The opposite of me, or A Winter's Tale

Things I am not: High flying and fancy free.



See.

That was most certainly not me earlier today.

Sugar Glider related antitheses aside, I am seriously addicted to the winter weather. Rather, I am reveling in the sheer winter-inspired life style the current weather is affording me. Hermetic by nature, I love excuses to stay indoors and snuggle up to my laptop or a book, or even the hanging of my new curtains with social justification on my side. I love wintery foods: pumpkin, gingerbread, nutmeg and all those intense carb and meat centered creations that one craves as a hibernation catalyst. Soup looms large with me this time of year: steamy, full of little chunks of tasty, even the bowl it comes in warms me to the core.

In the winter I listen to books on tape. I stay home and work on craft projects. I play solitaire. I do a million things that all let me sit alone in the quiet of my house and free the mind to wander through the halls of introspection. It’s this time of year that I get the most ideas for new shows, the seeds of things that the productive spring months will foster, nurture and grow beyond shadows and flickers. It’s also the time that I reconnect with what I’m doing now, checking in with life as it stands and sort of just noting what’s there.

Winter is never really a time of action-packedness for me. It’s about stillness and preservation of one’s energies, be they mental or physical, because there’s less to go around. I try not to start big new endeavors in winter, in part I guess because of the hassle that goes along with winter schlepping, but more so because the short days and chilled air encourages a kind of minimalism. And yet, because I know I tap out around 11pm and can’t run around the clock like the long summer nights seem to always find me doing, I’m more careful with the way I use those hours. When I read, I don’t feel the need to slam through my book to get it done, I can savor the words.

I sometimes get upset with the slow paced-ness of life in the winter months, but lots of experience trying to change the inevitable says the effort is futile. So instead I trust that I will again rev up in the coming months and bask in the semi-lethargy for now.

i want to shine on in the hearts of men!!!!!!

Another head aches,
another heart breaks,

I'm so much older than I can take...

And my affection,
well it comes and goes,
I need direction to perfection
No no no no no no: Help me out.
Yeah-e-ah.
You know you got to help me out.

- Some alterna-pop band with a name that was "The Fill-In-The-Ironic-Blank" from a recent trendy movie I can't remember

So freaking true man.

Do you know the days when bad pop music just hurts so good? Those days when you know it's trashy and that everyone is singing it but you seriously can't believe that another person can be comprehending this music on the deep philosophical level that you have spontaneously achieved? And even as you karmically connect you know the music isn't actually all that meaningful, but perhaps you've found depth were there was none. In fact, tomorrow it may not strike any sort of chord with you at all, but this particular afternoon when this song randomly came up on your play list you stopped and actually listened to (a selective some of) the lyrics for the first time and felt like Jimmy Cool was talking right to you.

This is the stuff that walking down a city sidewalk hero/heroine slow-smile-spreading across the face "everything is going to be ok" end of movie credit roll scenes are made of. And I've determined that, for me at least, this is one of the few simple pleasures that keep the young creative minds of this X-Y-what comes after Z generation going. We need to make the things that surround us important or we'll simply go bonkers.

We're po-mo and majored in anthro, orgo, or socio. Or perhaps gender/woman/sexuality/race studies with a dash of urban planning. Skilled in the language of "ology"s notwithstanding we seek jobs that pay us a fractional amount per year of the cost of our higher educations. We house low rent but live high maintenance. We have above-par intelligence and sub-standard housing. Every person I know is a super genius physicist who ballroom dances professionally in their spare time. They're the closet opera singers who pay the rent peddling medical insurance to drug companies and work 50-plus hours a week besides their 9-5 because their "career" does not make them a living.

And most of the time it means that we're doing things that challenge us every day of our lives. It's tough work, draining work, and 99% percent of the time it's severely unrewarding. All that work towards a vague artistic ideal can taint you on the way. By the time you get to the point where you can do the thing you want to do, it's the last thing you feel like doing. So life becomes this idea of infinite potential, a world in which you knew if you just had "the time, the funds, the resources" to do your thing, you'd be brilliant. But all those literal other-worldly things start to seem so far away, and more "needs" start to pile up. So before you have gotten to anything at all, it starts to seem easier to detour off into something else. There is a reason for artist "burn out" and it's a prevalent creative phenomenon, especially within the American artistic landscape, that the best artists are not always the ones who can survive.

And at the end of the day after toiling in some silly job that a monkey could perform or spending 7 years behind a book getting a PhD so that you can teach somewhere, simply so that one has the flexibility to be around in case what they want to do has a chance of happening, there is a need for those underextended brains to find meaning in the silly and sometimes overly shallow world around them. So we find that meaning in the middle of Hot Fuss.

Because sometimes, you just want to yell, kick and scream your head off about something, even if you don't yet know what it is. When I've finished yelling, life usually seems a little clearer, more focused, which is nice. And sometimes I hit the replay button and listen again, headphones on, and actually feel like that person in the movie, walking down the street, with a slow smile crossing my face, knowing everything will turn out alright.