The Doctor Is In

Last night Spangles and I were discussing a friend of ours who, we decided, was just too laid back for this uptight city life. We decided he should move to a beachfront community and open a little bistro.

This led us to develop a concept for a show called "What Not To Do." It would be just like "What Not To Wear" on TLC, except instead of telling people how to dress we would tell them how to live their lives. Ultimately we decided the concept wouldn't be that successful because we would just end up telling everyone to move to a beachfront community and open a little bistro.

Happy-ish Playlist: I'm Alive by The Hooters

I highly recommend downloading this bad boy. It was playing on WXPN when I got in the car and the only thing better than starting your day with a loud blast of this song is starting your day with a loud blast of this song and a cup of coffee.

I've got a condition for which there is no cure
I'm in a position that everyone prays for
Got a sound in my head that could wake up the dead
Like The Who singing summertime blues
Got no thorn in my side, got no secrets to hide
I'm completeley and utterly amused

I'm alive, I'm alive
It's a beautiful day and I'm happy to say
I'm alive, I'm alive
And wherever I go it's amazing to know
I'm alive

From running fast as fast as I could getting nowhere
I'm standing incedibly steadily somewhere
Got a hand on a jug and a girl that I love
and it's driving me out of my mind
I'm a bird on the wing with the world on a string
and I'm feeling incredibly fine

I'm alive, I'm alive
It's a beautiful day and I'm happy to say
I'm alive, I'm alive
And wherever I go it's amazing to know
I'm alive

I'm looking older now than when I was a kid
but feeling younger now than I ever did
and I've got no situations playing tricks upon my mind
I'm feeling christmas in the middle of July

In the morning, in the night
though I walk though the valley of the shadows
you are the light of my life
and the song in my soul
and the beat of my heart
and the rock in my roll


I'm alive, I'm alive
It's a beautiful day and I'm happy to say
I'm alive, I'm alive
And wherever I go it's amazing to know
I'm alive, I'm alive, I'm alive, I'm alive, I'm alive

On Flying Blind

What do you tell someone on a down day, too little and too fitful sleep, too little "accomplished," the ball of Un-done growing in her stomach, on her to-do's too much to do, and to add insult to injury it's a Monday? What will sustain her on the days when the door to the Backyard of Sunny Wisdom has slammed shut, the curtain has dropped, she has tumbled off the mountain of the Vista of Wide Perspectives, and her vision has become myopic and whiny once again and her extremities can't get warm?

Maybe you say, just keep trudging. Do just one thing. Maybe you say, be gentle, you don't have to to do it all today. Maybe you ask her if she has taken her ten minutes to sit quietly today, and she will respond no, quietly, chastened. Or remind her that every day can't be an uninterrupted concert of the angel's choirs. And that all things considered, in her very small little universe, an ordinary day in which no great catastrophes rained down is perhaps better than she gives it credit for.

You might tell her to lighten up, or look around. The quiet hum of the refrigerator, the snow on the ground, the sunlight already getting warmer and longer, belie the thesis that gets unproven again and again that this moment and day and era is permanent and intractable. In fact the shelf life is even shorter than she might guess, and before she knows it she will probably look up and see something else.

You might tell her that her daily work, the efforts she exerts, the humdrum of the routine is a perfectly fine endeavor, worth doing, worth getting lost in. That she will get smart again, and get happy, and accomplish some percentage of the ambitious tasks she lines up next to each other like pickets in a fence.

You might advise her just to ride the waves of uncertainty or boredom or the sense that she left an important part of her brain home that day. Tell her that the important thing is just that she not lose her lightness, so that she can float on that pounding surf until the weather changes or a new tide comes in or she is sighted from shore.

You might tell her all of those things, hoping one or the other sticks, hoping that some or all of them might be true.

In which the relation of the story of an unexpected gift transforms into rumination on the nature of inspiration

An everyday miracle occurred yesterday, in the sense that it happened not as a result of divine intervention but was a product of real live human effort and love.

