tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36067402655610276732024-02-08T14:28:42.125-05:00Girl Seeks GoodlifeBlogging My Attempts at Better LivingErikahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09289566036433629960noreply@blogger.comBlogger72125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3606740265561027673.post-36650179041101483022010-11-10T09:25:00.002-05:002010-11-10T09:25:23.270-05:00We interrupt this programColitis flare. Going underground for a while to get myself sorted. See you in a few.Erikahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09289566036433629960noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3606740265561027673.post-71360420867922129212010-11-02T16:26:00.000-04:002010-11-02T16:26:46.353-04:00I'm baaaaackAmidst an intensive napping schedule this past weekend, I managed to perform a personal annual ritual, that of setting my yearly goals. The urge usually overtakes me in the fall. By this point last year's goals and plans have been through the ringer and have come out pretty scathed. (Sorry, guitar skills. Maybe another year.) Generally my priorities and routines have shifted and settled, some snuck out in the middle of the night while others are skittering around in the attic like uninvited guests. <br />
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I use <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Your-Best-Year-Yet-Successful/dp/0446675474/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1288728491&sr=1-1">this book</a> as my guide and this is, I believe, my 4th year. My successes have certainly not been unequivocal, but the book encourages you to appreciate your accomplishments each year and, indeed, I find each year when I write them out I end up with a list I'm proud of. (The list of accomplishments is not always long. I think for '09 it was like, Item 1: survived. End of list.)<br />
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In any case, so far I can tangibly feel my new yearly goals working - because my muscles are sore from yoga class, the re-commitment to which has been reaffirmed. Good for the mind and the body! Strengthens the muscles, quiets the voices.<br />
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I won't bore you with the ins and outs of my goal setting but suffice to say, it was good to remember to make my daily actions match my values. The more of your day that can be spent doing things that correspond with who you really are deep down, the less of a time-waste those activities feel like. Pour example: I'm listening to an "inspirational" audio book during my hour-long commute. I only have turn it off every once in a while to give myself a fake NPR interview about an astounding yet appreciably vague success I've had. ("Well Terry, you know, it's a funny story..")<br />
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I tend to get this urge to self-assess and goal-set in the fall because it feels like either a beginning or an end. Back to school, or else batten the hatches. Shape up. Winter's coming. <br />
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What about you? What do you get the urge for this time of year?Erikahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09289566036433629960noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3606740265561027673.post-81392687105556470512010-10-29T13:01:00.001-04:002010-10-29T13:02:18.995-04:00Surrender, surrender but don't give yourself awayI am dragging. My reserves have been depleted by a cold, not-enough sleep, and some important but difficult and thinking that I've been doing this week, and too much Doing and not enough staring at tree branches.<br />
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So I am raising the white flag. This weekend I am retreating, both in the sense that the enemy forces have gained too much ground and in the getting-zen-on-a-mountain-top way, except in my case the mountaintop is my bedroom. <br />
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This I pledge: I will turn off internet and TV. I will pull out notebooks, art supplies, walking shoes, my favorite jammies, my fuzziest socks, good music, yoga mat, just so they're ready. And I will make no plan, doing only what I feel like doing at a given moment (I'm thinking sleep will be right up there. No alarm! No agenda! Just me and the blankets and pillows, oh boy!) <br />
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Just thinking about it makes me feel perkier already. <br />
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Any suggestions? What makes for a restful, restorative weekend?Erikahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09289566036433629960noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3606740265561027673.post-51333539463770910512010-10-27T08:19:00.001-04:002010-10-27T08:39:19.431-04:00Would you like a little cheese with that whine?It's raining. I'm up early. My eyeballs are tight and my nose is running from allergies. This is a day when crawling back into bed seems like the only compassionate option.<br />
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But we go on. We have projects, goals, ideas, classes scheduled, trips planned, futures to arrive at. We keep marching forward, the cuffs of our jeans are wet, our tissues are balled up in our purses. <br />
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I've been pushing hard lately. The old impulse to do everything perfectly right now!!!!!!!! has been rearing its ugly head and paralyzing me. I have to remind myself to do just one thing at a time. That work is not a life-or-death situation, unless you count your own life and how you're choosing to spend it. I have to remind myself to look at the yellow leaves fluttering on the tree outside, the umbrellas passing by.<br />
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What are you reminding yourself of today?Erikahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09289566036433629960noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3606740265561027673.post-41403404361468742652010-10-25T11:38:00.000-04:002010-10-25T11:43:53.466-04:00To Blog Or Not To BlogPart 1 of ?<br /><br /> It’s a deceptively mundane question. After all, what can a blog accomplish, really? What is its purpose? A time-passer, a soapbox, a means of expression. An occasional receptacle for tirades, streams of consciousness, mindspew, rants (probably outnumbering raves).<br /><br /> Blogs are casual and democratic – any old chucklehead with an internet connection can have one. They are frequently unedited, unplanned, instant, grammatically incorrect. The medium allows flip-flopping, landing all over the map, run-on sentences, long absences while you’re on vacation. It is personal yet public, a diary on a flyer.