Would 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.

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.

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.

What are you reminding yourself of today?

Magically Delicious

"We were always in a rush, a rush to get better, a rush to get somewhere--somewhere else, wherever we were not." That's a quote from Dominique Brown's blog, which is one of the most consistent highlights of my little blog-reading routine.

I am frequently in a rush to "get better." I am always trying to improve things, come up with some new strategy or system or mantra that will make me just a little more organized, efficient, productive, diversified, happier, better. And I don't think that's necessarily bad, but maybe the question to ask is, better next to what?

I guess the contradiction within self-improvement is that on the one hand you try to accept yourself and your warts and enjoy the present moment. And on the other hand you are still always striving. And what are you striving for? If it's to be happier, or happyish, does having a running to-do list of ways you could be "better" run at odds with this? And then maybe that list and the striving for betterment is part of what makes us human, and is therefore deserving of acceptance in itself? Our dogged belief that what we are seeking is just around the next bend. Maybe that's just what keeps us going.

Can I be "enough" while simultaneously hoping to be more? Can I accept myself while striving to improve myself? Can I be both satisfied and ambitious? Grateful and dream-ful? Content and anticipating?

I guess it all comes back down to enjoying that hackneyed old journey. I like projects! Trips are fun. Adventures are great. I guess the trick is to remember, as someone once said, that now is the fun part. To use a leprachaun metaphor: it's not about the pot of gold, it's the thrill of chasing the rainbow.

Perspective

Yesterday I experienced the the benefit of aiming for happyish. As alluded to, I had a deadline and I was in that horrible college mid-terms 50% done and I've been working for days phase, greasy hair, empty pretzel bags strewn about, desperation in my eyes. Nevertheless, Spangles was in the neighborhood so I was taking a break to meet him for a cup of tea.

As I drove to meet him, I was full of panic and self-loathing about my project, my deadlines, my ignorance, my inability to just buckle down and work ceaselessly for eleven hours straight - I mean what's wrong with me? I had put on Whitney Houston's "I Didn't Know My Own Strength", so you know things were dire.

But are you happy-ISH?, I asked myself. I found my response to be, "Well...sure."

I mean on the other side of things, it's a gorgeous day, finally spring, I'm going to see my steady, I got paid, and I'll probably survive this project. Beyond today, life is pretty broad and unencumbered and free... so, sure, if I don't have to be weeping tears of joy like I just won an academy award, I mean if you take the long view...sure, I'm happyish.

Et voila. The miracle of lowered expectations.

Course Corrections

On Sunday, I was in the mountains of Pennsylvania on snowshoes, gazing at snow-sprinkled trees, trying to remember the words to "The Road Not Taken," by Robert Frost, spinning a historical fiction yarn in my head set in the adorable town-formerly-known-as-Mauch-Chunk, all but giving Spangles affectionate little eskimo nose-rubs.

Congratulations to me, I said to myself. I am turning the disappointment of a canceled trip to upstate New York into a spontaneous romantic weekend getaway into the foothills of Poconos with my beloved, not to mention living the life I've imagined, carpe-ing the diem, enjoying nature, all the types of things I'm always saying I ought to do to live a happy life.

Fast forward to Monday night, when I was in the car headed home from work, nauseous, scream-crying "I don't know! I don't know!" over and over again to myself in a primal-therapy-like fashion. I was what you might call a touch stressed out. I'll spare you the details, but suffice to say the basic story was, too much to do, too little time, coupled with the all the rationality, reasonableness and perspective that accompanies the ole' cyclical female hormone spike.

How did my zen-like weekend state unravel so quickly?, is I want to know. Granted, Mondays are always hard, a crash landing back onto Planet Goal-Orientation, made all the more difficult by a pleasant, relaxed weekend shuffling and daydreaming my way through the sylvan hollows.

But I have been helped immensely in situations like these by an internal project I've taken on, which is the cultivation of my Voice of Reason. She's like my wise, sassy, kind, don't-take-no-shit-from-nobody sidekick, who's there to slap some sense into me when I go off the mental deep end (which happens in some form or another pretty much like every fifteen minutes.) For example:

Me: OMG I can't believe I ate TWO porkchops for lunch! I am such a glutton! I am like one trip to Pizza Hut away from being the subject of one of those late night documentaries on TLC about the morbidly obese people who have to be cut out of their homes with a bulldozer to get to the gastric bypass operation! WHEN are you going to figure out PORTION CONTROL you fat stupid lazy moron?!!

