Happy Sunday (No, Really)

I doubt there will be much in the way of coherence or any real sense of importance to this post, but sometimes I just feel like thinking via writing and hey, this is my website – it’s even got my name on it – so I’m going to write.

I’m sitting in my apartment. It is a beautiful sunny day outside and I have the blinds up and that wonderful quality of natural light that makes everything glowy and warm and casts those movie-esque shadows in all the right places is hitting my white walls. I’ve been listening to low-key electronica-ish music for most of the afternoon (The Album Leaf, Air, Tycho, etc.) and I still have paint all over my hands and jeans from working on some new paintings earlier today. I played guitar for a bit. I’ve gotten sloppy, but I’m ok with it. (Mostly.) I had a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, some chips, and grape Kool-aid for lunch and as I was eating I wondered, “Hm… is this the kind of meal “adults” are supposed to eat? If so, should I feel bad for enjoying it so much?” I illustrated some posters that I’ll be selling soon. I really like them, I hope you do too. I fell down last week going up some steps and gashed my left shin and today I hit the wound squarely on the corner of my desk. I am amazed at how my tolerance for pain has shruken since the days when I would regularly crash my bicycle into trees/asphalt/cars/fellow-children and come home bloody, but somehow still extremely happy. Nonetheless, it looks like my collection of scars is growing at a decent clip. 

So that’s the surface of things. That’s what my life looks like today. But there’s a weird kind of tension in the air in my life right now. It’s not the spring fever type of tension (because, though it’s difficult to argue the presence of it, that variety of “fever” is no respecter of seasons for me.) No, this is the “standing on the edge of something” waiting tension – the kind that is good and true and right to walk in and take in and live out (if I can be so cheeky as to talk in such grand, sweeping, romantic phrases. Can I?) I like it. It makes me want to write poetry and try to capture what I’m feeling/thinking, even though I’m fairly certain I’ll fail in that endeavor. 

I like it because it doesn’t matter that the thing (or experience or person or event or whatever the waiting is for) isn’t here yet – because I know it will be eventually. You don’t stand on the edge of something and wait for nothing. I am far too optimistic to buy into that. And while I’m waiting, I’m just going to keep doing lots of things, mostly at once, because that seems to be the only course of action that keeps me from spending too much time in my own head, overanalyzing scenarios that never happen, feeling depressed about things not occurring that, in reality, were never promised to me in the first place. The human capacity to be pissed about things that don’t exist is really quite astounding. In conversations with people, I often tend to lump together my art-making exploits under the banner of “well, I’m just trying not to be bored” but lately I wonder if there’s more to it. I wonder if it’s more a case of I do it because it makes me happy. Because I am content in the creative process. 

Happiness is a rare thing these days, it seems. At least in America. I can go an entire day and not see one happy person. Somehow, I’m certain that is NOT the way things should be.