These things go a long way toward restoring my equilibrium: sleeping in, sushi, massage, cleaning, reading, napping, music and watching my children’s faces light up. I had all of them, in one form or another, this weekend. There might also have been Ben & Jerry’s Caramel Chew Chew ice cream in there somewhere. It makes me feel that I can face Monday morning, which is nice. The upcoming week isn’t a busy one (I mean, aside from work): just taking Karin to karate tomorrow and walking while she’s there; and dinner with the Wonders on Friday.
I read an excellent book over the weekend, too: Water For Elephants by Sara Gruen. In fact, I read 2 books, but the other one confirmed that I just don’t seem to get what everyone else sees in David Sedaris. That was my second attempt with him and I officially give up now. I was a reading machine in February. Of course it helped that many of the books were ones I had read before…it’s always faster the second time around, though no less satisfying visiting with beloved old books. So far, this year, I’ve read 26 books. At this rate, I’ll blow my yearly record out of the water.
I’ve decided to give up worrying about the writing in my journal being so much of the diary kind lately. I’m sure that when the muse gets back from the warmer climes she’s surely hied off to things will get cracking around here again. In the meantime, I refuse to sit around moping because I’m not as scintillating as I might be. Surely it’s enough to try and savor the days as they wing past towards spring and write down the moments I want to fold neatly and put in my pocket, where I can come upon them in the future and smooth them out with surprise and delight: O! remember when? remember that?
Perhaps part of the problem is my own expectations playing havoc with my ability to pull descriptive prose from my brain in long, beribboned curlicues. My delusions of grandeur which keep poking at me: you can do better, do better!—until suddenly I can’t do anything at all. There’s no denying that I can do better. Of course I can do better, and have! But sometimes, it must be enough just to DO.
“It isn’t what you have, or who you are, or where you are, or what you are doing that makes you happy or unhappy. It is what you think about.” —Dale Carnegie