<br /><br /> You often hear about blogs as a means to an end. Social media, people cry, so often and so loud that it begins to lose its meaning. You gotta promote yourself, you gotta get your jingles into their heads, gotta flog your product on your blog, not to mention tweet and twit and twat and get the handbook on the facebook. <br /><br /> But if I’m here, I’m here as an ends, not a means. Can a blog be an end unto itself? A little internet nugget of whatever it is we look for. These days it’s all about the Search and the engines, those things that power and put structure to your pursuit of all sorts of things… Am I the only one who has googled “the meaning of life” to see what the great white oracle will reveal?<br /><br /> Blogs represent the urge of us squalid, huddled masses toward something greater. A megaphone from which we may broadcast amusing things our cats did, the latest techniques in crochet, gossip from the world of technology, or manga, or book publishing, or the apocalypse, or whatever it is we care enough about to throw some words up on a screen. <br /><br /> For me, it’s this question of happiness, which in my scattered and highly unscientific studies I have learned is not a great question- the better question being the living of a good life, or the good life. <br /><br /> So here I sit, pecking away at the keys for reasons only moderately clear, for a devoted readership of 3 (Hi, guys!). <br /><br /> But also for an audience of one, that is, myself- that is, this nagging part of me that won’t put a sock in it already, no matter how many times competing factions insist that things would go more smoothly if I did.<br /> <br /> What about you, Gentle Reader? What blogs do you read that works of art and ends unto themselves?Erikahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09289566036433629960noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3606740265561027673.post-60046016893264084552010-10-24T20:08:00.000-04:002010-10-25T11:10:54.532-04:00Life and Other QuestionsToday I drove by a plastic sign stuck into the ground by the side of the highway off-ramp informing me that Judgment Day is coming on May 21, 2011. The end times, apparently, are upon us. <br /><br /> It would be easy to believe. To hear the airwaves tell it, the days are dark. People are struggling. Talking heads predict fiery collapse at any moment. It is easy to point to evidence. In the last few years, I, and many family members, have experienced the kinds of crises that force you to look life square in its spitting, frothing face and see what’s there. Physical illness, mental illness, destruction, deformity, natural disaster, plain old garden variety despair. Unemployment, the deep and profound and random unfairness of life, not to mention not-nice people and gridlocked traffic, can quickly take the shine off life. <br /><br /> And yet. When you look the unfairness of life right in the middle of its fat face, when a moment of reckoning is before you, when you are forced by circumstance to decide whether you will, literally and/or metaphorically, get busy living over get busy dying, to quote the Shawshank Redemtion…there is something that makes you return to that “and yet”. <br /><br /> Somewhere, somehow, you are not ready to give up on the strange beauty of life, moments funny and serene, an image of the moon framed in a window that you remember for no good reason, the force at once both within you and beyond you that makes you gasp for air coming up from underwater, hunger for food and sex, fear a drawn gun.<br /><br /> The will to live. The life force and the force of life – force, like strength, as in, you have no choice. <br /><br /> Like the Desiderata poem they print on things they sell at the Hallmark store: with all its sham, drudgery, and broken dreams, it is still a beautiful world. <br /><br /> There are things that make life worth living, and there are ways to live a worthy life, and I’m just speaking for myself here, I want to discover them and do them and see what they are.<br /><br />***<br /><br />Update: Per the below comment, I have revised the mis-remembered date on the sign. And also, Ed. Note: Wow.Erikahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09289566036433629960noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3606740265561027673.post-27241891741107654652010-10-11T20:53:00.000-04:002010-10-11T21:01:14.283-04:00Night VisitorLast night my dear departed Grandpa came to me in a dream and said "I'm a big believer in the Grand Scheme of Things." <br /><br />We were on the farm, standing by the barn, which was unpainted, peeling white and gray. His eyes were that sharp blue, but with a cloudy part. I had been talking and talking, trying to give him ideas for an essay he was writing, and he had to interrupt me and say "No, Listen--" and that's when he told me about the scheme of things. I woke up with his words loud in my head - I usually forget my dreams quickly but not this time.Erikahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09289566036433629960noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3606740265561027673.post-73562411912725021802010-10-03T20:52:00.001-04:002010-10-03T20:59:42.018-04:00No Dull Boys HereA beautiful day. Waffles with strawberries in the backyard, crisp, cold, fall-like weather. Spangles and I went for a hike and I was reminded of the phrase from CD Wright: the trees true me. A comment on the web site described them as cathedral trees. They were. <br /><br />As Spangles said this morning "I should do work all day, but spiritually, I need to go hiking."<br /><br />And this afternoon when we got back, we both sat down mildly, without a fuss, to work on things that needed working on. Which is better, I think, than working half-martyred, sulking and staring out the window at the beautiful day, checking the internet, skulking into the kitchen for an unnecessary snack, turning on the TV "just for a minute". <br /><br />Everybody needs to take themselves for a spin sometimes. Working is easier for me when I feel I've played.Erikahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09289566036433629960noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3606740265561027673.post-12792453215812187872010-09-29T11:04:00.000-04:002010-09-29T12:12:53.517-04:00An Old Testament QuestionI've been thinking about adversity lately, because my newest niece was born with some last week. Her problems, thankfully, are not life threatening, but at the same time they are not insignificant. <br /><br />As Spangles put it, it's stuff like this that makes you wonder, if there is a God, is he asleep at the wheel or what?<br /><br />The only upshot I've been able to find when pain and suffering strikes is that, as I've witnessed first-hand, when your luck runs out, your tribe runs in. You find out who your friends are, you find out how much you are loved, and you find out that you are stronger than you realized. <br /><br />My cousin Ekkie and family were there for me more times than I can count. My impulse is to want to do everything I can for them, but what I can do seems like so little. What can you do for a loved one who is facing painful circumstances and unknown outcomes?