Streams

I have a lot of things I could say a lot about and yet when Time makes itself available for the writing down of these things, none makes itself known. This is infuriating. But I will just type and type and see where we end up.

One thing that happened today was that thankfulness failed me. I was in a beautiful home that houses two small children and all the furniture matches and there is a place for everything and everything is the right thing and it belongs and nothing that doesn't belong is there. Oddly, I really like this family, and like being with them, so my go-to Judge and Resent isn't actually appealing.  So while in their bathroom, taking in the tidy and appealing and appropriate bath toys, I tried being thankful for something to take the edge off my envy and self-disdain. I tried to be thankful for a house that is warm and comfortable. I tried being thankful for a house that we can afford. I tried being thankful for a husband who can do so much to keep our home beautiful. I tried... but trying is useless, isn't it? I needed a genuine dose of straight-up thankfulness and none could be conjured. So instead, I've just tried to ignore envy and drown it in Thin Mint Cookies.

Another thing that I realized this week that has been a bit life-changing is that I really like being angry. I love conflict and arguing and feeling righteous and right.  I married someone who also loves this and this is why we have such a good marriage. I don't think I always think it's a good marriage, but the truth is that we both love conflict and so there is a lot of it in our home.  There are obvious downfalls, but the upside is that very little gets left to simmer or rot. If we had found partners that did not love conflict, we would have been a lot lonelier I think. As it is, we both get given (plenty of) opportunity to dip into that (cess)pool of anger and swim around often, feeling it's Energy and Power and probably some kind of endorphin experience. It would be better for our hearts (in every way), if we could get our endorphins from excercise, but alas, 'tisn't so.

Now before my Ode to Anger and Conflict gets carried away, having realized that more often than not I was being angry purely for the pleasure of it rather than because of any objective need for it, I further realized that probably I needed to explore ways to shortcircuit the system, if only for the sake of my children's future children (do you like how I've already given up on them?). I asked the supersmart psychologist guy I know about what might be the emotional-intensity-equivalent to anger so that I could start swapping it out, but he was useless and just asked me if I knew. Stupid psychologists.

Of course, it turned out that I did know.  The only experience that seems to please as much as anger is laughing. In marriage, this is difficult because... well, mostly because Scott doesn't laugh as easily as the children do. I think he's probably a bit jaded and/or over-used to the material. But with the kids, I have discovered that if I notice myself getting angry in time, I can switch over to getting funny and it's like a little miracle.  The kids laugh, I laugh and on we go. My children are no more compliant now than they were a week ago, but I am way less unpleasant and feel a tiny bit better about the content of their future counselling sessions.

I know that having announced this discovery, I have jinxed it, and within 48 hours I'm going to lose my sh*t and yell cursewords in the grocery store or something. But I wanted to write it down: write down that I realized something new about me, and write down that I can still adapt and make adjustments.  I take good news where I can find it.

Finally, this week I discovered that I love hockey even more than I used to: I blame the Olympics.