I came home to get a few things before Gumbo Night at Spangles's house, and there on the steps was a tantalizing book-shaped cardboard package from MajorOnlineBookSeller.com. I always check the name on these packages left in the stairwell, even if I'm not expecting anything, because I'm a nosy neighbor. Inexplicably, it was for me! For me? My first thought was, great, I bet this is some sort of scam.

But when I brought it upstairs and opened it i found, much to my ferklempt-ting, that it was a brand new hardback copy of The Happiness Project, mentioned as an unaffordable luxury in an earlier post! Since this blog only has one reader at the moment, and I know who she is, I knew this surprise (but not surprising) expression of love came from The Twin. I will leave you to make your own connections as to the sterling character and generosity of heart of said individual, because in my opinion the internet isn't big enough to contain such a subject.

I have already begun to read it, and I'm two months in to her year-long project. (The author, Gretchen Rubin is speaking in Philadelphia in two weeks, too! Guess who will be there with her copy of the book!)

I will hold off on a full blown book review at this point, but preliminary findings suggest that, much to my relief, she has not written the be-all end-all book about happiness after which another one need never be written. There are things I disagree with, methods I question, ways that I would do it differently. My Happiness book remains to be written, my own tune still to be hammered out - as with all of ours as individuals. As she points out, each one of our lives, at least here in the Free World, can be their own Happiness Project.

One of the great things about wanting to create things and taking on enormous amorphous topics like Happiness, is that you never get it completely right. There is always more to be said, a different way to paint the picture that would be more accurate, more beautiful, truer. This is mostly unacknowledged brilliance of the Great Hunger - it keeps you awake and on your toes, keeps you striving, keeps you moving toward the horizon, certain that the answer is just over that next ridge. It's great, because if you're moving you're not stuck, even if that movement comes with this unsettled feeling of incompleteness, of wanting more. I've felt stuck too before in life, and the hunger is by far the more lively option.

I remember when I took a ceramics class as a teenager, as I learned all the different techniques and types of clay and firing and glaze, feeling overwhelmed as I realized the infinite possibilities. You could stay in a clay studio for an entire lifetime and never try out all the different possibilities, never finish all the ideas. And that's great! That feeling that there are too many ideas rushing through your head - that's the feeling of inspiration. It can be anxiety producing if you try to cling to each one and hoard it like a gold bouillon piece. The other option is just to stand there in the middle of the shower and enjoy getting soaked, be thankful for the rain, catch a few drops in your mouth and let the rest roll off of you, trusting that the source and patterns and reasons for rain are far beyond your capacity for comprehension. I think the reason get passionate about anything is precisely this sense of infinite possibilities, the sense that no matter how deep you dig you'll never finish the hole, but there's great stuff down there all the same.

Recipe for Happiness

Dear Diary,

I couldn't wipe the grin off my face this morning, so I thought I'd write down the ingredients in case I want to try this dish again!

1. Obtain a new toy that you've wanted desperately for a long time. (In this case, a new Macbook![acbook...acbook...acbook!]. It was courtesy of the Parent Company, and like many things T-bone and Mama Citta Aperta have given me over the years, how do you ever say thank you for something like that, which they really didn't have to do but they did? As another example, giving me life.)

Enjoy it with the awareness that new-toy-based happiness can be fleeting and furnishes diminishing returns as the body adapts to the gadget high, so be sure to really relish in it while you can. Really get up in there and roll around. Marvel at the simple, unspoiled beauty. Hold it in your hands, caress it, feel the possibilities shoot through your veins like lightning bolts.

2. Before you go to bed, ask your sweetheart to help you get up in the morning, no matter how much you resist. Human intervention wake-up (even tickling) is head and shoulders better than electronic beeping wake-up.

3. The next morning, if possible, have this sweetheart make a pot of coffee just because you ask.

4. Take a warm shower in a sunlit bathroom.

5. Have a job that is flexible enough that you don't have to rush out the door. Drink your coffee while lounging on the bed with aforementioned sweetheart. Include tasty breakfast.

