I seem to be at a loss for words

It's strange to try to write in a vacuum. I know that some unidentified readers may be out there, but I don't know them, so it's hard to frame my words. It's not easy for me to get at my ideas lately. They seem to be languishing under a mountain of background noise.

I haven't had a TV for about a year and a half, and I really think this might be causing a low-level madness to set in. I have always had a television, and like most kids who have grown up since the 1960's it was the centerpiece of my entire existence when I was young. In the last few years of my marriage I didn't much love the tv, but it was always there to keep my company if I was lonely or bored or just needed emotional numbness.

Now I have the internet, and a sort of frenetic social life. I've come to notice that I only like about 30% of the people I go out with to get wasted. Why do I waste my time? Well the 30% are worth it, even if I am cringing at the other 70%.

Human connections are not easy to make and keep. I've been working harder than I ever have in my life to maintain connections with my few elite "good" friends, but it still feels so tenuous. At least you know a tv won't drift away.

do it clean

I'm looking for something new, something clean. The clutter of my history is piled up, even now in the apartment I promised myself I would keep organized. I can't seem to get rid of things quickly enough to make space for myself to breathe and think. I am still trying to be someone new who listens to different/ better music and wears less ill-fitting clothes. I want to wake up to find myself trim, elegant, beautiful, and witty - in a bed that is not a tangle of bedding, in a home that has beautiul clean surfaces and floors.

The clutter experts say that your environment is merely an outward representation of your inner life. It's true, everything has been tangled up in there by grief and disappointment.

One year ago, barely out of my marriage, I found myself stunned by an intangible love affair. My feelings, which wanted so badly to grow roots again, could find no substance to cling to. It was merely a ghost in that bed, giving me so much affection that never belonged to me. I let go of it, and I let go of my dad who slid quickly down the slope of cancer and finally gave in in the middle of a hectic summer.

Pushed further from shore than I had been before and cast adrift I gave myself over to long nights of whatever substances were on hand. I stopped vacuuming... I let things pile up until my only release could be escape to a foreign country. I went to the UK, where nothing belonged to me and I did not have to care for anything but myself and a borrowed novel.

lip glue

City girls slather their lips with sticky goo until they shimmer and glisten wetly in the moonlight. They want to be kissed, to be noticed, to be loved, for lips a yard in front of them glittering with failed adhesive. They want to shine like that, right through to morning. City girls reckon they can buy anything with that shimmer of promised sex.

Friday night. Irish holiday drunken fiasco night. I have crawled into myself to recuperate, to invent my own health spa amidst ungenerous urbanity with its ungracious smirk. So here I am, alone, thinking about lip gloss.

MAC LipGlass (the universal favorite and possibly closest to real glue) come in shades such as Nico, Squirt, Clarity, Oh Baby, Gaze, Greed, Underage, Expensive, Sun Set, and Secretive.

Without looking, I'd choose Expensive over Squirt.

cock and bull

I'm in a bad mood. This is in fact the baddest mood I can remember for quite some time, even in light of all of the bad mood inducing events of the past 1.5 years. Or 25, rather. My bad mood can be linked to all sorts of reasonable physiological causes, like... I haven't had sex since January 1, I stayed up until 7a.m. on Friday and have spent the past 2 days with a boulder of a hangover crushing my head, and i'm trying to lose weight. This means no alcohol and very few carbs during the week. I have a headache, and a weird itching in my throat like I'm coming down with something. My eyes hurt, and whenever I start to think about anything I feel like crying. Yeah, this is one bad mood.

I went to see Tristram Shandy yesterday with my friend, and I managed to laugh a little. It's funny enough in it's self-congratulatory brit-lit sort of way. Steve Coogan is brilliantly arrogant as always. I wished I had read the book, although I think they made the film with the assumption that no one has read it. One thing the film lacks is a sense of a sticking point or crux of some kind. The most dramatic moment is when he makes out with the PA, and that doesn't come from or go anywhere.

Hopefully I will have the presence of mind to delete this blog before anyone reads it. I just needed a little whine... since i can't have any wine!

welcome to authentic happiness

This evening I have been trying to find Happiness. On Google.

