The Cold Blacks

If Holly Golightly can make up her own mood (The mean reds) than so can I!
Today being just a horrible day, I've decided to describe this emotion as the Cold Blacks.

The Blues wont cut it for me today cause it didn't rain and I wasn't depressed.

If you've ever watched Breakfast at Tiffanys then you know that the Mean Red's happen when you are suddenly afraid and you don't know why. Thank goodness I wasn't suffering from this malady as the only known cure is Breakfast at Tiffanys and I'm pretty sure the closest thing to Tiffanys in this "city" is the jewelry counter at Walmart.


With no other suitable alternative, I decided to make up my own Color-me-emotion, "The Cold Blacks."
You know you've got a case of the Cold Blacks when everything bad that happens to you in a day is like iron entering your soul. The day is bleak before you, but the sun insists on shining. Instead of sinking into a respectable depression, you become angry at the unfolding events until you are filled with a dark and scary rage.

Thank goodness sadness and anger are expressed by me in an identical fashion. I cry. The cure it seems is ice cream, chocolate, good friends and reggae music.

This may sound extreme but when the day unfolds with one disappointment after another culminating in breaking a guitar string and suffering the unyielding torture of stats class, you come to realize there's a sinister emotion lurking deep within demanding to be named.

Last nights/ Todays adventure in being alone was realizing that I'm tired of my small adventures. I miss my husband, dog and house. I can't wait for the end of the school year.

I just hope I can keep the "Cold Blacks" at bay until then.

-Hoping for a better tomorrow-

Discoveries

Calvin and Hobbes wanted us to know, and rightly, that there's buried treasure everywhere.

It's true. There are surprises to enrich our lives around every corner. If we look for them. Today's treasure was finally finding a spot accessible to the  lake from which I can watch the sunset tomorrow.

There are also discoveries to underwhelm us. Getting ready to write this tonight, I noticed that there are two pieces of packing tape on the wall above my bed. And even as I write this, I notice a piece of masking tape on the wall in between the windows my desk faces. Clearly, whoever was here before me had some sort of tape fetish. Maybe one day, when I am avoiding working on my thesis, I should make a list of everything the previous resident left here. I feel confident it would make for useless but interesting reading.

There are also discoveries to unnerve us, to disturb us, to hurt us. Yes, sometimes these involve others. The pain of disappointment in someone else is acute. But when we are alone, we have only to discover these things about ourselves. We go hunting for buried treasures in our soul and come up with dead bodies.

But enough about that.

These nights alone have brought new discoveries at every turn. I look for them in anticipation, the good, the bad, the underwhelming. The cry ones and the smile ones.

Cry- Figuring out that now is good a time as any to accept that people change.

Smile- When paying for gas tonight I realized that I have turned into a cheapskate. I tried to take two cents out of the "Take-a-penny" box and add it to what I was paying for in gas. Like that would make a difference! I laughed uncontrollably and left the cashier in shame.

I like me and that is no new discovery. The new discovery is that, when left alone with myself, I still like me.

Smile.

Books, Bubbles and Bob Marley

You learn something about yourself when you are walking in between the bookshelves of the library and you start tearing up. When you think "I've lived a good life" simply because you've read a lot of great books. Passing Keats and Whitman and Shakespeare the mind thinks back to the lovely words they gave you. You pull Whitman off the shelf and read "Drum Taps." You stand there reading like you were reading the back of a cereal box at the grocery store when what you want to do is lay down in the middle of the aisle, back on the floor, face to the ceiling and read aloud Whitman's melancholy lamentations. Then you remember you are in the middle of stats class so you close the book, put it back on the shelf and cast one last longing glance back to where Dickens waits for you. *Sigh*

_______________________________

Swimming is lovely. The warm water at the YMCA is a like a gentle, rocking hug. After swimming there is nothing better than getting into the whirlpool. The one here in town is nice because the water is VERY bubbly. I climbed into the whirlpool after a recent swim and watched the bubbles collect on the side. There was just one other person sharing the pool with me. I patiently waited for her to leave. When she began to make her towards the steps I thought "A few more steps and the bubbles are mine!" I imagined myself grabbing the bubbles , jumping into the middle of them, maybe I could have made a bubble beard. Alas, just when I was about to find myself in bubble ecstasy, some old man made his way into the pool. Sharing a whirl pool with an old man fills my creeper quota for a while so, I stepped out of the whirl pool with my best Charlie Brown walk. Head down,towel dragging behind me and sigh full of "I can't stand it" as I made my way back to the locker room.*sigh*

_____________________________

The sun in my face and my little brother's Bob Marley CD were just begging to be enjoyed as I climbed in my car. I had a meeting right across the street but I might have been parked illegally. It was time to find a more suitable space. I popped in Bob and found "One Love." That Bob, he speaks to me. I followed "One Love" up with "Three Little Birds" and by the time the song was half way over, all was right with the world. I wanted to stay with Bob,driving through the country, warm sun on my face and a cold breeze making tangles in my hair. I pulled the car into a real space across the street, locked the car and walked into the meeting. *sigh* Later, when I got back into the car, Bob was there. The sun had gone down and the air was frigid. It just wasn't the same. *double sigh*

I'm trying to enjoy the simple pleasures in life but life keeps crowding them out dang it! Life in a small town (part time anyway) wouldn't be so bad if the small joys weren't consistantly crushed by the large responsibilities. If only I could just read the book when I wanted, sing along when it felt right or play in the bubbles in peace. If only life could be as simple as I want to make it. I would have all the books, bubbles and Bob Marley I could handle.

Life in a small town...... stealing my soul one less bubble at a time.

In the Flu and In the Rain

No one feels like having an adventure in the rain. Especially the bitterly cold kind. Add the flu and you can forget it. The only place your exploring is your warm bed.

Driving + fever makes for a bad combination. After driving down a one way street the wrong way, I felt it was time to get off the road. The woman at CVS "there, there'd" me as I struggled to navigate the debit card machine. I asked my stats professor if there was a movie we could watch about stats or if we could have worksheets. All that to say, today wasn't a stellar day for me by any stretch.

On my way back from CVS I started thinking about Peter Pan and how the weather in never never land would change with his mood. I considered how the dreary gray and fog of the day combined with the rain were a fair representation of how I was feeling today. Then I stopped to think how narcissistic of me to consider that the weather would accommodate my mood.

But I stopped to consider that there are days, perhaps, where God feels our hearts so strongly he gives us the beautiful spring days or the rainy winter ones to let us know how important we are to him. Perhaps he asked the sun to shine away today so that I could lay in bed, exhausted in every way, free from the guilt of wasting a perfectly lovely sun. It may be childish but if God can make me so wonderfully complex, number the hairs on my head and guard me as the apple of his eye, he can surely give me a rainy day to indulge the flu and other sorrows.

I realized today that being alone more often has made me hyper aware of what I am doing at every moment. The smallest of circumstances become an adventure for me and today's was finding God's love in both the Flu and in the Rain.