VoR: Yeah, Liklik? With all due respect, you were hungry, so you ate lunch. It was pork chops and veggies. This is not a red alert situation. You can always go for a walk or something later. Let's move on with our life. K?

Isn't she smart? She's nice but no-nonsense. Actually she kind of sounds like my Aunt Jane. And she always has something good to say, if I just let myself listen for her input. Last night when I was melting down in the car she was equally as wise and solution oriented. Regarde:

VoR: OK listen. You're obviously stressed out, so let's just take a deep breath. The Bosses already told you that the five-day business trip is optional. Why don't you go to the first part, but skip the second part? That cuts the trip in half and gives you time to work on the other projects. I know your preference is to be the best at everything at all times, but let's not let perfection be the enemy of the good, here. Give yourself time to do a quality job and cut out the non-essentials. Tomorrow morning we're going to go in there and let them know the plan. All right?

Me: *sniffs* Ok. Fine.

VoR: And tell you what, when we get home, want to put on your jammies and eat crackers and download that Tim McGraw song you like?

Me: Yes. Yes, I do want that.

VoR: I thought you might.

Me: I like crackers.

Lo and behold, the next morning after a good night's sleep life seemed a lot more manageable. And on my way to work this morning I had a chance to reflect on everything a little more and give myself a nice pep talk.

I gotta remember that there's never going to be some magic finish line that I cross, after which I will be sublimely happy and no problems will ever confound me again. It's good to have bright, sunny days when I feel like I'm doing exactly what I want to be doing in life, and it's good to work toward a higher ratio of those kinds of days. But it's also OK if some days are just OK. It's OK to work at a job that doesn't leave you squirming with pleasure to the tips of your toes at every moment, especially if it allows you to take care of yourself and enables you do other things in life that you want to do.

And it's OK to get stressed out sometimes, get out of control, and then pull yourself back in. One of my favorite little life analogies is the explanation of how airplanes fly - it's not a matter of flying in one straight line the entire time. In order to get to a destination, it's actually a series of a zillion little course corrections, moving from one side back to the other back to other over and over again until it gets there. And that's what we humans have to do to - keep your eye on the final destination, and if you go too far to one side, just scoot back a little the other way.

It's a balancing act, a dance, an airplane flight, all of that. It's not about fixing something once and then you're set for life. It's just habit, or mental hygiene, or whatever. The dishes get dirty, so you wash them again. Happiness isn't a goal, it's a lifestyle. It's figuring out the balance between working toward a goal and taking time to play. It's about getting caught up in the flow of working on something, and taking time out to notice your surroundings and the passage of time. It's working toward getting what you want out of life, AND letting yourself fritter away some down time without beating yourself up.

It's saying, OK, this week is shaping up to be a beeyotch and a half, so why don't I schedule an appointment to use that massage gift certificate on Friday? It's staying tuned in to what you're feeling and wanting, and acknowledging it, even if there isn't much you can *do* about it at a given time. It's about taking care of yourself, and the sense of - and I hate to use this term but - the sense of empowerment that comes from knowing that you have the ability to take care of your own needs (even if that means reaching out for help from someone else.)

It's acknowledging that hey, you don't have all the answers, we're all basically wandering around like confused but purposeful ants, each of us just trying to figure out how to operate this big ungainly gift we got of a stroll through the glass-paneled dirt farm.

It's about practicing using and listening to your own Voice of Reason, and the comfort and serenity it brings to know you can summon it whenever you want.

Like right now, she's tapping me on the shoulder, saying "All right, wrap it up, kid. We thought writing this post would make you feel better, and it did. Now what's going to make you feel better is getting down to business and tackling some of this big ole' stack of work you have. You can return to the blogosphere later."

So, like a self-schooled experimenter in home remedies with a long-winded hypothesis on how it all works, I will now leave you to ingest a tincture of my own making, hoping to add it to my shelf of not-so-magical potions.