<br /><br />You show up with food and words of comfort. You just show up. You can watch the kids and fold the laundry. You can do research, offer to drive. You try to make the day-to-day stuff go as smoothly as possible. It would be foolish to do nothing just because you can't do more. <br /><br />And in some ways, a person who is facing suffering has to face it alone. You can offer support and encouragement, remind them of their own strength, but they are the ones who have to walk through whatever it is they're walking through. Sometimes all you can give them is understanding and space. Especially for us "helper" types, the urge is always to run in and start trying to fix things and reassure people. It's so hard to stand by while someone you love is in pain. But sometimes you have no choice but to let people face the full force of all of it, trust them to withstand it and come out on the other side. <br /><br />I think in life some people are thrust up against moments of being completely unconsoled and unconsolable, and I think what happens in those moments is important. You have to stare the ugly side of life right in the eye, the part of it that is brutish, nasty, and short, and at that time you have make some hard choices. There is no relief, no burning bush, no choir of angels or beam of sunlight pointing the way. You just decide quietly to yourself, whether you will (to quote the Shawshank Redemption) get busy livin', or get busy dyin'. In the face of all the many and varied kinds of suffering humankind can encounter, what are you going to do? <span style="font-style:italic;">What</span> are you going to <span style="font-style:italic;">do</span>? <br /><br />At times of adversity in particular I wonder if there is or is not something bigger than us, an omniscient air traffic controller looking down and nudging things in ways that we can't understand. For example, it was a horrible flood that led Baby E's family to resettle here in this area which happens to be an international center of study for her condition, and where family is nearby and willing and able to offer support. It was a miserable job and health condition that led me to reduce my working hours, making my schedule flexible and allowing me not just the desire but the time to help out. My parents, too, are experiencing a lull in their hectic work schedule at this welcome time. I think about how Spangles came into my life just before the Year of Bad Things Happening started happening. <br /><br />It makes you wonder if there's a higher logic, someone moving the puzzle pieces around, sending in solace at times of great suffering. If there is or isn't, as Sara Crewe put it in <span style="font-style:italic;">The Little Princess</span>, "a Magic that will never let the worst things quite happen."Erikahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09289566036433629960noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3606740265561027673.post-50970646124888515652010-09-28T12:24:00.000-04:002010-09-28T14:56:32.465-04:0010 Reasons to Put Some 3-Year Old In Your Life1. They are hilarious. (e.g.: Edbear attempting to slide down the concrete path on his butt as if it were a playground slide. Did not work that great.)<br /><br />2. They think you are hilarious. Pratfalls, funny faces, pretending light things are heavy, anthropomorphizing inanimate objects, pushing a towel on a swing. They eat it up so heartily you start thinking "Man am I funny. I should charge for this comedy gold."<br /><br />3. It's good exercise. "Run with meeeee! Chase meeee! Go get the balls I keep hitting into the street! Heave my 30-pound body into the air!" Who knew the best personal trainers were the ones that stare up at you with an irresistably cute face and say "uppie, uppie!" <br /><br />4. They are great appreciators of the finer things in life. Splashing in puddles, a good story, a bad fart joke, bacon. They are not capable of <span style="font-style:italic;">not</span> living in the moment. Kids could give Thich Nhat Hanh a run for his money. If he had money. <br /><br />5. They are gullible (see number 1). You can tell them anything! They don't know! The only limit is what your imagination can think of to tell them about where the boy on the bike is going or why the truck makes a beeping noise when it backs up.<br /><br />6.They make you feel like a strong, omnipotent giant. In the workaday world you are just another shmoe. Around a kid you are Smelda, Viking God of Opening Things, Making Toys Function, Getting Out-of-Reach Objects, Fine Motor Skills, and Source of All Worldly Knowledge. (It's nice to have all the answers once in a while.) <br /><br />7. A little body hurtled into your lap, or clinging to your side, is an excellent source of warmth.<br /><br />8. You don't have to make small talk with them. They could give a crap. The real question is, will you or won't you take me outside to play.<br /><br />9. Light-up sneakers.<br /><br />10. Unabashed singing.Erikahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09289566036433629960noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3606740265561027673.post-10164383828210787332010-09-26T08:29:00.000-04:002010-09-26T10:00:01.614-04:00Beside the Still Waters<span style="font-style:italic;">"And I promised to change my priorities. You see, I think that the whole concept of happiness changed for me. When I was in the jungle, I read - and it comes many times in the Bible - it says that when you cross the valley of tears and you arrive to the oasis, the reward of God is not success, it's not money, it's not admiration or fame, it's not power - his reward is rest." </span><br /><br />This is from an interview I heard on npr with Ingrid Betancourt, who spent six years in the jungle as a prisoner of a Colombian rebel group. She's speaking about her perspective when she was finally freed.<br /><br />Now, normally I try to avoid such tales of horrible torture and misery, but npr is sneaky because they just shuffle these things in right after the jolly, gentle-mocking-of-current-events show. (An aside: It's surprising how hard it is to avoid media/entertainment/time-passers that have violence and ugliness at their center. I told the bookseller at the used bookstore that I didn't want any books where horrible things happen and she looked at me like I was asking if they sold diapers. Yes, I know you need conflict in a story, but does it have to be non-stop murder and adultery? It seems like a failure of imagination. Love and death, is that all these writers can come up with? What about those of us who want a happy little escapist jaunt of reading, not a profound treatise that will shake our conception of life as we know it? The bookseller ended up handing me a volume of chick lit (which I had already read, incidentally), but isn't there a middle ground between saying you <span style="font-style:italic;">don't</span> want a book that will hang a little gloom cloud over your head and saying you <span style="font-style:italic;">do </span>want a shallow book about shopping and hair dye? OK, diatribe over.)