52 Lists for Happiness: Week 1

Someone I knew said recently that I am "a woman of deep irony," which I think is probably pretty true. One of the ironies of my life is that when I am experiencing happiness, I usually simultaneously am filled with conflicting thoughts which potentially undermine this happinessAm I worthy of this happiness? It's fleeting, therefore it's not real. At the very least, it won't last. It's just my privilege that affords me this happiness. Etc.

(Aside: even if it is my privilege that affords me this happiness, does it make it any less genuine? Also, should I be more obligated to appreciate and experience this happiness, so that I am not wasting this opportunity and privilege?)

(See what I mean?)

Anyway, to cut this rambling short: I struggle with the concept of happiness. I also struggle with online shopping right after Christmas, which means, that this year, I ended up with this book:

So, I'll bite. Let's see what we can see.

Week 1's Project was to List What Makes You Happy Right Now. So I did: 

Looking back over my list, I'm struck by how much on that list is sensation- or productivity-based. The sound of the wind howling, of my cats purring; the feel of my warm feet on a cold night; the sight of a brightly and neatly-polished nail (preferably mine). The sense of accomplishment at the end of a productive day, knowing I've helped someone at work or been useful to a friend, feeling as though I am needed. Just as there are languages of love, I wonder, are there languages oI f happiness?

Week 1's  Challenge was to Take action. How often do you actually get to experience these things? How can you take one item on this list and turn it into a daily practice of happiness?

Upon honest reflection, I think it's possible-likely, even-that many of these things do happen on a daily basis. I call one of my sisters frequently (I'd bug the other one more if she didn't hate the phone so much); I try to have productive days every day; I often ponder old, happy memories. So perhaps in those sorts of situations, it's a question of permitting myself to relish the residual emotion (hopefully, happiness) that comes from these things. But then, does it become a situation of being hyper-aware of my thoughts and feelings and analyzing them as they happen, and then getting to the point where I am over-thinking it...

(Ugh, there I go again. For fuck's sake, brain, SHUT UP.) 

In other cases, I think there are certainly things I could do, mindfully, each day, to provoke happiness, or at least contentment. Taking 5 minutes to pet Austen and Indiana up into a purr; shooting off texts to my nearest and dearest; even tidying up my purse before I turn in each night. (Seriously, so many of the stresses and ills of my life are provoked by a messy purse which never yields up the whatever-it-is I need in that moment. Do you have the same issue?) 

Thus ends Week 1 of the 52 Lists for Happiness Project. 

You Say Self-Care, I Say Survival

Since The Great Shitshow of 2016, there's been a lot of talk in the world about self-care. This concept differs wildly from person to person--for some folks, it's taking a day to apply a $75 squid jizz mask, eat a vegan concoction of rhubarb and kale and chickpea innards, and meditate for three hours. For other folks, it's getting a mani-pedi, shopping at Kate Spade and Kendra Scott and Sephora, and then eating a leisurely lobster dinner. And then there are some folks that just take that time to do basic "I should do this every day but don't because I suck at adulting" shit. With poptarts. And wine.

Guess which category The Indy Grrl falls in?

Towards the end of my workweek last week,  I realized that I had an opportunity to clear my schedule and hunker down for the weekend. (My brilliant Eldest Sister calls this a Fuck Off World! Weekend, which I think is the most accurate, if not kindest, description.) And it was perfect timing--we were supposed to get rain all weekend. So that's what I did--promised myself 36 hours of "self care" and went so far as to commit to it on my planner, stocked up with some food essentials, and disappeared from the world.

Here's what these adventures in self-care looked like:

Gently Moving, Saturday Afternoon:
Usually I feel like I am constantly going-going-going, with half of my mind on the task at hand and half my mind scanning the horizon for the next thing to get done. Mindfulness, schmindfulness. But as I am coming home from the grocery store on Saturday afternoon, the brilliant scarlets and orange leaves against the stormy sky outside my apartment building catch my eye. With nowhere that I HAVE to be now, it seems like a perfect time to take an amble. 

Sleeping In and Having a Lazy Morning
The women in my family have several endearing talents; chief amongst them is our ability to sleep and sleep and sleep. And then sleep some more. As you can imagine, having to adhere to a schedule of...well, waking up at designated times really puts a cramp in our style. So any chance we have to not bow down and submit to the cruel mistress of our cell phone alarms, you can be damned sure we are grabbing it. So I've done just that, letting my body wake up on its own, natural-like. Amazingly, I manage to wake up at 9, but any smugness I feel is quickly banished when I realize that I'd forgotten that daylight savings time had ended, we had "fallen back" during the night, and my body feels like it's 10 a.m. No matter. I shrug it off, fix some coffee, light a candle, and creep back into bed for a couple of hours of YouTube and Interneting. 

