All That You Can't Leave Behind

As most everyone reading this blog would know, I'm a U2 fan. I love going to their U2 shows relative the general populace. Relative to U2 fans, I barely go at all. I have tickets to Atlanta and Tampa and I've not used either set. I gave up my Tampa tickets last night (sold them for face value, dear FBI) because I am under the weather, over worked and found out it would take me approximately 3 hours to get to the venue through bumper to bumper traffic. I couldn't face that and I couldn't leave work til 6 anyway.

The funny thing is... I don't care. I am taking my $100 and going to put it towards the birthday money I got and buy myself something I can enjoy for quite some time. The thing is, I have such wonderful memories of other U2 shows and so missing this concert just frankly isn't painful for me. Everything becomes a memory, "the only baggage you can bring" and whether I have a precious set of smaller memories or a wide collection of them, they don't get richer with more volume.

So will I regret I missed the Vertigo tour? No, of course not because I missed it mostly on purpose. If I had missed it because I didn't know about it, or put myself through the ringer to get to it and failed, that would be bad. Perhaps today I will get the concert DVD (or next week - whenever it is) and see the concert I missed. I think I don't care as much as I used to because my life is filling up in other ways. I don't have singular interests anymore and therefore no one event is the MUST DO of the year. I think, as well, missing the concert in Dublin when my grandmother had her stroke put a lot of things into perspective. That was very hard, because I had never been to Ireland, I was looking forward to hanging out with Heidi and seeing Snow Patrol, Athlete and U2 just sounded like the perfect vacation. But life is funny like that.

A small surprise today came via DirectTV. I'm sick of watching TV and I thought, "I wish I had XM radio in the house because I want to listen to the 'Frank's Place' channel." Lo and behold, I go to the DirectTV music channels and it's been converted to XM radio and I'm listening to Tony Bennett.

So I took today off and have a very healthy list of things to be accomplished today. I guess I better get cracking!