lemme begin with an al green quote
why... (somebody)
why people break up
turn around and make up
i just can't see...
you'd never do that to me
(would ya baby?)
cuz being around me is all you see
it's what i wanna do, so now,
let's stay together (together)
lovin you forever, whether
times are good or bad
happy or sad, ohhhhh...
or sump'n like that. anyhow... i love my wife. i am not as perfect as al green, and i have actually, in our 8 years together, gone through spells where i did not appreciate her enough. and i have gone through spells where i was so focused on my own goals that i didn't necessarily put much back into the relationship. it's now, though, and i'm currently steeped in a comforting awareness that my wife and i love each other so much, we are capable of going through so much more difficult emotional work than we even realize we may one day have to. i'm getting all melancholy and morbid, but just thinking about one or both of us with alzheimer's creeping up in fits and spurts so the other one is never sure what's real and what's hallucination; never sure when they're holding the hand of their loved one or being tolerated bye someone who is utterly confused and doesn't know you from a hill of beans. it's so scary. and people's lives have ended for as long as people have been around. so i guess in theory we should be evolutionarily adapted to the loss of our closest companions. but the thing about modern life is that we imbue all of it with a romanticism that feeds part of us that would never even have broken the surface in our earlier evolutionary days. feeling so romantically engaged, so mentally and emotionally dependent on our partner, maybe that's too new.
well, on another note...
i've been in a lot of depressive tones for many years now. i suppose you could say i drift in and out in quick succession, but when you take a step back and look at a period of time, it's easy to cast it into memory as a primarily melancholy period or an upbeat one. i've known i need therapy for quite some time. but i didn't always know what i needed to work on in therapy. the [therapist who i shall not name] was so put off by my cartesian try-doubting-everything that she would have none of it, unless she could make someone believe i'm far less functional than i am. regardless of what limitations exist in my habits, values, and socialization, there are facets of the way i express myself that meet with little to no resistance in the context they're solicited. this is at least one place from which to draw personal pride and motivation to habituate myself to certain social norms.
i dunno. here's what i think: if you have a group of friends, you can put them all into your brain collectively at once and think about all the fabulous things about them: rescued a one-eyed dog that is old and skittish; rekindled love for playing drums & joined a band by extensive gaming in guitar hero and rock band; lives in a 3-story loft in downtown, with roof and patio access that are gorgeous, knows everything in the world about plants, and makes them all grow beautifully and shares with terrific pictures; started a website to playfully mock a popular crafting and selling website, which became a cult classic on its own; runs a landscaping business; got Ph.D.s; frequently (and seemingly exclusively) participates in curating and creating art for exhibitions in prestigious locations; goes out to eat all the time and orders all the best, and fancy drinks, too; doesn't hold back on repairs and improvements to the property: adds pools, hot tubs, landscaping, hardscaping, all kinds of thingsing...; drinks beer constantly; smokes pot like a chimney; keeps up with facebook, linkedin, tumblr, deviantART, twitter, youtube, etsy, ebay, flickr, picasa, shutterfly, google+, and all those things; relaxes every morning while enjoying a delicious coffee drink before getting moving on the getting-ready-for-work routine; showers daily; takes their dog to the dog park several times a week; goes for walks and works out at the gym regularly; keeps up with the latest films that are showing in theaters; vacuums, dusts, and de-lints furniture, floors, windows, and walls to get rid of dander and fur from pets; goes to the farmer's market at least twice a week so veggies in the hanging fruit basket are always fresh and delightful; can always make a moment to sketch or doodle, then throw up on the internet almost immediately; keeps house clean and tidy; keeps up with grocery shopping; watches all the best shows, including 'how i met your mother', 'big bang theory', 'glee', 'house', 'daily show' and 'colbert report'; always reads the news, including CNN, the huffington post, the drudge report, transcripts of democracy now, all the translations from bill moyers' genius to audio & video, and then somehow also a smattering of awful awfulness that can be described in an unfortunate level of detail; keep their bodies limber with yoga; keep up an active erotic, seductive, sensual, and sexual life with their partner; travel to other countries and come back with glazed eyes reminiscing about the beauty/simplicity/sensibility of the flow of everyday life of [last visited place]; stay in good contact with their parents and siblings and other loved ones; keep up with sports scores; listen to NPR enough to know what's going on with CA legislation and with the stuff the BBC reports on in short snippets frequently; stay tuned in to all the latest gadgets and the strengths and weaknesses of the next generation of products and their defining characteristics; host large parties and provide much or all of the decoration/mood, activities, and food; read lots of books; make a lot of home-cooked meals from as many raw ingredients as possible; plan for and work on burning man project each year; sketch, plan, and actualize costumery for comic-con each year; spend money on at least 2 or 3 domestic round-trip flights each year to satisfy the involved people; read all those popular magazines...
