, because the sock gnomes behind the dryer made away in the night with the other some time last week.

But there are a few people who know their socks, and here are some of them. Replete with accessories and items that are merely sock-related, they not only keep a unique and vibrant array of socks available (I found things here that I had been seeking for a long time, and which could not be found anywhere else), but they also have a little bit of more specific info on each kind, because they check each style out personally when a new kind comes in. They are also very reasonably priced for such high-quality socks. You’ll spend forever just browsing around before you can pick your favourite and get it! Beyond that, they even keep a sock journal, with news, reviews, pictures and other tidbits that updates pretty regularly. If you love socks, check these girls out.

Perhaps this all sounds like a bunch of pointless drivel to you. But maybe tomorrow you’ll take a closer look at your sock drawer. Who knows?

My friend got some bad news yesterday.
Long story short, there are some cells present which, though they appear commonly, have a chance of turning into cancer. For which there is no cure.
As we talked about it, she kept saying “oh well”. And well, I guess that’s it. What more can you say? If it happens it happens, and if it doesn’t it doesn’t. Not to say that one shouldn’t be worried — the thought of it feels like I’ve been hit by a two-ton truck. Or that it should not be fought, if it happens. This wasn’t some kind of super-pacified nihilism.
Because she said to me that even then, she wouldn’t feel as though she were going to die. And I said, if she doesn’t already feel like she’s going to die, why should that have to change?

I don’t know why I take so much notice of these church billboard signs. I don’t go to church. I’m not Christian, and I don’t percieve God in the same manner they do. I am, in fact, of a Bhuddist-Hindu philosophy. But I’m very contemplative, despite context, and am always on a subconscious lookout for concepts to mull over. Things like “Big bang theory? Yeah right! –God” catch my eye now and again.
So this morning on the way to work, after dropping off some of my mum’s heavenly vegetable soup for my best friend (it’s her favourite), I drove by a sign that jumped out at me.
It said, more or less, that prayer was not to give commands to God, but to report for duty.
This challenged my personal perspective.
I have prayed to “God” before, once. I guess I just wanted to see what it was like. It was a warm fuzzy feeling, though uncertain, and of course tinged with that silly feeling that one is talking to oneself about things one already knows. It was the latter that stuck with me, not because I felt stupid for having done it, but because it was true - I was talking to myself. Churches have the strange dichotomy of all at once telling you that God is in everyone, but that “He” is also the master. He is a separate entity. When you speak to him in prayer, you are broadcasting your prayer in a heavenly direction. But what I found, that one night, is that it is simply a further internalization. We pray before we sleep, with what is most important to us weighing on our mind. The comfort of the idea of a God then sends you to sleep with reassurance that someone is giving thought to your problems, your dilemmas. And sometimes it happens, miraculously, that you wake up in the morning and you come to some kind of conclusion, though you can’t explain why. You dreamt something? Or maybe you don’t even remember your dream.
I talk to myself all the time. Driving in my car, falling asleep at night, both silently and out loud. The same thing has happened to me, some strange resolution, realization, or epiphany has come to me, though I have no heavenly agent to which I can attribute its coming. It is of the same nature.
“Prayer” is not for giving commands to God, no. But it is not for recieving them, either. It is for putting those thoughts of yours out in the open. Telling yourself and whatever is floating in the air around you what you are worried about, what you are thankful for, or what you hope will happen, works the same way as it does when you sometimes write something down to remember it and the act of writing it causes you to memorize it. It is now manifest as one assumes God to be. And there it remains, in your subconscious, which processes these thoughts in the background more than you may realize at the time. Is this “God?”
All I had intended to say, initially, was that no one can tell you how to “pray”. But the more I bounced it off of myself in the car on the way here, the more I thought of. All this in a ten-minute drive to work? I’ve got a lifetime ahead of me! This ought to be fun.