<br /><br />Anyway, I think that aside is tangentially related to the point I was hoping to get at which is: rest. I was struck by Betancourt's comment that what she wanted out of life after six years of unimaginable suffering, was (in addition to cake and ice cream), rest. <br /><br />I can relate to this desire. After The Year Of Bad Things Happening, I remember telling my spiritual advisor that what I wanted more than anything was just to lie down. Physically, of course, but also, you know, on a deeper level. And actually, the word I used at the time was <span style="font-style:italic;">lay</span> down, and that was accurate too. I wanted to lay down my arms. I was tired from keeping by guard and my hackles up all the time, waiting for the other shoe to drop, the constant red alert. At the time I even printed out the 23rd psalm and taped it up by my pillow, replacing the word Lord with the word Love because, you know, jury's still out. <br /><br />I wonder if this urge to rest after a valley of shadow is a common phenomenon. I am thinking of the lovely <a href="http://www.slowlovelife.com/">Slow Love Life</a> blog and book, about a woman whose life came down in a spectacular crash, and how it changed her perspective. Once out on the other side, she didn't even want her fast-paced, high-powered job back. She wanted to putter in the garden, live at the beach, watch the sky. <br /><br />And I can <span style="font-style:italic;">so</span> relate to that. I was thinking about my priorities recently, and the one that came out on top was just, rest. I want to sleep 8, 9, 10 hours a night! I don't want to rush around in the morning, cramming a bagel into my mouth as I run for a bus. I don't want to be one of those Women On-the-Go you see in commercials. I want to be a Woman At Rest. I want to water my plants, cut out pictures of things I like from shelter magazines and catalogs. I want to re-read Jane Austen and novels about make-up artists to the stars. The past two weekend nights, my nightlife centered around the procurement and ingestion of ice cream. And I <span style="font-style:italic;">like</span> it that way! <br /><br />In some ways this goes against everything I believe in. A part of me would prefer it if I could be productive 25 hours a day. I give myself gold stars for organizing the tupperware and paying bills and learning new vocabulary words, and a part of me wouldn't be satisfied until I'm publishing sonnets from the top of Mt. Everest while giving life advice to Oprah Winfrey and the Dalai Lama while skiing backwards. And even then, I would be thinking, "I should be doing jumps." <br /><br />On some level, it's good not to be satisfied, because it pushes you forward, gives you goals to aim toward. On the other hand, <span style="font-style:italic;">never</span> to be satisfied? How sad.<br /><br />I wanted to be a fascinating and adventurous artist, perhaps, or an early Bob Dylan singer/songwriter selling stories of the vagabond life, or a Jane Goodall communing with the gorillas. I didn't think I wanted to be someone whose blood pressure got up for the Home Organizing Aides aisle of Target (which it totally did yesterday, by the way, I <span style="font-style:italic;">loved</span> it.) <br /><br />And then I've got that German Orthodox/American Puritan work ethic/guilt, and was told from an early age that I was bright and capable, and got hooked on grades and awards and achievements and other external measures of "enoughness". And when the other shoe dropped, when it got down to the wire, when the chips hit the fan, know what that stuff did for me? All of diddly squat. <br /><br />So here I am. One faction wants Barack Obama and whoever the prime minister of England is now to crown me Queen of the Free World and give me that golden admission ticket to the chocolate factory of full of Chosen Ones. (Little known fact, Homeland Security owns 4 golden tickets, the fifth is rumored to be in North Korea.)<br /><br />And another part of me just wants to chill here in the green pastures and restoreth my soul a little, achieve nothing more than a nap, and be satisfied with all the things I already have.Erikahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09289566036433629960noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3606740265561027673.post-84205171087523944022010-09-20T22:05:00.000-04:002010-09-22T09:36:19.721-04:00On The Good LifeMy own questions to myself got me thinking -- in the grand tradition of questions to oneself. Seriously though, what <span style="font-style:italic;">do</span> I want this blog to be? (Or this blog-to-be to be?)<br /><br />I wish for the bite of <a href="http://betsylerner.wordpress.com/">Betsy Lerner</a>, the humor of <a href="http://tomatonation.com/">Sarah Bunting</a>, the deep soul-searching lyricism of <a href="http://www.salon.com/life/since_you_asked/">Cary Tennis</a>. And I shun lame AdWords ads, trite subject lines, "lists" and "tips," as if anyone knows anything more than anyone else. Bloggers who clearly copied a page out of "how to write a successful blog", who cluttered the page with buttons and gadgets, who are clearly out to make a buck. What about being out to make a moment? What about being out to write good things about a specific topic? What about giving people something they can count on, a little nugget of inspiration or interest or unusual-ness or joy? What about a little ray of computer-aided connection drifting into all those bleak and lifeless cubicles?<br /><br />The problem with blogging about/striving for happiness is that it's too confining. In some ways, too bland. How can we go around smiling all the time, like flight attendants, like a painted clown? There's more to life than cascades of ecstasy and joy. The goal can't be pure happiness. It doesn't make a good goal on the horizon, because it's slippery and hard to predict, hard to measure, describe, define. <br /><br />Martin Seligman, positive psychology demigod, addresses this problem with the concept of the good life. It is up to each person what it means to live the good life. <br /><br />To Scrooge McDuck it was diving into a swimming pool full of gold coins. To the image in my head of some 50's black and white gangster, the good life is what they'll be livin' as soon as they pull off this bank heist - cut to a nightclub filled with champagne and jazz and 50's bombshells in pointy 50's bras, men with slick hair wearing expensive suits... <br /><br />But the good life is not be confused with life on Easy Street. <br /><br />The concept of the good life allows for sorrow and struggle, death and taxes. It lets you whine, encounter suffering, overcome tragedy, grieve loss, pick scabs. The good life is not to be confused with the perfect life or the life of comfort and ease. It makes allowances for saving ones own soul. The good life acknowledges that we are not all walking around in a toothpaste commercial. <br /><br />I consider it a small victory for my own good life that I stopped for groceries on the way home so the cupboard won't be bare; that I bought three used books; that Spangles and I ate our microwaved leftovers in the backyard by citronella candlelight. <br /><br />Thinking about the good life made me think about another of Seligman's tenets, which is savoring. That positive experiences are made even more so by the act of relishing them. So I would like to take a moment to pause and relish life with good old Spangles (keep in mind he was in a lovey-dovey mood because I'd just brought home six miniature frozen pizzas and an eight-pound pork shoulder):<br /><br />Spangles (after embracing me [I was wearing a cardigan]): This sweater isn't fair.