The Dark Underbelly of Engagement Announcements

Can I confess something? When people I know get engaged, I don't always feel unmitigated joy and goodwill welling up in the depths of my soul.

Back in college, when my beloved cousin/extra big sister Ekkie first called to tell me she was engaged, I choked out my congratulations from amidst a queasy feeling of sadness, and shame for feeling anything but happiness for her. It was because I didn't want to lose her to this "fiance" character, whom I hadn't yet met. No one that close to me had gotten married before, and I felt oddly... bereft. I was afraid she was leaving me.

It was only later that experience showed me that I wasn't losing Ekkie, I was gaining Big Mike (and now their heart-rendingly adorable offspring), and in fact they work well as a unit. Big Mike is the rational, snow-shoveling, knowledgeable-about-household-things counterpoint to Ekkie's passion and flair and intensity. They are both funny separately, but the two together can be better than TV.

On the one hand, the part of me that will always be fiercely, unabashadely single (even when I'm in a relationship), will never agree that you need another person to complete you. I think it's demeaning to unattached people everywhere and gross. On the other hand, how great to have someone who balances you and has promised in front of God and everybody to always be on your side.

When someone you love gets engaged or married, the relationship does change. (Don't even get me started on what if the Twin got married. No one likes to share the #1 spot.) Probably part of the reason for a wedding ceremony is to have a public acknowledgment that says "Sure, yes, things are different now, but we're still a family, just in a different way."

What about when someone you may not love, but know from work or school or elsewhere gets engaged? I found out via facebook today that two friendcquaintances of mine just got engaged to each other. They posted photos - it happened playing in the snow on the lawn behind the art museum on the day of Philly's record-breaking snowstorm. They built a snowman and everything. How cute.

People my age get engaged and ugly parts of me show up. I get bitter and sarcastic and Scroogely. And beneath that is an inexplicable panicky feeling, similar to how I feel when someone from my cohort has a success too much like one that I want, or when I read the back of the alumni publication and find out that people from my year are doing things that sound awesomer than what I'm doing.

It's not exactly jealousy, because I am at minimum 60% comfortable with my life choices up to now. It's not envy of the relationship, because I've got one I'm pretty fond of (if you're reading this: Hi, Spangles!), and getting married is most definitely not my jam at the moment.

It may partly be a deeply ingrained evolutionary response, like "uh-oh, one less fish in the dating pool!" I have a guy friend who I never particularly felt That Way about, but in the back of my mind I always kind of thought of him as a decent backup guy, like if things didn't pan out with other dudes and I found wanted to settle down I thought we'd be compatible and figured I could probably convince him. But then he fell hard for a girl and married her! My first words when I found out, were of course, "Congratulations!" My first thoughts were "Wait, what? This girl took my backup guy!" (It's times like that when you kind of want to thank society for having all the social nicety scripts written out beforehand, so that you can launch into auto-pilot instead of saying something you can't take back. Couple: We're engaged! Me: Seriously? Why?) And as luck would have it, in this case too, they turned out to be fun as a couple and they like to throw barbecues. Advantage: Erika.

So I guess the whole dark underbelly of marriage proposals thing is really my perfectly human desire for nothing to ever change from the way it is, ever, and being foiled yet again. And, perhaps in response to my many years as a younger sister and borderline social outcast, an overinflated sensitivity to the heartbreak of feeling left out, left behind.

This gets me again and again. I'll be floating along, moderately content with life's little routines, and somehow I get wind that someone I vaguely know and normally couldn't care less about, has achieved a widely accepted Life's Milestone before I have. My response seems always to be the same: "Whaaaaa? A fiance/baby/television appearance/doctorate degree? Where was I? What have I been doing all this time? I have got to stop spending so much time rearranging my Netflix queue."

If there's one lesson I have semi-learned only to disregard it again and again, it's that comparing yourself to others is a recipe for psychological distress. Any girl who is a middle school survivor can tell you that one of the most heated discussion topics for a seventh grade girl is who has gotten It. (And if you don't know what It is, my friend, then you, like all of us were, are in for an eye-opener. "Wait. You're telling me some what comes out of where?") Too early, and you're a freak. Too late, and you're also a freak. And everyone is either too early or too late.

