Four Things Your Friend Needs to Work On!

I'm loving the clickbait today:  10 Reasons Why John Lennon was a Dick.  15 Celebrities with Strange Body Parts.  As long as a student doesn't walk in as I'm waiting for the slideshow to change (big photo of Bobbi Kristina Brown taking a bong hit).  Too much.

I've been sleeping a lot.  Partly it's because I have two early morning classes, which doesn't fit well with Jeff and my interest in late-night Netflix binges:  British psychodrama, anyone?  Could there-- statistically--be that many serial killers in North England?  You would think so.  My daughters are getting used to Mommy crashing for a few hours after arriving home.  I like to compare it to Sport's novelist dad in Harriet the Spy, who slept during the day, and whom Sport romanticized, even as he was making his own dinner.

Lots of things are going on, and I'm still feeling sucky-of-the-having-eaten-too-much-shit variety, but it's getting better, I think/hope.  Today, rather than hiding my head under a pillow, I'm visualizing constructive ways of annihilation.  Just kidding.  But it has occurred to me that I've never been very good at expressing anger.  Usually it just bottles up until it explodes:  red (rage) or blue (detachment), with blue dominating:  I'm really good at ignoring people to death.

But how's that working for me?  The bottling part, not so much.  That's goal #1.  Say no earlier.  I've become better at that at work, for sure.  Tenure is a lovely crutch, but a crutch nonetheless.  My sister and I always used to give more points to those who tackle problems sober/naked/without nets...but who actually has the guts to do that?  I'm trying to have the guts.  The NUTS!

And then, the delivery of anger.  Once I get around to actually being mad, I lose control really fast. Goal #2:  be a more effective (read: ethical, read: not-righteous) yeller.

Ok, dear reader, I challenge you to make. me. mad.   Come on.

Goal #3:  Stop inviting conflict.

So all of this crap has had its usual effect on me, which is a diagrammatic accounting of my social life: yay OCD!  Actually, OCD is very comforting to me, which is why I have it.  I started thinking about old friends and what it means to have old friends.  Do you have old friends?  Some people,  I realize, do not.  Or (and this is much closer to my situation) some think they have old friends, but have relegated many of them to the confines of Facebook, which is like a "whole nother" category...like a Diet Friendship:  safe and sane and somewhat sanitized.

Facebook is great for my OCD:  everyone present/accounted for, but it is nothing like real friendship. Hence Goal #4: See actual people with some regularity.  Jeff and I don't get out much, but it means so much to us to have old friends, especially ones we share (e.g. Robert, Miah).  And then the new/old friends.

Do you really give a shit about any of this?  I'll understand if you don't.   (Direct violation of Goal #1: awesome.)

The really good news of today is that it's raining in Northern California.  Our parched mountaintop is getting a break, and hopefully the wind will blow down a lot of dead trees so we can clean them up and pretend they were never there.  One of my favorite students will visit tomorrow and we will walk in the woods, looking for mushrooms and wildflowers, grill something, and fulfill the requirements of Goal #4.  I will sleep some more, do some work, maybe finish reading a book, maybe throw a few plates, scream into the waves, etc.