<br />Me: Why?<br />Spangles: It's too soft and snuggly. With your inherent snugglability, it's too much.<br /><br />Or, as I was puttering about and he was studying on the couch- "This is everything I ever wanted out of living together."<br /><br />Or, after he came over and gave me a kiss- "It's a wonder I get anything done at all."<br /><br />One must savor the fact that I have what every girl wants, which is to be adored. Here is a quote I came across as an epigraph in the used bookstore. It's from Tom Robbins:<br /><br /><br />"The bottom line is that (a) people are never perfect, but love can be, (b) that is the one and only way that the mediocre and vile can be transformed, and (c) doing that makes it that. We waste time looking for the perfect lover, instead of creating the perfect love."<br /><br />And you know what else? I have a niece on the way tomorrow. And a nephew who all on his own invented "walking like an eggie" by putting his shirt over his bent knees so that only his feet stick out, and walk across the floor. And another niece with eyes like shiny blueberries. If that life isn't good, what is?<br /><br />What are you savoring today, Gentle Reader?Erikahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09289566036433629960noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3606740265561027673.post-3226355149674686532010-09-20T18:27:00.000-04:002010-09-20T18:36:49.281-04:00What Is This Blog About?The Twin requested that I update my blog. I know that when I see a new one of hers I feel a sweet, sparkly rush of anticipation, and I do want to reciprocate.<br /><br />But, The Twin's blog has a subject matter (her classroom), and new material is generated daily. For me, the slow but not unwelcome plodding of routine often leaves me feeling as if I don't have much to say. 'Nother day 'nother dollar.<br /><br />When I started this blog I thought it was about my interest in positive psychology. But now I'm thinking it might just be about my interest in <span style="font-style:italic;">my own</span> positive psychology. And negative psychology. Etc. <br /><br />I want to have a topic, but what is it? Is it inspiration, and how we get inspired? Is it happiness, creativity, progress, life, our collective human bumbling toward greater insight and understanding? Searching for answers/meaning/delicious snacks? A random place to unload my thoughts? An insipid trend?<br /><br />What is this blog about? What am I all about?<br /><br />In blogging and in life, I am searching for a subject.Erikahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09289566036433629960noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3606740265561027673.post-36920371007938544032010-09-06T12:15:00.001-04:002010-09-06T13:58:39.463-04:00Meaning and GivingBeloved cousin Wee was in town, and told me of her current dilemma. Perhaps because of a stessbasket-y project she's working on at work, or perhaps because of all the media attention to the 5-year anniversary of Katrina, after which she had to rebuild her life...she is thinking about what it all means. <br /><br />Sure, you work a good job, you try to make a nice life for yourself, you love your family, you do enjoyable and pleasant things, you have your hobbies...and is that it? Is that all there is to life, a dance featuring pleasantness interspersed with stressbasketing, and hope that pleasantness has the lead role? And in the end it all gets washed away?<br /><br />Tal Ben-Shahar, positive psychology guru, writes that happiness is a combination of pleasure and meaning. So even if you're doing well on the pleasure side of things, if you don't have enough meaning, you feel like something's lacking. <br /><br />And cousin Wee reconfirms that meaning is a tricky thing to pin down. Viktor Frankl doesn't necessarily say that life is anything more than circling a bleak existential drain - but, while we're here, we must make our own meaning, we decide what will bring it to our lives. <br /><br />It seems to me that meaning has to do with giving. Like Winston Churchill said, we make a living by what we get, we make a life by what we give. But where and why and how to give is what makes up the most difficult part of this question. What can you give, what gifts can you share, what motivates you to do so? What do you care a lot about? What do you know a lot about? I think it's about using your powers for good - which means you have to think both about your powers and your idea of what really is good.<br /><br />I think many women of a certain age find it easy to think that having children and having a family will give life meaning. And it can. Leaving a legacy of yourself, passing on your values and beliefs, being a part of humanity continuing itself... but how do you do that if you haven't figured out yourself, your values, your beliefs, what parts of humanity are worth continuing?<br /><br />Although thinking about meaning in life is usually totally my jam, I spent my whole summer in a blissful summer coma, flitting from leaf to leaf without a care in the world. As I've mentioned before, it's been a sweet relief compared to feeling like a sherpa carrying a hundred pound sack on my back. <br /><br />But the approach of fall always makes me restless and ambitious, makes me want to plan my back to school outfit and set new goals and excelsior!!!!!ever upward. I have schemes and plans and dreams, which is also nice, in comparison to feeling like a member of the undead, walking around with nothing inside but blank walls and cork. <br /><br />But I'm still tired and summer-coma-y enough to want to take on all these things slowly, still take time to practice the skill of savoring. E.g.: I am sitting on Spangles' parents' back porch on a gorgeous, sunny, September day. I can here the neighbors gabbing poolside in the next yard over. Spangles is reading for class. The dog is snoozing on the couch, a hummingbird visits the hummingbird feeder, its wings so fast they are visible and invisible at the same time.Erikahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09289566036433629960noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3606740265561027673.post-54134125250183533502010-09-03T11:00:00.000-04:002010-09-03T11:11:16.593-04:00In MemoriamEvery so often, someone you know dies. Yesterday I thought I saw a picture of a former bookstore coworker in the funeral announcements section of the newspaper, and I was right. He was 60, not that young, but not that old, either. <br /><br />I didn't know him that well, and it's been a long time, so it's not like I can muster the grief that goes along with losing a dear loved one. And the usual platitudes about how life is short and you never know and live life to the fullest are used so often that they lose their meaning.