Girly stuff

(Yeah, yeah, the blogbreak didn't last long. But I thought of something to write about).

I like girly stuff. By that, I mean scented candles and nice soap and pretty things and craft supplies and throw pillows and little angels to hang up on my walls and flowers and coffee mugs with cute pictures on them. I like antiques and "vintage" items. I like fancy tea and semi-gourmet food like fancy salad dressings.

Part of my weekend plans - I'm working on some research right now, and want to do some exercise this morning yet, and do my bimonthly walk-through-the-neighborhood-and-pick-up-trash-because-
my-neighbors-apparently-can't-be-arsed-to-and-
seeing-it-bugs-me project - include going to a couple of new boutique/gift stores that opened in town. It's going to be my little post-birthday treat; there are four or more stores I can go to (I know of at least 2 I've never been in yet). I'm just going to go, and look around, and not worry about the time, and if I see something I like and I want, I'm going to buy it.

I'm going to focus my mind on light things, on girly things, and most importantly, on the Simple Questions.

Because I think part of my malaise these days is I've been thinking too hard about the Complex Questions - the questions that either don't have answers, or that I don't know how to answer:

1. Is this what I want to be doing for the rest of my life?

2. Am I having ANY kind of positive impact on the world? (And believe me, that's a big one for me. If I can't look back over my life and feel like I left something a little better than it would have been without me...well, you know how George Bailey felt at the beginning of "It's a Wonderful Life"? That's how I'd feel.)

3. What's going to become of us? (This one seems to be more at the forefront this year, I think it's because of all the campaign ugliness I've seen and also the fear that no matter who we elect, it's not going to be a great four years and might even be a very bad four years. And I worry about the creeping nannyism of laws, the thought that someday I might be told how many miles I'm permitted to drive in a week, or what I can set my thermostat on, or how many watts of electricity I may use per day, or what types and amount of food I'm permitted to eat, and on, and on).

4. What more is going to be expected of me in the coming years? (We have a few new administrators at my university. And like all managerial types, they want to "make their mark" by instituting some grand sweeping project, which generally trickles down to the faculty with the dictum of "Teach more better" or something, and they get all the glory for any improvement while we sit there scratching our heads about how to fulfill two mutually exclusive goals at once, like, "Increase retention but make your program more challenging." So I have a fear that something's going to come down the pike that will make remaining teaching here untenable...and I'll have to go out for the horrific job-search again, and start all over somewhere else, and try to earn tenure somewhere else, and all of that, until THEIR administration decides to meddle more...and it becomes lather, rinse, repeat, until I'm able to retire. If I put aside enough money. If they haven't decided to tax people of my generation at 80% in order to pay for free facelifts and "dealing with aging" therapy for Baby Boomers...)

And yes, I know, as a Christian, my feeling about all of those should be "it's going to be all right, eventually" but sometimes it feels like that "eventually" might be on The Other Side, so to speak, and I'm not exactly looking forward to another 50 years or whatever of dealing with the increasing incivility of the world, and worrying about the new things I may have to deal with in the future, and dealing with my own sense of general ineffectiveness.

So I need to get away from that. As much as I may decry some forms of shallowness, they do have their charms - being able to put worries about "what will become of us" out of your head and just BE. I once read a magazine article about a normally hard-driving businesswoman who spent a week at a spa...and she talked about getting "spa brain," where your focus sort of closes down, where you forget about the outside world and instead focus on things like, "What's for lunch?" and "Should I do the river-rock massage next or the volcanic mud pack?"

And I think people need that kind of thing. We need a chance to be able to unplug and to live with the "trivial" for a while, especially when we spend a certain amount of time dealing with the "deep." (And though I'm not a philosopher, and although I have no illusions of my research saving the world or even leading to medical advances, I do think spending a lot of time working to improve one's career - in my case, focusing either on research and teaching and kind of beating myself with the "must do better, must do more" stick - does kind of deplete the soul).

I think perhaps that's one of the purposes of hobbies - to be able to ask the "simple" questions, instead of the "complex" ones. What book should I read next? Which color yarn, what fiber type, should I use to knit up this pattern? What project do I want to start next? What do I need to fill in my collection? Should I re-do the train layout to reflect the changing seasons?

Because it's sort of restful to deal with questions where the "right" answer is 100% tied to your own whim - the world will not stop turning if you decide to read "Lucky Jim" instead of "Atonement" next, no one will die if you make a sweater out of peach colored yarn instead of periwinkle, no one (Well, maybe except for spouses) will take issue with your choice to do a spring-themed train layout with new little lichen trees and tiny flowers and repainting the tiny female figures so it looks like they are wearing pastel colored clothing.

It's nice to have something where there aren't repercussions that affect other people.

(And that may be a big part of my frustration, sadness, and malaise these past few days: I've seen far, far too many instances of where choices people made - in some cases it was the only choice TO be made, but still - had negative effects on lots of people around them. And I get that horrible feeling I get from time to time, that we're all like very fragile eggshells, ready to crack under the slightest provocation, or like we're all walking around carrying absolutely brim-full cups of water, and we're all trying not to spill the tiniest drop, but there are all these shocks that keep hitting us, and the ground under our feet keeps tilting crazily, and it's all we can do to keep from spilling our little cup of water).

So, this afternoon, I'm going to spend some time focusing on the Simple Questions: Do I want to buy lavender sachets to hang up in my closet? Do I like this soap or that soap better? Should I buy a bottle of this gourmet salad dressing to try?

Because those are the questions I can answer right now. And those are the questions that if I answer them "wrong," there aren't any really bad consequences - maybe I wind up with a $4 bottle of salad dressing I don't really LIKE, but that's easily fixed (take it over to my department and stick it in the breakroom fridge with a note on it explaining that I bought it and didn't care for it - someone will eat it up).

And right now, I want some things that are easily fixed if I happen to make the wrong decision.

I once described - in another place and referring to another location - as going to the boutiques for me as being kind of like Holly Golightly's vision of Tiffany's - that nothing bad can happen there. I kind of picture it in my mind as floating in a calm ocean of nice things, of being underwater in the sense that the daily demands cannot reach me, where I am just my own person - where I can sort of float freely and forget the work that's waiting for me.

It's sort of taking care of myself in a way. A different sort of way than the eat healthfully-exercise-floss the teeth-always wear a seatbelt way. Not the "So you won't die in a horrible manner" way. More of a "so you can have some happiness while you're here" way. Because those little things DO matter to me - having some kind of nice-smelling hardmilled soap to wash my face with, being able to light lavender or "vanilla oak" (whatever the heck that is) candles in the evening, having a comfy pair of slippers to scuff around in. Because that will make the insecurities I feel about the world in general and my particular role in it recede a little bit. Maybe it's being hopelessly escapist, I don't know. But it seems far too humorless, far too self-denying, to avoid the little luxuries of life in the name of...what? Saving money? Not using as many resources? I don't know. I tend to believe that it's not necessarily spiritually healthy to abstain from the things that make you happy.

I'd make a poor ascetic. But I can make a pretty happy girly-girl, if I let myself be.