well, you look at that list and it's just damn intimidating. some of those were spoken somewhat tongue-in-cheek in the making-fun-of-yuppies way, but on the whole, it's a list of things i wish i could do. all of them. all of them, plus the things that i do, like get into creative fits where all i can do is doodle, sketch, and write down ideas. and then on top of that, i want to actually have time to accomplish a great deal more of my ideas than i currently do. and anyhow, the thing is, looking at that list, i have to remind myself that this is a list of all the things all the people i know do. well, not all of the things they do. i'm pretty sure i left out play all the bestest video games. but what happens is that i compare myself to this list as if it were one fully-together person who manages to find time for everything, and that's just not true. there are people who keep up with TV shows who do nothing creative, don't travel, and don't host parties, for instance. there are people who travel a lot but don't own their own house or have a garden or go to the movies. there are people who make a lot of art, watch a lot of TV, keep up with their web presence really well, and cook a lot, but don't much leave the house or have folks over. what's really hard is trying to imagine that if i look at this list in terms of the things i want to have time for, the things i want to be, the things i want to be good at, the things i will accomplish, the way i will experience it all, and have to take a subset of those things, it stings. maybe there will have to be trade-offs that i'm not admitting to myself, thus driving myself insane trying to keep up with far too much. it certainly helps that we don't have live TV and all the shows we watch we watch after they're available for streaming on netflix or (in the case of the show house) by mailed DVD. at least then we don't have a DVR eternally backed up with so many shows that we can't watch them fast enough. sure, our instant queue gets a bit out of control. but we can always find the time to watch some shows later. and i can definitely *handle* not having a gym membership or attending any exercise classes like yoga or martial arts. it just bums me out that i (a) don't want to exercise anyway and (b) can't afford to even if i could force myself to do it.
i wonder if other people sit around and contemplate these things, too... it's not usually the *whole* list that i'm contemplating. it's things like, the next door neighbor owns a fancy volvo, buys produce that gets delivered to her door weekly, and has a diaper service where they pick up the dirty diapers and bring her fresh clean ones (she's using cloth diapers, yay for her!), and they have fancy laptops and phones, and shop at whole foods. i sit there thinking, don't we make roughly what she makes, income-wise? what are we doing wrong that we can't afford nicer vehicles, and buy the fancy groceries? is it just that we spend too much money on beer? is it that i am bad with money? do her parents help them out with the things they can't afford on their own? or, like, a couple we know who recently had a super fancy 30th bday in vegas, then subsequently in the following months went to thailand, cambodia, and vietnam, and then to london. and then put in a damn pool and landscaping in the backyard. wtf is up with that? why can't we travel? we're the same age as them. are we going to have to travel when we're too fragile to do any climbing or serious bending of the knees? did we just get unlucky? or are we making trade-offs that we don't even realize? and when people see our garden, or the intense efforts we put into decorating the interior & exterior of our house, that we've got a piano and guitars, that we're well-educated, that we're always relaxing and drinking beer... do they ever wonder the same things but in reverse? do our friends who travel wish they had a garden? do our friends with fancy cars wish they were creative like us? do our friends who spend a lot of time working out at the gym wish they had the courage to just develop a beer gut and say fuck it? i don't want to envy us, necessarily. it's just that it'd be nice to know that those we envy their exploits, they are in fact the trade-offs for the things we *are* busy doing and that make us who we are.
although some people really do seem to have it all. and to have it all together. i think more than anything, i want to feel like i've got my shit together. once my gigs start coming in more frequently, i think i'm going to have that feeling way more than i do now. all we've got to do is stop ourselves becoming alcoholics and we should have a long and happy life ahead of ourselves, right? i really do hope so. i've been more hopeful than down-and-out lately. but still, when you're hopeful, you're aspiring, and when you're aspiring, you're looking around at the big wide world, and so i think if you're really looking, you're bound to feel overwhelmed. and if you don't, you're not really looking. at least that's what i'll tell myself so i can carry on my merry way.
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