6. If at all possible, let it be a Friday, and let the weekend be full of a variety of pleasant plans, but not so many that there won't be time to relax and do nothing in particular. (These activities include making gumbo and watching a movie about summer camp; wine and sandwiches; a housewarming party with long-lost but well-loved friends; and trying, as you do most weekends, to convince F-Money to make biscuits and gravy for Sunday breakfast.)

7. Borrow an album of music that you haven't heard before but that the lender is pretty sure you'll like based on your music preferences. (I used M.Ward, but adjust to taste.)

8.Let it be a sunny, mild day with a nice tender blue sky. This is most potent after a string of gray and wintry days in which you began to despair that the sun even existed.

9. Get in the car, put in the CD.

10. Drive. Savor. Reflect on the notion that this is it. This moment is your life.

On Seeing Clearly

I’ve been thinking about windshield wipers lately, in no small part because nephew Edbear got "The Wheels on the Bus” stuck in my head. It’s currently the # 1 hit in Edbearsville, especially the wipers-on-the-bus part. Each rendition he sings (and he is generous with the renditions), begins and ends with that verse, with special emphasis on the "Swish swish swish”.

And frankly I think it’s time wipers got their day. I was reminded of their great utility while driving in the recent snows here. They are the unsung heroes of inclement weather. You don’t have to think about it, but dependably, as raindrops plop, the wipers clear. Yet without them how far could you really get? I remember vividly from childhood the time the driver’s side wiper of my parents’ car gave out during a thunderous storm, my dad driving with his head hanging out the the driver’s side window, getting soaked to the shoulders.

What I’ve been thinking is that sometimes life itself could use a good wipe. I walk around in a haze so much of the time, running from one thing to the next, trying to see between splotches and streaks on the windshield, a continual to-do list falling like fat raindrops from the sky and scattering across my field of vision.

But every now and again I’m aware of a feeling of clearness, like my feet are planted firmly on the ground and I’m awake, I see and understand the road ahead. When I am, however briefly, smarter than my everyday self. I’m all: yes, I am one with the universe! I understand the deep yin and yang of it all! I hold within me with great delicacy all the paradox and pain and deep goodness of the fragile and tantalizingly brief moments we spend spinning around on this precious blue marble! I become like Walt Whitman: all this I swallow, it tastes good, I like it well. Her Wiseness Anne Lamott has described this feeling as a veil lifting.

I try to interpolate the graph, to understand which things I do (or stop doing) that lead to this feeling of calmness and solidity.

Sitting for a while with my thoughts helps. It doesn't really help while I’m sitting – a few beats after I close my eyes and tune in to my breath like you’re supposed to, I become privy to the deafening cyclone that is the inside of my brain. The whole operation sounds a lot like these cartoon viking kittens plundering the seas to Led Zeppelin, if the sound were piped through subwoofers and garbled with static and scattered sentence fragments and loops of conversations in which my part of the dialogue becomes increasingly witty and self-righteous with each repeat.

Sometimes I wonder how I manage to function at all.

The clarity part usually happens when I open my eyes and realize I’m back where I began, and the room is stunningly silent and still compared to the white water rapids I’ve been cruising down in my mind.

And the afterglow from that is that I tend to feel a little less like an unstable isotope, always whipping my electrons around me at maximum speed, unable to land anywhere to rest happily, slowly decaying into other things. I feel a little more like I live inside my body, and my body doesn’t stretch a block before and after my mind like it usually does. It’s like in the cartoon Peter Pan when he finally catches that hyperactive shadow and reattaches it to himself, where it belongs. It feels like I turned the windshield wipers on.

Another thing that helps me turn the wipers on is remembering a phrase I read in a book by Charlotte Kasl: what is, is. Here's what she says about it:

It helped me accept the moment and stop fighting with myself...It’s just what is. It’s the truth, it’s where my life is right this moment. It’s not good, it’s not bad, it’s just what’s happening at the moment. Saying what is, is helps us stop demanding that situations and people be different. It also allows us to drop into our feelings, which connects us to our inner wisdom.

