AUSTIN, Texas, June 17, 2005 — Two things make me realize how time flies. My dad and other older people, looking at them and knowing that it will be me, soon, older, a little less able to do things maybe. And flipping the calendar every day. Flipping the page-a-day calendar I have in my office with the French phrase on each day. Looking at my cheap Timex that says 'FR 6-17 1:37:21.' Making a new page here in my journal and inching the yellow background up over another day. Getting through one more day with little to show for it. A calendar hangs on the wall, still stuck in May.

I know it makes me more aware of my wasted time, my uselessness, to write it down. Yet I do it.

I don't get out of bed until 8:30. I talk to my dad a couple of times on the phone. I make my welfare call and then I call back to see if he got paperwork in the mail from the doctor he is seeing next week. Later he will call me back about a message on his machine, reminding him of that appointment. He didn't quite understand the message and he was confused. Later yet I will call him and ask if he got PT appointments for next week that I need to remind him about. It's the least I can do: remind him of appointments, go with him the first time to some place new, fill out paperwork. "Taking care" of him has gotten very easy again.

I do my journal and proofread something for FFP. Then I am sort of at loose ends. I'd like to finish watching the films I have out from AFF and exchange them today. I need a workout. I have a meeting at 2PM. I decide to do the films, then the meeting, then return the films, then have a workout later in the day. Will this scheme work?

I get the films finished. I get to the meeting which ends up lasting over two hours. While I'm looking at the consultants pictures of country clubs and hearing other participants talk about how they've been to River Oaks or this place or that, I'm thinking how my background is sort of different from others in the club. Part of me is glad of that, I suppose. It is after four when I leave the club. I imagine that I'll go downtown but, thankfully, I drive right by the Mopac entrance and see bumper-to-bumper traffic going downtown. That convinces me that the films can be returned on Monday. I'll spend my 'free' time over the weekend doing something else. Trip planning, reading, straightening up things. I go home. FFP has been cooking up chicken. I could go back to the club and workout. I could go back to the club at seven for a demonstration of Team Tennis. I do neither.

I mess around on my computer until FFP is ready for dinner. We watch the news and eat chicken tenders in some sort of sauce and spinach salad with broccoli and tomato and carrots and onions. We settle in to reading (me: newspapers) and watching a film we got from Netflix. Called Journey to Kafiristan it is based on a true story about Annemarie Schwarzenbach and Ella Maillart, real women taking a trip east in 1939. It was beautifully filmed but boring and you didn't really develop an empathy for the women. After that I watched some quiz shows off the DVR and then watched Stalag 17, the old Billy Wilder flick from 1953 that seems to be the jumping off place for Hogan's Heroes. What movies find their way from Netflix seems to be arbitrary now with our list being updated and added to by both FFP and I and then forgotten about until a movie comes to the top and is sent. FFP went to sleep for Stalag 17. I was glad I watched it, though. However, it was after midnight when I went to sleep. I had a little trouble dropping off.