gratitude on a very windy humpday night

today, dear ones, i am grateful for:

1) ananda for posting this on FB: “Efforts at self-improvement based on self-hatred are rarely successful.” Alakananda Ma. because, damn. that has been my mind today. like the 30 rock where liz and jack are at the corporate retreat and he’s psyching himself up in the mirror by telling himself he’s a bold lion and she psyches herself up by saying something like, “get it together, you ugly bitch.” um, a little too familiar for comfort. so thanks ananda and alakananda.

2) mi secondi italiano class tonight! and our lovely tutor stefano. belissimo!

3) buying an italian fashion magazine that i understand nothing of because it seems a good way to bathe in the language while also bathing in cute accessories–a neat cognitive trick to get me to learn faster.

4) for j. for the italiano and stefano

5) the sound of the leaves out there, rustling. you only get rustling for like two months out of the year; it goes from crickets to rustling. i love them both.

6) turquoise and red together

7) the support of friends in the dream-chasing

8) bella. yep, bella of twilight. i’m on the last book and i’m just digging them more and more as the writing gets better and the plots get sturdier. i am sucked in for all the obvious reasons: their unbelievably deep, real, avowed love for each other, and duh, vampires! but also because i feel like i have company in seeing past the film realm we live in. like all the stuff just under the skin of the custard. i often and lately feel very lonely there, with my knowings, even though they are skeptical and tentative, but ethereally solid.

9) feist on sesame street: “1234 chickens back from the shore….”

10) the web of support. even with all of what seem like my catastrophically human failings. these people love me and i love them.

11) how bella one day sees everything differently, more clearly, sharp, present. like an awakening. and how i can feel that as a possibility, to have the volume turned up on life if only i had the internal space for it. makes me want to get rid of some internal junk to be able to take it all in without being overwhelmed.

12) hope. i think i’m relating to/obsessing about the vampire books partly of feeling vulnerable all the time as a woman, as a cancer survivor, as a scared creature who wants to live. immortality–or actually just indestructibility–is so appealing. i mean duh, of course it is. but i don’t realize how weak and frightened and vulnerable to internal and external attack i feel until i compare myself to a vampire. which might just be a metaphor for actualization. a person who slips into the person they are supposed to be and is made impervious and lovingly strong by it.

13) horseradish hummus from trader joe’s

14) candy red toenails