It’s kind of a reality check. It helps you identify and accept whatever’s going on in your life at that very moment. It puts the horrible and the sublime in perspective. Keeps you from sensationalizing. Helps you get a firmer grasp on reality.

Our eyes are flawed and we forget to see with them. It’s nice to put on a pair of glasses now and then, and see the sharpness and detail you’ve been missing. It's nice to get the high-def channels once in a while.

The V Stands for Ambivalence

Ah, Ballentimes Day. It seems that a blog that so heavy-handedly purports to cover the topic of love might make a mention of this excruciating holiday. So here it is: it sucks. (In the interest of full disclosure I will mention that my valentine, Spangles, is far away on official business and won't be back until late, thereby spending all but 12 minutes of the day elsewhere from me. Not that something like that would ever influence my completely unbiased and impartial reporting.)

Single or attached, this is the holiday-cum-months-long-card-selling-ploy in which "they" try to stuff your highly individual and boundless love into a small, heart-shaped chocolate mold. In which love is colored red and pink and festooned with doilies. In which love is equated with buying useless clutter and delicious but fattening bonbons, not to mention, if you are unlucky enough to be a twenty-something woman who reads fashion magazines, frilly underwear. (If you are attached, editors will include this directive with their instructions on "6 Sexy Ways to Rev His Love Engine"; if you are single they will categorize this advice under the aegis of "treating yourself". Either way, heeding this advice is a lose-lose because in both cases you end up with frills wedged between your butt cheeks. My advice: take the underwear money and invest in something that will improve your quality of life, like jammies. Or IHOP.)

For many years, my preparation for Valentine's Day has involved bunkering down to survive the onslaught of reminders that you don't have a boyfriend and it's probably because of some fundamental personality flaw that everyone's aware of but you. I tend to make Valentine's Day, and a lot of other things, either black or white: either you have a mushy, romantic evening with your one true love who showers you with presents and adoration, or you drink late into the night- in the company of a group of other desperate, bitter singletons, if you're lucky.

But anecdotal evidence suggests, as usual, that the truth is somewhere in the middle. Last year, I had a sweetheart and we went to a monster truck rally, then walked the several miles up Broad St. back to my apartment. The monster truck rally was, well, let's just say there's probably a reason their primary audience is nine-year-old boys. And the walk back was lovely and sweet, but no more or less so than other lovely and sweet things that Spangles and I have done. The year before that, when I was single, I went to Copabanana and had nachos and margaritas with a friend and her friends, who all turned out to be very nice and funny, and we got free promotional tank tops for Absolut vodka! Then one year in college I participated in "V-day," which promotes awareness to end violence against women and girls (which I wholeheartedly support) by getting on stage and using a lot of different words for "vagina" (which, to be honest, I felt weird about.)

So anyway, you can't entirely blame Valentine's Day. It's not the holiday's fault if we choose to think that its fullest expression can only be achieved by young couples who are passionately in love going to dinner in a fancy restaurant. Maybe I even feel sorry for Valentine's Day and all the venom it's been subjected to over the years, all the parties that have been thrown for the purpose of cursing its existence. Maybe people like me are to blame for distorting it into this crazed, candy-gobbling, black-or-white Holiday of Judgment of Self and Others.

After all, it usually turns out to be just another day in the life. So why not use it as a chance to take a look at the people in our lives we love best, be grateful for them, and find a way to make them feel special. Not in an icky way, but in a way that reflects our unique brand of awesomeness. And let's not leave out receiving love, either. Let's rejoice and be glad at being loved by one or many, when we can, while we can.

So let us close, on this long-suffering and long-suffered holiday, with words from Her Wiseness Elisabeth Kubler Ross and co-author David Kessler:

Our lessons in love come in all forms, from all kinds of people and situations. It doesn't matter who we are, what we do, how much money we make, whom we know. We can all love and be loved. We can be there, we can open our hearts to the love around us as we give love back, determined not to miss the great gift.

**PS: I just heard from Spangles - he's catching an earlier flight so we can be together on Valentine's Day. It's a St. Valentine's miracle!**