<br /><br />For me I guess it's just a feeling of surprise. The old guard at the bookstore, the dudes who chose to make selling books their vocation, it was like they were Mt. Rushmore or the Statue of Liberty or something. Something had at one point put them there, but so long ago that it was like they had always been there. And you just assume they always will be. <br /><br />But they won't. No one knows what will happen eventually to the rock and metal faced monuments. They outlast us, but not forever. You think you can count on certain things but you can't, not always. <br /><br />I don't know what I'm trying to get at here. Someone I knew died, that's all I'm trying to say. It feels more significant than a regular day.Erikahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09289566036433629960noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3606740265561027673.post-16883007856524930662010-09-01T18:43:00.000-04:002010-09-01T18:54:18.139-04:00Don't Have To Live Like A RefugeeIt seemed apropos that, despite all the help I've received along the way from Spangles and my friend Blondie, I did that last scrub-down and took the last screws from the walls on my own. I vacuumed streaks of clean into the dust and debris, I tossed out long-unidentifiable refrigerator gunk. I moved through the old apartment, room by room, removing all the last traces of myself. It was awesome. It was like erasing myself, erasing the taint of the past. Taking out the garbage, literally.<br /><br />I love that you get to reinvent yourself. I love that you can change your life if you're not happy with it. I love that with some planning and elbow grease, you can get rid of your old snail shell and pick out a new one that suits you better. I love that you can die and be reborn. <br /><br />Maybe that all sounds a tad melodramatic to ascribe to a grimy apartment, but that thing was an albatross for so long. Now I am someone with hardwood floors and three couches. I am a person who completed a triathlon. I am someone who attempted to better herself. Sure, I still eat too much pasta and haven't showered in the very recent past and have trouble tearing myself away from instant Netflix to be a productive member of society - I mean I'm still a human <span style="font-style:italic;">being.</span><br /><br />But man it feels good to have only one apartment at a time. This one is now full of boxes of my crap again, but eventually, I will find a place for it all. There is a place for it. There is a place for <span style="font-style:italic;">us.</span> L'chaim!Erikahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09289566036433629960noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3606740265561027673.post-30220947064401135212010-08-30T17:22:00.000-04:002010-08-30T17:34:31.768-04:00Quote of the Day: The Reward"The journey is the reward."<br /><br />I am considering this in the contexts of the following: triathlons especially finish lines, our vocations, deadlines, moving house, uncertainty, projects I want to embark on but don't know how, selling things on craigslist, Back To School. Actual rewards, such as chocolate and Christmas bonuses.Erikahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09289566036433629960noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3606740265561027673.post-26885285199202176072010-08-26T20:03:00.000-04:002010-08-26T20:06:38.593-04:00Words Failed MeAmid the catastrophic year- no book<br />no bible, speech or phrase would hear<br />your pain. No prayer, no 23rd psalm<br />would lay you down to sleep or be<br />your balm. The poems you’d held up to your chest<br />so long as living beings bringing warmth<br />and tidings from the lands of friendly others<br />were as if written in another tongue.<br /><br />You who labored diligent as any<br />twenty-year old might whose mind and body<br />battled for the spotlight. You who filled<br />five-subject spiral notebooks with your scribbles,<br />and wrote the world around you down on index<br />cards- quotes that you were sure would soon<br />sink in and leave you lifted up, inspired.<br />You who made a wallpaper of letters<br />and thought your favorite writers to be friends.<br /><br />Where were they when the blood filled up<br />the bowl? What kind of friends leave friends<br />so unconsoled? When the phone call came<br />the lump was not benign and where were they?<br />Smugly silent, lost upon the page.<br />The collapse of roof and ceiling in the night,<br />the miserable fight, the time spent curled<br />in a fetal ball in tears, the waiting room<br />of Chester County hospital- all words<br />had disappeared. And so (we thought) you learned:<br /><br />let the books be burned before the people.<br />May the alphabet be swallowed in a rage.<br />Let us be judged by flesh and fear and action.<br />Believe in God or science, trust yourself,<br />lean on your tribe, but leave the black and white<br />to those less wise. Words are bad friends, they make<br />a fool of you, they plunder, lie, betray.<br />Nowhere in the fine print will you find<br />what you are seeking: no truth, no meaning.<br /><br />So if you find yourself one early evening-<br />late in summer, sun escaping fast<br />behind the neighbors’ house- drawn back in<br />some sentimental fashion to the page,<br />a place you once heard whispers of a song...<br />if you seek solace, or a place to place<br />your heartbreak, or escape to, just remember.<br />You could start writing then. You could be wrong.Erikahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09289566036433629960noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3606740265561027673.post-2527000633173508072010-08-23T14:14:00.000-04:002010-08-23T14:16:40.383-04:00An Internet Gem<a href="http://failblog.org/2010/05/19/epic-fail-photos-rise-to-power-fail/"><img src="http://failblog.files.wordpress.com/2010/05/cool-list-p.jpg" alt="epic fail photos cool-list" title="epic fail photos cool-list" width="500" height="641" class="alignnone size-full wp-image-49258" /></a><br />see more <a href="http://failblog.org">Epic Fails</a>Erikahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09289566036433629960noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3606740265561027673.post-49920526364268675392010-08-23T14:08:00.000-04:002010-08-23T14:11:40.740-04:00Quote of the Day: The Future<span style="font-style:italic;">At twenty-three, Dexter Mayhew's vision of his future was no clearer than Emma Morley's. He hoped to be successful, to make his parents proud and to sleep with more than one woman at the same time, but how to make these all compatible? He wanted to feature in magazine articles, and hoped one day for a retrospective of his work, without having any clear notion of what that work might be. He wanted to live life to the extreme, but without any mess or complications. He wanted to live life in such a way that if a photograph were taken at random, it would be a cool photograph. Things should look right. Fun; there should be a lot of fun and no more sadness than absolutely necessary. </span><br /><br />Excerpted from One Day by David NichollsErikahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09289566036433629960noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3606740265561027673.post-24012480179869570442010-08-22T10:57:00.000-04:002010-08-22T12:06:27.881-04:00Michigan Seems Like A Dream To Me NowIn the last scene of the TV series Freaks and Geeks, which I have just finished Netflixing, the main character Lindsey gets off the bus her parents think is taking her to academic camp and into a waiting van of Grateful Deadheads to go follow the band around the US for a couple weeks. <br /><br />I guess I shouldn't have been surprised by this, but I was. In the story it represented an act of rebellion, the first out-of-character thing she'd ever done, a new leaf, a new way of looking at the world.