A few weeks ago I read an article on Salon called "Getting over happiness" about Steven Hayes' new pop-psych book "Get out of your mind and into your life." Hayes contends that we live in a culture wherein feeling good is valued above living well. Could it be true that we live in a culture bereft of meaningful values to give us a foundation for satisfaction? Well, yes, of course it's possible and even glaringly obvious when one starts to look closely at the angst and dissatisfaction all around us.

In the past twenty years or so the standard statistical quantifier for happiness has shifted from "standard of living" to "quality of life." Someone cleverly noticed that people with mortgages and jobs do not necessarily live better lives than those living in abject poverty. In fact, someone living in a hut with fifteen family members may be happier and enjoying a higher quality of life than someone working in a factory and barely scraping by, although the latter technically has a higher standard of living. The Quality of Life Research Center provides insight into motivation for living, as well as some intelligent research on how creative engagement enriches quality of life.

Hayes' book begins with the sentence "People suffer." There's a lot packed into that tiny sentence. We are programmed from a very young age to categorize any kind of suffering as "wrong" and when the inevitable flood of pain and ugliness starts to flow through the walls of the fortress we panic and try to patch them up. People think that because life hurts they must have something wrong with them. It couldn't possibly be normal to be unhappy, could it?

My friend and I were chatting yesterday about a piece he heard on NPR about happiness research. The happiness researchers have discovered that the more rich, married, white, republican and religious you are the more likely you are to report that you are happy. Looking at the demographic, we agreed that maybe we'd stick to miserable for now. Frequently people who claim to be happy are really not satisfied with their lives, but they have cultivated a definition for happiness that fits their reality. 'If I'm married and live in a beautiful house, etc etc, then I must be happy, right?'

In Betty Friedan's 1963 feminist classic "The Feminine Mystique" she examines "the problem with no name." In the 1950's, at the height of post-war prosperity, thousands of "happy" housewives showed up at the local GP or psychiatrist complaining of headaches, fatigue, malaise, ennui, anxiety, and horrible horrible guilt over not being happy. They had everything they were supposed to want and they felt very isolated in their unhappiness. By all appearances, pretty much everyone else was happy. It was only when these miserable women started talking to each other that they realized it was normal to be unhappy in a state of oppression. Thus began the latest women's movement.

So, what is causing the new "problem with no name"? Are people universally stifled within a confusing web of oppressions? Yeah, I'd bet five bucks on it.

According to Hayes, the key to a rich satisfying life is defining and acting according to a set of values. I haven't read the book, and I usually think these trendy pop-psych books are hogwash, but something about this rings true. He is not attempting to provide a cure for suffering, because suffering is normal. So our only choices are to either drown ourselves in whatever numbs the pain, or to accept the pain as our own and do something meaningful and engaging. Of course there's always suicide, but what a trite cop out that is!

There's something missing here though. Okay, suffering is inevitably part of being human, but isn't taking the stance that it's "normal to suffer" something akin to those doctors telling the unhappy housewives there was nothing wrong with them and giving them some sleeping pills? There is something wrong, but it's not something wrong with us.

Tonight I searched Google for Happiness and ended up at the "authentic happiness quiz." I scored 2 out of 5 on the authentic happiness scale. When I registered on the site I got an email titled "welcome to authentic happiness"... ha!

blogging about blogging

About a year ago I started blogging. At first it was a solipsistic affair, with myself as the only known audience. At the time I had a theory that the bulk of blogs in existence are pointless piffle -- an amalgam of raging (unsubstantiated) opinion and mundane details of daily life. This still pretty much holds true. However, I have started to gain an appreciation for the genre and especially for those who do it well. I have recently discovered that some of the best blog writing comes from professional call girls! One of them is even nominated for the "Blooker Prize" (honoring authors who publish books based on their blogs).

The trouble with blogging is that most people (including myself) don't have much of interest to say. No I take that back - even the most mundane life can be interesting if written well. But how much time does any of us have to read about a stranger's weird day at the vet or vacation in Cancun. Not much, since we're busy going to the vet and Cancun ourselves.

This is where I have laid forth the challenge to myself... write an interesting blog. Something worth taking the time to read, and not simply an addition to the volumes of web chatter. Here I go then.