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11:23 am - TUE 8/06/02
Life doesn't suck...but sometimes it does blow

Life Doesn't Suck...Though Sometimes, It Does Blow

I think all my life I've felt there was a "real me" struggling to get through somehow. And if I could only break down down a wall of resistance, pull aside a veil of fear, struggle out from the underbrush of pain and confusion, I'd finally emerge as the person I really am. And proceed to rule the world, or something to that effect.

In other words, "I'd really be something if life didn't just keep messing with me...".

That's but one example of the out-of-kilter thought processes I'm working with here. I want to believe I'm beyond thinking like that now, that as an "adult" I understand that life isn't something that "messes us up", but instead is something that determines who we are by how we deal with it, but in the place where I don't say what I think I should say, but what I actually feel...I feel like there's a "real me" waiting to emerge from the rubble of a life that, so far, hasn't felt like it's "working out".

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My own personal definition of "stress" is this--I don't want to stand still, yet I don't want to move. So either at rest or in action, I'm not happy.

It's been my life story, or at least the story of my adult life.

Nothing feels good. My constant refrain (I was going to call it "my interior monologue", but it's not much of a "monologue", is it? More like "my interior whine").

But to say nothing feels good is, or course, not true. To say that I never feel good, "either at rest or in action", is also not true.

All kinds of things "feel good".

1. I often enjoyed riding my bike to/from work, and will soon be enjoying riding my new bike to work. In the meantime, Joe, the very nice Irish chap who runs the backroom now, offered up his bike till I get a new one. It doesn't offer the luxurious ride of my old bike--It's too small for me, for one thing and makes my knees hurt--but it definitely beats the bus (Riding home on the bus at 1:30 am Sunday morning, packed in with pock marked, pimply-faced, dead-eyed losers of various ethnicities, was not the best feeling I've experienced recently. I referred to it to Lauren as "The Bus Of The Damned").

2. Work has a number of things I enjoy--People I enjoy seeing (In the whole store, there are many more people I like than dislike, or even feel neutral about), free coffee, tv in the breakroom, magazines I can now read on my break (If you took away the "work" part, it's almost better than being at home)--and recent days have, for the most part, fallen on the neutral-to-pleasant side of the scale.

3. Still loving the weather.

4. I like going to the movies, and the illicit little thrill of sneaking in a pop and a candy bar to eat while I watch.

(Crap! I'm already coming up short here...)

Uh...Ummm...let's see....

5. I enjoy getting e-mail from friends, or "snail mail" that isn't a bill or junkmail.

6. I enjoy going over to Cary and Kay's.

(I'm meeting up with Cary to go bike-shopping on Friday, btw).

7. I've had something of a "reading renaissance" lately (It's occurred to me recently that I can't recall having read a Pulitzer-prize winning book that I didnt' enjoy. Lonesome Dove, The Mambo Kings, American Pastoral, Kavalier and Clay, the Lincoln bio, and most recently, Empire Falls. Not a loser in the bunch, to my way of thinking (Those Pulitzer people know how to pick 'em, that's for sure...).

I kind of "fell out" of reading for quite awhile, between doing theater and playing on the computer. There were even times, I'm ashamed to say, where I was "between books", something that would never have happened when I was a kid.

But reading is really critical for me, and not just for escapism, either, though there is that; In each of the last books I've read, I've found my thoughts and feelings provoked, stimulated in ways I just can't do for myself, with the well-worn mental ruts I fall into. It's not "escapism" I'm looking for and getting from reading these days, as much as it is connection, and help with understanding myself better (People have dealt with what I deal with. People have felt the way I feel. My struggles are not an aberration, but the stuff of life itself).

8. I enjoy children at the bookstore. Sometimes engaging them directly, sometimes just watching them interacting with other children, with their parents, or just seeing how they entertain themselves when no one's watching. I like how little kids have to run everywhere, I like how they just break into song if that's what they feel like doing. And lately, I've been very intrigued by the depth of emotion when a kid isn't getting what he or she wants, or is being forced to leave the bookstore before seeing everything they want to see (I try to imagine what would cause me to feel that depth of emotion. Losing a limb perhaps, being told I had a fatal illness, being informed that Jane had died in a fatal graphic-design accident).

There are all kinds of little moments. They get lost, often, in the crush of bigger, more important matters, but they're there.

In short? Life doesn't suck. At least not right now.

 

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