<br /><br />If it were me at that age, I would have sucked it up and gone to academic camp, done what was expected of me, pleased those in the position to praise me. <br /><br />But after years after all of that pleasing and up-sucking, I have a growing urge to climb into the van. There is no one left to please, no more papers to be graded, no more report cards to be issued. That's one of the things I find annoying about this real world: there is no deus ex machina to come down and tell you how you are doing in relation to a random sampling of your peers. After years - decades - of worrying about how I measure up on the curve, the curve has devolved into a jumble of meaningless squiggles. How can I know whether or not I am Enough when there is no teacher designated to tell me so? How do I know if I have worked hard enough, studied hard enough, am naturally smart enough, if there is no number or letter value to assign to my recent efforts? In school I worked so hard to learn the rules of the game and then outsmart them, and now I am chagrined to find that everyone is playing a different game, they are making up the rules as they go, there is no consistent scoring pattern. I was not prepared for this! <br /><br />And to top it all off I am now beginning to worry that while I was busy immersing myself in the minutiae of an unwinnable and ultimately irrelevant game, other people were climbing into vans and going to sex clubs and backpacking through Vietnam and Cambodia, thereby gaining a lead in a different contest, one which Spangles might refer to as Drinking Deeply From the Cup of Life.<br /><br />I worry that this urge to go look for America, to have a crazy adventure, to do something wild and unexpected, is a rather bourgeois upper-middle class desire - not the desire, maybe, but the ability to execute it. Plane tickets to Cambodia, taking six months away from an income stream seem like luxuries that only a certain demographic could afford. <br /><br />Still, sailors and settlers and explorers have embarked on the unknown for centuries, although they usually had more concrete reasons than restiveness and the quest for self-discovery. But why not? Who doesn't want to See the World!!!?<br /><br />But then, is going somewhere just to see it a good use of resources? Particularly when going to more impoverished countries, is it enough to just be a tourist, stay in the hotels, spend your tourist dollars? And on the other hand, when you go on one of those mission-type trips where you build a house or something in between your tourist destinations, doesn't that seem a little, I don't know, condescending or something? <br /><br />And then you have the ones who walk the length of the US or do the Appalachian trail barefoot. Dudes who just up and leave, no point, no purpose, they just want to walk, do something wild and different, see what they can see, the Doc Watsons in Cannery Row. <br /><br />How to do something with no point, no purpose, no net gain? How is such a feat to be embarked upon? Even when I studied abroad in the back of my mind was the satisfying thought that I was also earning a foreign language minor. (Even though...fat lotta good it's done me so far...)<br /><br />How do you balance this vague Simon and Garfunkel looking for America yearning, with something that wouldn't make my family sick with worry, with something that seems like it has a point, with something that I could even afford? And how do you balance that with the feeling that the whole point would be to do something crazy, something your family wouldn't approve of, something that doesn't make any kind of sense but you just up and do it anyway and find a way to make it work? <br /><br />Perhaps even more enjoyable than a real adventure is the longing for one, the sense of limitless possibility (if only), the hurt so good, an aching tooth you can't seem to leave alone. I could, I would, I might, and then I continue my routine, write in a blog, cut pictures from magazines, imagine how I might have squandered all the money I borrowed for higher education in an entirely different way, how I might still make it, still go, still find, and find out, what I'm looking for.<br /><br /><span style="font-style:italic;">"Kathy, I'm lost," I said, though I knew she was sleeping<br />I'm empty and aching and I don't know why<br />Counting the cars on the New Jersey Turnpike<br />They've all gone to look for America</span>Erikahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09289566036433629960noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3606740265561027673.post-18752184094876562002010-08-19T13:54:00.000-04:002010-08-19T14:31:31.628-04:00The New MeI have moved house. Jung might suggest that I have symbolically begun to inhabit a new self, and I have chosen to celebrate my revamping my blog which has been languishing pitifully over the summer, like a dried out garden whose appointed tender has been off gallivanting irresponsibly.<br /><br />As August descends so does that exquisite feeling of endings, dread, poignancy...the Back To School feeling that haunts me in August years after the academic calendar has ceased to have a bearing on my life, other than the way that this month inevitably feels like the last few minutes of a long back massage - great pleasure that is hard to separate from anticipation of the End. <br /><br />And in fact, this heavy idea I began with, this pursuit of happiness, seems to have dried up and blown away. Who knows if it will be back again in another form, tumbleweeds or convection currents or a particle caught on trade wind that lands in your eye, but in any case I find myself gazing at the bookshelf I have full of books about happiness, finding it, keeping it...with a feeling similar but not quite as strong as disgust. <br /><br />Perhaps I have finally talked this topic to death, or at least a measure of zombie- like living deadness, and I feel too bouyant and distractable and dilletantish to go poking my nose in that dusty old tome. I want to chase butterflies and fiddle all day while the ants lay in their supplies! I want to go for a long pointless bike ride and stay up late watching inane youtube videos! I want to have a second, third, fourth, fifth childhood, whittle sticks in the backyard for no reason, tell ghost stories, travel by catapult and parachute!