A Little Bit of Productivity
My Eldest Sister believes that the ideal weekend includes a lot of puttering, in which nothing really gets accomplished, so she would be appalled at my approach. But I've got my own roll--my idea of a pampering weekend is one in which a LOT of stuff is accomplished, but none of it feels like work. Nothing too strenuous, but part of self-care is doing something to feel like your home is a haven and not a shithole. And so I clean for a bit, fold some laundry, do some dishes, change the sheets...with the help of my furry feline fuckers. 

Some Entertainment

So books! Much words! 


Pampering/Treat Yo'Self
I don't have a lot of fancy facial stuff on hand (alas--no squid jizz!) but there is some e.l.f. stuff I've been wanting to try, so today I took the plunge and used them. I wouldn't say my face felt transformed, but it did feel nice. 

Another treat--Brie, and some out-of-season-yet-still delicious berries. 

Not Dying
It's November here in the Heartland, and it's second storm season. Halfway through my Self-Care Day, the sky darkens, the atmosphere grows still, my phone buzzes with an emergency alert from the county, and the "torny warnies" start warbling their weird, wild wails. My housemate and I round up the disgruntled feline fuckers, as well as some wine and other boozy companions, and hunker down into the tiny little half-bath. 

Four hours later, second verse, same as the first. 

Fortunately, any tornadic activity went to the place known as Not Here. Nonetheless--at one point, I grouse to the Housemate, "This is NOT how I wanted this Self-Care Day to go!"

To which she responds, not inaccurately, "Survival is self-care."

You say self-care, I say survival. 

It's too bad that we have to take time to set aside, specially, for self-care. In a perfect world, it's part of our daily routine. In a perfect world, we don't have to clear our schedule for a day of it. In a perfect world...is not the world we live in. The world I live in is chaotic and busy and I am a flawed inhabitant of this world, but I survive it as best I can. I could do better, I could do worse. But I have to move through this world believing that I deserve to treat myself to some kindness, to some survival, to some quality of life. I invite you to do the same. To take care of others, we gots to take care of ourselves first. 

New Year, New...Meh.

I remember, when I was a little girl, a time or two my grandparents had a get-together on New Year's Eve. It was just them, and a couple of neighbor couples, and snacks and boozy drinks and Trivial Pursuit, and that annoying, awkward little girl staying up 'way past her bedtime and annoying the grown-ups. These grown-ups were in their seventies, and no doubt had seen many, many old years die and new years born. I wonder now if they felt a thrill, a charge, a sense of relief of a bad year ending, or a sense of joy of a new year starting? Did they make plans and resolutions or goals? Or had they simply been around the block enough times that it didn't matter?

Guess I haven't hit that point yet.

On December 31, five friends came to my home and together, we watched a epic historical Chinese war film, and played games, and ate food, and drank champagne, and talked about nothing too major. Some of us had endured a pretty rough year, and at that late point in the game, there was no point in re-hashing old, painful ground. Together, we said good-bye to 2016, and helped 2017 be born. Whether we all had made goals and resolutions, I don't know. We didn't really speak of it, at least not too seriously. Perhaps most of us hadn't made any, or perhaps none of us felt comfortable enough yet to reveal those things to each other.

I know that I've been trying to ponder my goals and resolutions for a while now. There's so much in my life that will eventually need changing, and I really don't know where to start--particularly since I don't know quite what I want to change into. Professional ambitions, geographical desires, romantic interests; I am at sea when it comes to those. I simply don't know what I want. I'm just not there yet. And who knows? Maybe I'm not supposed to be, yet. Lord knows there are other things I need to be tending to. So while I don't have anything too earth-shattering planned out, I know what I need to tend to: I've got to get my health improved. I've got to get a place of my own. I've got to continue to spend time at the job that gave me my escape. I want to continue exploring my beloved state, ideally with the friends I am trying to bond with. And that's enough to be getting on with, at least for now. I suppose, in other words, now that I'm settled into my state, it's time to start reversing the damage I've done to myself over the last decade. And once I'm well on that path, I can start tackling the bigger stuff--start trying to find answers to the questions I'm not yet ready to ask.

Thoughts on Two Marriages

Last month on Facebook (the most reliable source for all breaking news) I came across a little article announcing that the author Elizabeth Gilbert and her partner were separating.


If you're not familiar with this storyline, never fear--I can sum it up for you pretty quickly: Talented author realizes that she is miserable in her marriage. Author divorces husband and decides to travel around the world to a lot of countries that begin with the letter "I" to eat pasta and find herself. Instead, she found herself another fella, fell in love, and wrote a memoir about the whole experience, making a boatload of money in the process, and getting a movie deal too. I can't say for certain, but I think there's a strong possibility that the book and movie inspired a good few women of a certain seconomic and educational strata to leave their partners and chase after their inner Julia Roberts.


(Not me. I didn't take a months-long trip to Italy or Indonesia or India, although I DID take a 17-day vacation to Indiana.)


