Stuff that makes me happy

It's not good to be alone (as on a Sunday afternoon) after getting difficult-to-digest news; it's too easy to brood. So I did a bunch of stuff to make me not-brood and to forget the news I had heard. Some of it made me happy just because it makes me happy; some of it made me happy because it was accomplishing something useful.

1. Wrote an exam for one of my classes. I don't GIVE this exam for just over a week and I may have to tweak it a bit if I don't cover all the material I think I'll get to cover. But it's good to have it done. I have another exam to write for a week from this coming Friday but I can do that during the week.

2. Made black bean soup. From scratch. Using my mother's recipe. It makes a LOT but I like cooking stuff on the weekend that makes decent leftovers - that way, when I get home at 6 pm during the week and am STARVING, I am less likely to turn to something less healthful or to do the "screw it, I'm just eating cereal for dinner" way of operating.

3. Also made a fruit cocktail cake. (Yes, cake. I've kind of gone back to the old "life is short and I'm going to eat healthfully but to the devil with this calorie-counting crap" attitude). It's a very simple cake - as fast to make as a mix - but it's surprisingly good. It's more like a coffee cake than a cake-cake, which means you don't need to frost it. Which is good, because I don't particularly like making frosting, and I'm not crazy about a lot of frostings. (Yes, I'm the person who sometimes scrapes the frosting off the birthday cake at work. I know it drives people nuts but sometimes frosting is too too sweet for me).

4. Watched a bunch of the Dirty Jobs marathon on Discovery. I love marathons of programs I like - love being able to tune in and tune out as I'm going about my business (in this case, exam writing and cooking and cleaning). I love Mike Rowe, too. I love his sort of put-upon humor and his general attitude of not putting-down the people who do the dirty jobs. Because honestly? When you need someone to clean the sewage out of a pipe for you, you should be damn happy that there's someone willing to come and do it, and not look down on them for that.

And Mike Rowe has those kind of piercing blue eyes that make me get a little pang in my solar plexus.

5. Cleaned up house a little bit. Did away with some accumulated junk mail, swept, put some stuff away. I like having a clean house; I can't work comfortably in one that's dusty or overly cluttered or dirty in some way.

6. Looked at the new Victoria magazine that came the other day. I love the "castle" in Vancouver they featured. If I ever get transported to an alternate universe where I happen to have buckets and buckets of money (and a reasonably secure expectation of continuing to make buckets and buckets of money), I'd like to hire craftsmen to build me a castle. And gardeners to maintain formal gardens. And aqua-culture experts to make fishponds and things on the property. And a good stonemason to build a giant fence around the whole thing so I could go in when the world starts to p*ss me off and lock the gate and walk around in my garden and dangle my toes in the fishpond and sit in my nice big quiet castle-house and escape.

Oh, I'd let people in, too. I might offer tours or do charity teas or something. Or have a library on the grounds that's open to the public. Or a museum. Or something. I just like having the option of locking up the gates when the world gets to be too much for me. Which it often does.

7. Read some in Pickwick Papers. I never realized before starting it what a FUNNY book this is - I mean, it might not be "funny" if your standards are South Park or the Farrelly brothers - but it's the kind of thing I find amusing, these sort of pompous but foolish figures going about their lives, and nothing too terrible seems to happen to them. They're almost comic heroes in the Aristotelean sense (I'm thinking back to Great Books...we had a guest lecturer about one of the books, maybe it was the Aristophanes play we read? All I remember is his talking about the concept of the comic hero and how he is a person who always lands on his feet...I particularly remember (and I guess this is how pop culture has corrupted me) his mentioning Bugs Bunny as a modern example.) They do stupid things, they claim to be more knowledgeable about stuff than they are, one character ALMOST gets in a duel because of a misunderstanding - and yet, everything resolves at the end and they head off on their next adventure. The resilience of it soothes me in a strange way...like, even though there's bad stuff going on around me, maybe somehow everything can rebound and be fixed and be right again.

It seems to me - and maybe I've not read enough Dickens to make a fair assessment of this - but Pickwick Papers is one of his "sunnier" works, where there really aren't downtrodden poor or people with strange psychological problems (that weren't recognized as such in that day). Oh, true, there's "fat Joe," the narcoleptic boy, but he's not really a figure of pity the way some of Dickens' characters are.

8. Put on some crazy bombastic music and sang along. Bobby Darin is good for this. I also dug out my box set of Sammy Davis, Jr. CDs, because I hadn't listened to them in a while and there's some good stuff on there. That's actually near the top of my list of cheer-myself-up strategies and it has been for years.

9. Am contemplating doing something, either on one of my "free" afternoons this coming week, or better yet, on Saturday, to celebrate my birthday. A number of new stores have opened here in town - one that bills itself as an upscale-gift type store, and another that's kind of a big mix (they call themselves a "variety" store but they feature a lot of antiques). I could go to those. Or I could take a whole day and go to the nice, boutique-filled area about an hour south of me and spend the whole day going to antique stores. I haven't decided yet for sure but I feel like I want to do SOMETHING. Part of my malaise, I think, is that I get into these cycles of doing things for so many other people - so much volunteer work - and although I know it's important and I mostly enjoy it and supposedly a former prof of mine claimed I'd get "gold stars in my crown" for it, still, there comes a point where you feel like it's too much. Isn't there a saying that goes something like "too much sacrifice makes a heart a stone"? I kind of feel that way when I sacrifice too much of my free time for the good of others; I begin to get a little resentful and then begin to feel like, "They damn better well THANK me for this," which isn't the point and is a signal to me that I need to draw back a little.

10. Made plans for my spring break. I was originally going to stay in town and set up an experiment but I realized that the phenology of the plant I'm using is such that it won't be ready for me to set up the experiment that early. So rather than sit in town for a week and SAY I'm going to work on papers (but then probably not because I never work well on what I think is supposed to be my 'vacation'), I made arrangements to go visit my parents over the break.

Now, I know some of you with more challenging family situations might not think that would be much fun or a very pleasant spring break. But I LOVE my parents a whole lot, I get along with them well, and I miss having them nearby, and also, they're in their 70s and they've both had some minor medical scares over the past couple years...so I'm well aware (too aware, sometimes, when I wake up at 3 am and all the things that torture me when my mind's not occupied come to visit me) that they won't be here forever, so I'm going to visit them when I can. (It's harder for them to travel - my father's knees are in very poor shape and sitting for long periods is hard on him, and also they have a couple of extremely geriatric cats who have to receive medication daily). So it's a lot easier for me to travel than it would be for them.

I called them to tell them and they seemed very happy, my dad in particular. He started talking about this new fancy restaurant that has opened up up there and how he wants to take me to it when I visit (I guess his low-salt diet is flexible enough to allow restaurant food sometimes). And they even offered to pay for my tickets up there, which I'm not sure I am going to take them up on....part of me is like "Whoo-hoo, free money!" and part of me is like, "But they're RETIRED..."

The only bad thing is I miss my dad's birthday by just a couple days - if spring break were a little earlier this year, I could be there for it. But oh well, it's only a couple of days.