247: the obsessively looking back syndrome

One of my favorite cartoon strips is a Peanuts cartoon where Charlie Brown is watching a square-dancing competition on TV and his little sister asks him why he's watching it and he says the people look happy. He likes watching people be happy, he says. I love that strip but I never want to embody it. It's Charlie Brown speaking so you know he's only saying it because he isn't happy and he also feels he never will be happy. His reasoning is that if he can't be happy, at least he can watch other people be happy. That's terribly defeatist.

So. Some things I want to keep in my mind for next year:

1. The motives and thoughts I ascribe to people are simply that: motives and thoughts I'm putting in their mouths and which they have not spoken or even thought. So I should stop getting angry and frustrated at made up people and instead investigate my own motives. Why do I think a person is responding a certain way? What am I doing that I feel guilty about? (because I kind of think that's the root, right there. I'm doing something I know I shouldn't or in a way I shouldn't but I don't want to stop. I want what I'm doing to be justified and right)

2. I'm happiest when I'm making, whether that's sewing, drawing, writing, or playing music and writing songs. This year, I didn't do enough making... although, I guess, I was writing every day at the newspaper.

3. I will not stay in the service industry for more than a year. That means by Sept.2012, I'd better have a new job lined up. M. says I won't be satisfied ultimately with anything less, and he's right. My patience for waiting tables and making coffee is limited. Unless I have to (for money), I won't be able to keep it up. Not if there's a writing/creative job out there I can weasel my way into. It helps that old sources are constantly harassing me at the restaurant and coffee shop, asking me when I'm going to go back to reporting.

4. Stop sabotaging myself. I'm going on a snowboarding/hiking trip to Montana in January or February and I'm a little bit terrified even though I know it's going to be a blast. A part of me would rather stay safe and comfortable and bored and in a flimsy false version of happiness (which comes, really, from fear to do what is hard). The other part is screaming to explore this vast country and see people and let things happen and move to another state and work hard at challenging jobs and have my confines (mental and physical) blown apart. It makes me think again of a W.H. Auden poem:

"We would rather be ruined than changed
we would rather die in our dread
than climb the cross of the moment
and let our illusions die."

Also, I've come up a with a purpose for this blog: short assignments. I love where I live and I don't write about it, not enough, not truly. So, short assignments: tasks of describing, of recording. Starting next week.

Neeeway. Today is going to consist of resting up (last night was terrible. I was at work for only two hours and I couldn't even stretch out full length on the bed until after an extremely hot shower, a back massage that was more a spine-cracking ordeal than a massage because my muscles were so tense, and at least a quart of tea and I don't know how much ibuprofen... after which, I slept like a large, ugly baby). Also, taking stuff to Goodwill and playing with Bruno (who is fantastic and still a fartsy brat)