<br /><br />Yea, I walked through the valley of the shadow of death and it was a DRAG. Now I want to get motion sick rolling down hills and climb into waiting hot air balloons. I want to play hookey and splash in the creek and go riding on the trains with the hobos, finally, after all those years of wanting to, gazing wistfully out of the classroom window where I diligently learned my times tables and the price of achievement. <br /><br />The New Me stays up late drinking wine with friends. The New Me might try to get in on this party of puppeteers getting into nonsense in Fishtown. I google cruises to anarctica and the beautiful empty facade of former hotel the Divine Lorraine. I will write odes to crumbling places and host parties and string up lights.<br /><br />Somewhere in a dingy apartment on South Street in the recent past the Old Me still sits, looking for answers in books, curled up with desperation or despair. I want to send her a post card that says "No Regrets" and "Wish u were here" with a picture of an old old man on the front, but how do you mail something to someone for whom there is no known address?Erikahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09289566036433629960noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3606740265561027673.post-80188530993737444442010-07-13T11:12:00.000-04:002010-07-13T11:24:50.282-04:00Like a Madeline CookieLast night at the gym Antiques Roadshow: Salt Lake City was on. I have loved AR ever since I first moved into my apartment and, inexplicably, it seemed it was the only show that was on the only channel that came through. I learned to love it, and it wasn't hard.<br /><br />Anyway, there was this one very old lady on it who had some sort of extremely old book of importance to Mormonism that she had brought in that her grandaddy had taken with him on the boat to America or something like that. The white haired lady sat very modestly and quietly while the rare books guy went through it bit by bit. In the end told her that it was worth like 50,000 dollars - I couldn't wait to see this lady's response. Do you know what she said?: "Oh." And then when he pressed her for a reaction, like, "what do you think of that?" she said "I guess I should take better care of it then."<br /><br />Something about her understated reaction just reminded me so much of Grandpa. Except he might've added a "mercy sakes" in there somewhere, too. I miss that wacky guy.Erikahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09289566036433629960noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3606740265561027673.post-9866229845956500912010-07-11T21:22:00.000-04:002010-07-11T21:33:13.264-04:00What I'm Doing on My Summer VacationIt's been a while since I've posted, and it's been a happy while. Lately it seems as if I've been too busy to think about the pursuit of happyish, in a good way. In my case I think it's good to be doing more straight, hard and fast living, and less thinking about living. <br /><br />This morning at the coffee shop as I wrote yet another pros and cons list of pursuing yet another career idea, I decided that how you do something is more important than what you do, that a committed, compassionate, create deli counter guy can do more good than a surly, doesn't-have-his-act-together radiologist. That said, I have trod upon the lands of the soul-sucking job, and having one's soul siphoned out on a day-to-day basis is not something that happens only from 9-5. The repercussions of an emptied-out soul are pervasive.<br /><br />I have a big week ahead - Spangles and I (finally) are getting the keys to our new apartment/new life, and on Friday I'm headed down to the beach! for a week! with my rad family! <br /><br />If that's not something to be happy about I don't know what is.Erikahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09289566036433629960noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3606740265561027673.post-87556414578174615732010-06-26T14:07:00.000-04:002010-06-26T14:54:23.411-04:00Like a fish (or duckling) to waterThis is what I want to remember about my first ceremony:<br /><br />The Twin meeting me at the train station, lit up by the joy of one-half day of school left before the summer officially begins, and by the joy of happy hour and her hilarious friends. We took our customary chatting-and-cackling-the-whole-way train ride back to her apartment.<br /><br />At her apartment, I rehearsed my ceremony for her, and she gave me notes, and also gave me the giggles.<br /><br />As I lay in her bed that night, my eyes were wide open, my heart was beating in my chest, but it felt good. I had to keep telling myself, "this is a gift you're giving" and that made me not think so much about myself but why I wanted to be there in the first place.<br /><br />Which is, to help people. To be a part of people's joy and love. To try to notice beauty. To do something meaningful, for myself and others (maybe the "others" part is what makes it meaningful).<br /><br />I told the Twin I tried to think of it as being excited more so than nervous. She said "You were born for this!"<br /><br />It was in a beautiful garden at the Queens Botanical Garden. It was hot, the occasional plane passed overhead, guests heard a mama duck and ducklings quacking.<br /><br />The actual ceremony itself went by so quickly and for the most part, as planned. You know how it is when you perform something - I was just caught up in making sure the moving parts kept moving, and didn't really have a chance to take it all in. But I was glad to have The Twin and friends there, and she seemed to have good things to say.<br /><br />Twin and Co. dropped me off at the subway.<br /><br />The way I felt riding the 7 train looking out at the buildings, listening to a happy song on my ipod - that's a scene I want played on the movie montage of triumphant moments of my life. I felt proud and happy and my cup was just runnething over everywhere. <br /><br />What fun! A few days ago I was telling AJ about how I came to decide to be a Celebrant. And in addition to thinking I would like it, and be good at it, and find it meaningful. But it was also kind of a risk, and the first thing I ever decided to do entirely on my own, and some might think it kind of a random thing to do. And I was telling AJ, I wasn't 100% certain about it, but there was a point where I just decided I would do it. So I did. <br /><br />It all stemmed from my own pursuit of happyishness - and I am pleased to report that from where I'm sitting, here on the megabus back to Philly from New York, caught in Shore traffic - that this out and out happiness has everything to do, like Winston Churchill put it, not with what I get, but with what I give. To be able to be yourself, do what you enjoy, and use your strengths for the benefit of other people - I'm pretty sure the secret of life is wrapped somewhere up in that idea. <br /><br />I was thinking of calling my future/nascent/currently-being-born business Inspired Ceremonies. And in fact I think I will, because that's exactly how I feel right now: inspired.Erikahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09289566036433629960noreply@blogger.com1