grateful saturday

I've been reading The Secret of Happiness and trying to follow, at least, part one of the PERMA acronym: positive emotion. I've tried this before and each time it seems like a good idea: gratitude journals as a way to reach positivity.

Oprah loves them. I met this beautiful woman once who loved them--and seemed happy--I often think that doing things beautiful women do is somehow going to translate to me becoming more beautiful; this is probably stupid and embarrassing to type. And I hear rumor that this is verging on "trend"...enough that there's an app for it: igratitude.

I'm not a journal person. I took a great class with Lisa Fishman where we read, kept, and discussed journals. Amazing class. My work was better, my poetics were clearer; can't say much for translation outside of "work" and poetry, but it was AMAZING. Class over, journal over. Not my first round of journal beginning and ending. And not my last.

This Christmas, Jesse bought me lovely journals from Sprout Home, a store we liked in Chicago, but LOVE in Brooklyn. I was totally committed to documenting our move, our new marriage, and every detail of days. It lasted for about a week and it felt like complaining. Journal ended.

So I try again, digitally and with gratitude. I try again because today the upstairs neighbor's bath leaked into our hallway and the neighbor's way to handle it was less than perfect: she let us deal with it. We mopped it, we put the bucket under it, and she, for whatever reason, cried upstairs. I was irritated. I was confused. I was thinking that I get irritated and confused too often and I needed to figure out how to think differently...

Can you teach yourself to think differently? Gosh I hope so.

I was reading that moving your eyes back and forth from one direction to another can help both sides of your brain connect--a therapist tried something like this on me once too, called it "rapid eye movement" (which made me hope there was a nap involved). There wasn't, it was actually traumatizing. Let's move on past that episode. I was reading about suggestion too, how suggestion can really change perception. Sure can! Once I thought I swallowed a needle because my sister joked about it. We went to the emergency room, had a ton of X-rays, and found the needle in the couch later that evening after 6 hours in the ER. Suggestion, it's a big deal.

What I'm saying is, yeah--I wanna be grateful and stuff. I wanna be positive. Who doesn't? Even R.A. Dickey, the pitcher, wants to be a better person--he's planning to climb Kilimanjaro, he's a "late bloomer" (Jesse's words), and he's positive enough to talk about Hemmingway in the middle of a baseball game. That dude rocks!

So here's what I'm grateful for, here's my positive emotion for Saturday:

1. We saw flowers today, tons of flowers. They're all over Ithaca. Some of them droop when the sun isn't on them and then stand up a bit more when the sun is around. This is totally cool to watch and it makes for good conversation if you're running out of things to say with someone you're walking with.

2. Jesse made granola today while I spring cleaned the drawers under the sink. The granola in question was called Christmas granola, which means we're not exactly seasonal, but we're indulgent or something. I'm grateful for the granola because of how it made the house smell, because of how high it filled our granola jar, and because Jesse made it while we were both in the kitchen listening to music and having a good morning together. 

3. I'm thankful that job transitions, life transitions, and all of this flux is something I get to share with my partner Jesse. Granted, he's watching sports most of the day, but he looks funny while doing it.