I experienced an utterly irrational and emotional reaction to something on Friday, which instantly steered my mood toward depression. I have been weepy since. I do like to think why I reacted the way I did and look only for the feeling to pass, as all things do. Reptilian brain.

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I need to vacuum, take care of laundry, and pack an overnight bag, but otherwise I am ready for the UFE. I think.

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Those who most like to govern often seem to govern badly.

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After dreaming about my elementary school gym teacher, I woke up realizing that I may be older now than he was when I knew him and that if he is still alive he may be quite old and frail. When you lose someone, or lose track of them, time stops. He’ll always be the big, athletic, dominant man I remember. The same is true of all the teachers, professors, classmates, and co-workers I recall but haven’t seen in years.

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As a species, house sparrows are a troublesome intruder. As individuals, they can be quite charming as they cock their heads at you as you sit outside the bakery, hoping you will carelessly drop some crumbs their way.

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I’ve seen some small children, proudly escorted by parents with more money than brains (attribution: Dad) driving battery-powered cars. Last week at the bakery, however, it was a tiny wooden bicycle without pedals parked at the door that had passing toddlers drooling. After trying to draw his insistent tyke away several times, one dad muttered, “It is very cool.” Children might appreciate simpler things if given a chance.

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Wouldn’t it be a better world if politics weren’t dominated by politicians?

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It would be a better world if people could make the small extra effort to turn the pool shower here off instead of three quarters of the way toward off. What a thoughtless, lazy waste of water. In the meantime, someone somewhere is dying of want of water.

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A gorgeous male northern cardinal perched on a chair 20 feet from me.

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Do some people have children so they can have someone to yell at and bully? Sometimes I want to ask. And sometimes I want these parents to be put into a program in which they are treated in the same way they treat their children, 24/7. The problem is that they would know that they will be released in a reasonable amount of time. The children are stuck with them for 18 years, an eternity for a bullied child.

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Whether or not you buy into the Myers-Brigg personality typing system (I’m on the fence), the ESTJ has been the bane of my professional existence. Perhaps they could be granted an island, a distant island, where they can mutually admire each other’s purported leadership abilities, adhering mindlessly to pointless rules and sparing the rest of us. If only.

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Lately I have been seeing young people in the faces of the old, and old people in the faces of the young. An old man will pass me, and my mind pictures him 20, 30, 40 years ago. A young woman on the bus is transformed into a crone. Today, a young man walked briskly by me, and I saw him in 50 or 60 years, thin, stooped, shuffling along with his walker.

But I do not see myself this way.