I wanted her to have a happy ending. (I mean, what curmudgeonly troglodyte asshole DOESN'T want someone to be happy?) We all wanted her to have a happy ending because we want to know that we will have happy endings. But here's the truth: there's never a totally happy ending. Perhaps a happy pause between storylines.


Regardless, I did feel a slight see of connection with Elizabeth Gilbert, as one is supposed to do when reading the work of a talented memoirist. And then, she decided to marry her fella, for complicated reasons...but before she did, she wrote a book facing down her ambivalence about the institution of marriage. Ironically, or perhaps coincidentally, I read it right before I got married.


We have nothing really in common, Ms. Gilbert and myself. She has achieved a great deal of worldly success and is much farther along than I am in her skills as a writer. But yet, here we both are, both of us separated and terminating our relationships with the partners that we once thought we would be with until the end of this life. I got married, and couldn't make it work. She wrote a book on marriage, and got married, and couldn't make it work. And there are no doubt a lot of people that have plenty of thoughts on that matter.


Last weekend, I came across a blog post about Elizabeth Gilbert's announcement, and the world's more-than-slightly-stupid reaction to it. I agreed quite strongly with her statement that "to suggest that readers are (or should be) somehow 'disillusioned' with the news of their separation is to hold Gilbert to a ridiculous standard--one nobody can uphold." She also takes the pretty generous, but not inaccurate, view that "marriage does not need to last forever to be a success." That all sorts of amazing things can come out of marriages that don't last. Children, and happy memories, and positive impacts, and lasting friendships can make marriages--even ones that end in divorce--a success.


Here is, at least for now, where Ms. Gilbert's and my story differ most drastically. I feel like--and I say this with no bitterness--my marriage was anything but a success. We didn't have children, we are not coming away with a lasting friendship, and just about all of my recollections of our six years together are tinged with vague emotions of contempt, boredom, disgust with both of us, homesickness, bitterness, disillusionment, and distrust. I know I shouldn't indulge in those kinds of emotions, and I want to move past them, move past this travesty of a marriage and all my flawed thinking that got me into that mess to begin with.


Maybe it's time to eat, pray, and love my way through Indiana. I've got the eating part down.

Third Time's The Charm...

"But she wasn't back where she'd started; she'd simply arrived where she'd left off, this time smarter and stronger and maybe even stripped of illusions." -Kate Bollick


The First Time of Significance...

The fall I was 14, my paternal grandmother--a dotty old woman we called Lady Sue, I don't even know why--called me up, all excited because she had gotten a good deal on an airplane ticket and wanted to fly me up to see her and her husband, my Grandpa Fritz. (Again, not sure why we called him that. They were a couple of odd ducks to be sure; to this day my sisters and I recall an incident concerning them and a fight over ketchup and peas, and no one remembers the outcome, but we sure as heck remember the fight).

So I flew up to Indianapolis in October 1994 and visited my grandparents, and their son, my uncle, picked me up and drove me down to Bloomington. It was a great place to live, he told me. He raved about what a young, vibrant feel the place had, what with it being a university town and all. I was 14; to me, college was ages away and only promised troubling things like...College Algebra. The only other things about Bloomington that stood out to me were the grey, chilly weather and the piles of dead leaves; accustomed as I was to the balmy climes of Florida, this was a novelty to me, and I begged my uncle to let me rake his lawn.

The Second Time of Significance...

The late summer of 2004, when I was 24, I arrived in Bloomington, chased out of Florida by a hurricane. I was excited to live somewhere brand-new and completely different, and for the first six weeks of my time there, I was completely starry-eyed, enchanted with the old buildings and houses, the swarms of young people, the amazing variety of foods, the different trees and climate...Of course, the feeling didn't last; grad school and real life and yes, winter and the feeling of being trapped in a small town all overwhelmed me, and while I still loved it, the novelty wore off.

The Third Time of Significance...

Now. Right Now. Spring of 2016, almost 10 years since I moved away from Bloomington, I am back. Yesterday, when driving through the downtown area to meet up with friends for lunch, that old sense of wonder tugged at me a little. Bloomington is a bit magical--"a town forever young", I once read it described as--but I am not forever young. I am not 14 or 24. I'm almost 36, about to be divorced, basically circling back around to the beginning and trying to pick up a different thread of my life story. It's almost like, when I was young, I'd read the "Choose Your Own Adventure" novels in reverse,  carefully following which storylines and choices took me to the best outcome. Only I'm doing it now, living my life in reverse a little.

 I don't have many dreams and hopes beyond what has driven me over the past year--stay alive, get divorced, protect yourself, get out. Now that all of that has been accomplished... I'm not thinking too much about anything else other than "being successful at my new job" and "being worthy of this new third time..." I don't really know what comes next. But I've been given a chance, and this time, I hope I get it right.