I've been keeping a "what I'm thankful for" book bedside for about three months now. It is a moleskine bought for me by my sister at Christmas, which is the first thanks in the book, "That Linds bought me a spare moleskine for Christmas." Every night I try to think of two or three things I'm happy about since I normally have two or three HUNDRED reasons perpetually running through my head as to why I should punch myself in the face and stop talking forever.
I know I replay all my conversations and beat myself up too much about things that probably don't matter. I know. But seriously, I also know it's bad for my system to eat an entire bag of crumbly, oaty, British HobNobs and yet...
Type II diabetes here I come.
This "thankful" book has evolved into a "thankful/ awesome things I want to remember" book. Why? Because I'm encountering way too many awesome things I want to remember. For instance, I'm reading two books together and they are amazing, very similar and current all-time faves. One is by the best lecturer of all time, Hugo Hamilton and it's called "The Speckled People." The other is Thomas Bernhard's memoir. Very good. So so good.
In Hugo's, there is a scene with my favorite food. It goes as such: Hugo and his little brother take a bowl of mashed potatoes and cover a room with it for various reasons, mainly, I think, as a small rebellion against their abusive, controlling father. Soon, Hugo's mom and father walk in the room and Hugo writes, "My father looked at bits of mashed potato on the ceiling and said they would never come off. They would be there for ever. We were in real trouble. But my mother wouldn't let him hit us. Instead of getting angry, she said you couldn't punish a thing like that because it happened only once in a lifetime. My father was still frowning, but then she put her arm around him and said it didnt matter going without mashed potato for one day. She said they were lucky to have children with such imagination. She smiled and said you had to have an imagination to do something as mad as that." And that's an awesome thing I want to remember.
Similarly, in Thomas Bernhard's memoir, he recounts stealing a bicycle at 8 years old from his step-father and riding it (successfully riding it, the first time he tried!) to his aunt's house. He ends up getting slightly lost and hitches a ride back to his town in the middle of the night. His mom seethes and rages, but his grandfather says something like, "Holy crap!! You can ride a bike now. Just think, if you hadn't taken it, you would never know that. The only thing you did wrong was to not tell anyone where you were going."
So, I wrote the quotes in my book and then, "be like this for people."
I also want to remember to have an old fashioned pencil sharperner on a desk in my future house and the branches wall sticker from
this site in one of my rooms. Also, to copy a page from a favorite book or a poem in a cool artsy way and frame it as a decoration. I want to remember how yesterday Sean quoted Hot Fuzz the whole bus ride home instead of talking about Justice Scalia or the gripes he has with Fair Trade coffee. Awesome. And how lovely the rain sounds on a Friday when I don't have to go anywhere.
I'm a happier person this month, I really am. It's getting easier to see good and it looks like another moleskine will be in order fairly, (awesomely!) soon.
