Tonight I:
Spoke for the first time to the best prospect from Craigslist. He reads SF (including my litmus novel, Frank Herbert’s the Dosadi Experiment)! He’s a union man! He sings bass! He has long hair and a beard! He made me laugh my ass off! I am meeting him Friday night!
Arranged in my own mind – okay, started spade work with the CUC – to work on a social justice refresher course for my church (welcoming gays, lesbians, transgendered and gender rebellious people of all stripes.)
Spoke to my mother on the phone. Spoke (briefly) to my Kitty Kate on the phone.
Hung with one of my fave exinlaws. Being Swampy.
Sat in a brilliantly sunny patio and watched the world go by while so doing.
Pondered how to put a retraction in my blog about beer. Okay, deep breath, here goes. I like beer. It’s staying.
Wrote a song:
Give me five, give me ten
give me round the bend again
you will know when I blow through your town
Give me five, give me ten
give me round the bend again
As I impart the wisdom I have found
You may stray…. so far away
you may go where only God can follow
But your mind will find a thousand ways to shine
and your heart may ache and never yet be hollow
chorus
You may wait … for an important date
And find that life has gone by in the meantime
But it’s one short breath between your birth and death
so you might as well enjoy yourself between time
Chorus.
I need another voice, (verse!), but I’m quite happy as things stand. It amazes me how much I can do when I am happy.
Yes, I started a book which you have probably seen in the bookstores called “The Secret” by Rhonda Byrne. The theory is to have a list of things that make you feel happy. If you feel happy, you are in a state of mind to have the things in life you want. If you are not happy, you are therefore, not in a state of mind to have the things you want in life. By referring to the list of things that can make you feel happy (listen to music, something you remember, anything), you can return to the state of mind that allows you to have the things you want in life. In you’re case, you can write songs when you are happy. “The Secret” also comes in DVD format.
I also write songs when I’m miserable, sick, drunk, and dying of lust for some unattainable fool of a man. I am, in short, a song writing machine, although I don’t think I could be like Song a Day Billy Hughes.
I have severe issues, as I have noted elsewhere and repeatedly in my blog, with the whole ‘create your own reality’ concept. I do know that my reality is more fun when I’m happy than when I’m insanely angry, jealous and riddled with back pain. I have also made the conscious decision that, as long as I am thinking about what facial expression I’m wearing, I will smile rather than frown. Your facial expression feeds back into your hormones. As disgusting as I first found it, the whole fake it til you make it thing is true enough to make it advice worth taking. The trick is making it a real smile so your hormones kick in properly. A fake smile is just a mask for covering grimacing slabs of teeth. So yes, while I agree that you are responsible for your own mood (with many provisos caveats &cetera) I’m not sure any of us has to buy a book to figure that out. And listen to me babble…..Although I’ve met lots of people who enjoyed The Secret, I think the meta-message is about gullibility, not happiness. I’ve already got so many self-help books it’s quite ludicrous… I am actually contemplating how to get rid of most of them – I registered for Bookcrossing per Lexi’s instructions.
The most bizarre thing about smiling gently all the time (I practice on the bus, now that I spend so much time on one) is that it influences your most trivial social interactions, and you will be the first person on the bus whom the baby in the stroller looks at. Of course, once you’ll caught the eye of this little round headed fizzle machine…. well, where is your frown now? It’s most amusing, and all quite recursive.
Yes, I admit, I am having trouble with some things in this book. Believing everything that is in that book, seems like some die-hard Christians I know. Every conversation somehow relates back to God in a VERY BIG way. Like Brenda’s mother telling me that God was with Brenda every moment of every day all the way through her 5-year fight against cancer. Brenda was an atheist, who fought with every bit of determination and grit to beat her cancer. When Brenda asked for my help, I told her what to do and she did it. Well unless God put Debbie on this earth to help Brenda then God had nothing to do with it. I don’t see that God helped me help Brenda. I love Brenda, would do anything for Brenda, I would even risk her hating me by telling her the truth — she would do the same for me. To me this is the best that life has to offer!
Still I’m willing to give this little book a chance. I’ll take anything that comes my way on the upside. On the downside, I may teach myself not to get stuck in a rut — much like your smiling technique.
As far as religion goes, I believe in Jesus. I believe he was probably the most phenomenal teacher/leader that has ever existed. I don’t care if he was the son of god or the son of man or the son of an alien — it doesn’t strengthen or weaken the power of his teachings for me.
Regarding “The Secret, ” my baloney detector has redlined – and I have only read ABOUT it. I agree that the attitude with which one faces the world is largely self-controllable – although I am inclined to think, from empirical observations, that there is a hardwired component.
I find if interesting how, over and over, the self-help books take some small scrap of common sense and parlay it into a best-seller. Well, I guess it’s a living – but it’s not an honest one, and it has many of the elements of a con game.
You and I should write a self help book make a million and retire. Oh sugah! you’re already retired. Never mind.
Debbie, Amen, ameen to your comments about Jesus. If you want another perspective check out King Jesus by Robert Graves. It’s a hard slog but it’s worth it, and the Bible makes a lot more sense from a historical sense afterwards.
Allegra, didn’t I tell you about Bookcrossing years ago? I thought I sent the link to all of my literate overly (book) endowed friends…
Yeah, and I signed up then. And I signed up when Lexi told me about it. And I’ve already lost my password and I don’t have a functioning printer at home because it turns out that the Z51 only works with PCs. So I can’t print out the labels you print out for the books unless I do it at work, which is misappropriation of company resources.
I’ll buy a printer eventually.