Andy Lien

Okay!  I’ m back metformin side effects pcos from my hiatus…the nine-day West Coast trip was absolutely perfect in every way.  So perfect, in fact, that I’m having a very hard time coming to terms with its end.  I want to tell you about every moment of it, but haven’t found the time.  I want to post every picture I took, but know there’s a limit to the exhibitionism.  I want to rewind my life by two weeks, but that’s just plain crazy talk of time travel.

Kind of.

In my world, science fiction isn’t fiction.  I think in terms of the odd and out-of-the-ordinary.  For instance, I keep coming back to Ray Bradbury’s short work, “All Summer in a Day,” as I ponder my post-vacation existence…the little bit o’ depression that is browning the edges of my life.  Allow me to summarize Bradbury’s story:

A group of humans moved to Venus for a better life.  It rained all the time on Venus.  All the time.  The children don’t remember sun…except for one child, Margot, who moved to Venus when she was five.  The other children were too young to be able to recall a day without rain.  A day without wondering if the sky would drown them.  A day without the percussion of falling water.  The other children disliked Margot for being different…for screaming in the showers that the water couldn’t touch her head.  There was talk that her family might return to Earth for Margot’s well-being and the other children hated her for that, too.  You see, she knew better.  She knew what they were missing by living on the water-drenched planet of Venus.  She knew the sun.

On this particular day on Venus, there was a buzz of excitement.  There would be reprieve from the rain.  For two hours the sun would come out, every seven years.  Two hours of blue sky and warmth.  The children had only guesses as to what it might be like…but Margot knew.  She knew the glow, the heat…that it is like a fire in an oven.

As the raining waned, the other children locked Margot in a closet.

Two hours later, they silently unlocked the closet.

It was raining again.

I glimpsed the sun last week.  I know that life can be a bit better.  I’m figuring out what makes me happy.  And, rather than lock myself in a closet, I have to figure out how to make the sun shine here…or seek until I find the sun.