3 thoughtful things

1) Caught up on the Happiness Project blog today. There were two interesting ideas this month: the idea of controlling your exits and the idea of recognizing your own "tell" -- the behavior that will tell you you're down or need an intervention before you can actually feel the feeling. I love the honesty & craziness of the commenter who buys green things when she's starting to depressed -- my own tell, or one of them, is that I don't think far into the future when I'm not happy. (Right now I'm thinking about to the end of the year, with emphasis on the next two weeks -- about normal for me.)

2) Because it's been a long time since I did a Book of Qualities quote, I present... POWER.

Power made me a coat. For a long time I kept it in the back of my closet. I didn't like to wear it much, but I always took good care of it. When I first started wearing it again, it smelled like mothballs. As I wore it more, it started fitting better, and stopped smelling like mothballs.

I was afraid if I wore the coat too much someone would want to take it or else I would accidentally leave it in the dojo dressing room. But it has my name on the label now, and it doesn't really fit anyone else. When people ask me where I found such a becoming garment, I tell them about the tailor, Power, who knows how to make coats that you grow into. First, you must find the courage to find him and ask you to make you a coat. Then, you must find the patience inside yourself to wear the coat until it fits.

3) We saw Laurie Anderson's show, Delusion, tonight. She talked about the concept of dying, in some final way, long after your physical death when someone says your name for the very last time. It's a somber thought, but I realized that I don't know if people would talk about me if I died, or what they would say. In what contexts would I even come up? "flexagon would've known how to cross a cable like that. I remember how she never wanted to knit anything simple, how she would make up a cable from scratch to fit into a design." Or, "I would never have heard of Fluevogs if not for this girl I used to work with, it's strange what happened to her actually...".

Ah, well, it's not happening soon.