Tammy Westphall wanted to live in the moment. It was so very difficult to do, at least difficult to do for any length of time. She tried all the tricks, meditation, staring at flowers, listening for birds, admiring colors, sitting at a playground A Children's Playground watching children, watching the sunset while having dinner, getting up early to watch the sunrise, spending hours (well, maybe 15 minutes, but it seemed like hours) standing in the backyard staring at the stars. She even drove an hour to sit on the beach and watch the waves roll in and out and out and in. That might have gotten her into the moment except for the two well tanned young men who insisted on playing Frisbee right in front of her. She refused their request to play because, after all, she was there to try to live in the moment, not to play Frisbee or anything else they might have wanted to play.

Nothing seemed to work. Sometimes she felt like she was living in the moment, but that never lasted very long, rarely more than 10 or 15 seconds before she realized she was thinking about something else. There was the job, and the bills and the TV shows she watched last night, and the TV shows she was going to watch tonight, and what she was having for dinner, and should she buy some Ben and Jerry’s or just go with a large container of ice cream. Of course, the Ben and Jerry’s was always so good but so expensive, but a large container left her feeling like she should have another bowl full if she wanted to continue trying to enjoy it in the moment. Worst of all was when she left the moment she was trying to be in to have a discussion in her head about how good the moment was and how to make it better. Usually, the whole thing was fruitless because she couldn’t get into any of the moments she wanted to be in.

The kind of moment she really wanted to get into was one where Tom Cruise was sitting looking at the flowers with her or with Johnny Depp watching the stars and pointing out the Milky Way, or even one where she was watching the sunset over a dinner with Robin Williams and laughing so hard she didn’t dare drink anything. She probably wouldn’t be able to keep up with him, but he would be paying for the dinner and that would be an incredible moment.

If only those two guys playing Frisbee had been Cory Monteith and Mark Salling, that would have been a pretty good moment because it would have meant she was probably sitting in the middle of a TV scene and maybe they would be singing around her, maybe even to her. That would even be better than the only real moment she ever had before, when Jonah Hill bumped into her at the airport and said, “Excuse me.” Maybe it wasn’t much of a moment at the time. Hardly anybody knew him, but that was the kind of moment she wanted to live in again.

Absorbed in thought, while remembering that moment and the look on Jonah’s face, Tammy suddenly walked nose first into a light pole. She saw stars. She checked her nose to make sure it wasn’t broken. It wasn’t. As she continued down the street, the pain started going away; but for a moment, her nose really hurt.