And seventh grade is just the beginning. We seem to have written a script out and we've pretty much got it all covered. If the pain and humiliation of puberty doesn't kill you, there's still any number of things other people can get to faster than you. Shedding your virginity, taking college classes in high school, taking graduate courses in college, taking mind-altering substances while in graduate school, buying a house, getting a dog, procreating, retiring, winning important prizes, unveiling a work of art to great critical acclaim. And oh yeah, getting married.

But you know what? Fuck the script. The script is much too narrow and look at the people who wrote it - like they're doing so great. The script leaves no room for you to fall down and get back up. No room for scenic detours to see the Giant Ball of Twine. And isn't the Giant Ball of Twine what it's all about? What if you want a gila monster instead of a dog? What if you can live with your great-aunt Gerta rent-free? What if your fiance is unfaithful? What if your careful plans for dental school are blindsided by a passionate love for dinosaur bones*? What if you have one of those years in which, as we say in my family, your entire world crumbles around your cankles?

Then we can talk. Because my friends, once you diverge from the blueprints, you're on your own. Out there in the wilderness, you have to discover everything by first-hand experience, trial and error, what it is you really, really want. That's really hard. You're living by your wits, and from your heart and your instincts. We live in a culture that is almost constantly making pretty strongly worded suggestions on what we should want and how we should feel once we get it. According to the McDonald's bag I received at the drive-thru, its contents will bring me pure joy. Pure joy! Can you imagine? There you were looking for happiness in life, and it was right there in the McFishwich all along.

No wonder so many of us are confused and disheartened. It's hard to go around with so much cognitive dissonance all the time. Marketers are saying that young Johnny should obtain this particular deoderant because it makes men irresistably attractive to women. But young Johnny is irresistably attracted to men! You do as you're told - you clear your pores, you accent your brow line, you wear the correct type of sandals with the correct length of shorts, you pay your bills and vote and donate blood - and yet you don't feel, you know... good.

That's because the script? Don't know you. It gets all chummy and nice and seems friendly - but the script has its own agenda. And if you don't know you, then where does that leave anyone?

That's why I strongly reccomend healthy doses of huge mistakes, crushing failure, and long, sinking ship struggles for anyone looking to fnd their way in this crazy hobbyshop they call the world. In my experience these things are not at all hard to come by. They force you to cut the crap and get honest about who you are and why you're here. No, I take that back. They don't force you to do any of that. You have to choose. There is another option: to become embittered, jaded, mad at the world, a victim of circumstance, and that's also really really easy to do when the Shitmobile comes speeding your way.

So when I find myself with the facebook announcement crazies, maybe the thing to do is remind myself, Fuck the script. I write my own script! I tell the world who I am and how I'm going to be, not the other way around. I also find it helpful to remind myself that all people everywhere , once you really get to know them, are totally crazy. Just batshit insane. So you really can't go by what other people do.

Here smack-dab in the middle of my twenties is probably as good a time as any to figure this out - lord knows there will only be more news of the engagement and baby ilk in the future. In fact I've been told that developmentally speaking, I'm right on track as far as lifestage - trying stuff on, figuring things out, deciding who and how I want to be in the world. So, gold star for me!

Maybe it's helpful to think about the one thing that, if you heard Sally Suchandsuch from high school had done it, would really make you go "Nooooooooooooooooooooo!!!! That was MYYYY dream!!" And then get started in that direction yourself. Why waste time fixing alarm clocks if you know you want to decorate cakes?

But even more important is to heed the advice of a wise sage who also happens to be my aunt: Don't be in a hurry. If I were the tattooing type, I would get that inked on somewhere I could see it. One of the things we signed up for as we shot out of the birth canal, is that our lives would be terribly imperfect, full of heartbreak and shattered dreams and so on. But this is it! You only get one for sure. So it makes sense to try to accomplish the things that really make you shimmy. But for those of us who may or may not have the tendency to be desperate overachievers and want everything to go perfectly at all times, it's probably a good idea to remember that his moment right here- while it may not the Olympic luge track of ecstasy and transcendence that we are constantly striving for - is probably not too bad either, all things considered.