And there's a picture of a train.

Maybe it's the clouds moving out and the glimpse of blue sky so it's sunny while snowing. Maybe its the blankets and drifts and odd shapes of frozen white outside the window which are a total pain when you have to be in it, but when you can sit at home and look out, it's quite beautiful. Maybe it was the slow dance last night. Maybe its the mix of space music mix I'm listening to this morning. Maybe its joy in watching Sophie go running around into the banks taller than her and getting lost in her own pleasure of racing through the snow.

But today, I'm just like "fuck that shit". In a good way.

Fcked up isht happens to us, so much trauma, and our minds and bodies do extraordinary things to cope and heal and protect us from it. Then sometimes the protection are walls and the coping has dictator-like ways of shaping our lives for fear that it will happen again and bullying ourselves and those around us, and its like all the good things we were doing for ourselves turns inward and implodes and we're continuing the cycle without even knowing it. This morning I thought, I spent 20something years feeling like everyday I was a messed up freak who had to look in the mirror at an image that was nothing like the one in my head, and now, I'm an adult, I have power and choice and freedom, and most importantly, I have a body I don't hate, in fact it kinda fcking rocks. I was able to keep my brain in the process, I still have all those idealized dreams and puzzling thoughts I've collected through all the days of this life and I risked a lot to make all that happen (including losing some key figures), and if I just sit here and don't breakthrough and enjoy it, then what was the point of doing it in the first place? To merely stay alive, to get by, to force the whole world to conform to my vision of how things should happen? Fuck that shit.

It's like what Sunim talked about one time, that buddhists are inherently loving happy people, not the somber stern idea people have (are); it's just like what a former pastor talked about one time, that christians are inherently loving happy people, not the somber judgmental idea people have (are) -- why are we, human beings collectively, continually getting bogged down into it? Life is fcked up and hard, no doubt. And for some, it is way harder than others. But damn, sometimes we're just perpetuating that isht. There's enough real trauma in the world, why make it worse but creating more, dwelling in it, revelling in it? For the sake of excitement? Because it makes us feel something intense? Because we don't think we deserve something better? Because we don't think we're capable of something better? Fuck that shit.

Yeah, I'm still going to have that pain in my chest sometimes. I'm still going to want to lie down and nap when I get overwhelmed by it all. I'm still going to hurt like hell sometimes for no obviously discernible reason. But damn, can't I laugh and have fun sometimes too? Can't I cut myself and everyone around me some loving slack? Can't I break the part of the cycle that I'm consciously or unconsciously creating out of habit, at every moment possible when I see with clarity how I'm unintentionally hurting myself?

Yes. Yes, I can. Happy Valentine's Day to me. I choo-choo-choose you!

You see that I have never gotten over you.

I accidentally had sex on valentine's day. I didn't mean to, it just happened. There were no roses or hot tubs involved.

I liked valentine's day as a kid, because it involved giving and getting mail and homemade mailboxes. It also meant usually waking up to something left as a surprise on my dresser from my mother, like candy and a card, though one year she gave me two bendable Fido Dido characters which really impressed me, as I didn't know she was aware I was so into Fido Dido at the time, nor was he a character that ever became hugely popular or marketed. (I just read the wikipedia article when I went to google a picture, and find it hilarious that at one point in my teen years I was "into Fido Dido". I think it's because I bought a t-shirt on the streets of NYC with him on it and I wore it all the time.)

I used to think when I grew up Valentine's day would be about going out to dinner and slow dancing to someone singing me an Anita Baker song. I could take or leave the holiday, but I'd still take the latter. Or you can sing Patti Austin. Or Melba Moore. Or Randy Crawford. Or Patti Labelle. Or really just any R&B song by a solo singer between the years of 1980 and 1992. Hence me currently listening to Pandora and my "Anita Baker" station in honor of the holiday as how my pre-teen self dreamed for my adult self.

I've been without a novel to a read for the past few weeks, feeling ambivalent about what to jump to next, partly because my last one was so dense and I needed to breathe a minute. I've been carrying around J.M. Coetzee's Slow Man for a few days, which, since it's Coetzee, I'm assuming is physically an easy read, but thematically maybe not, hence my hesitation. I'm taking in bunches of short stories. Dear gentle readers, I have been recommended Alice Munro by people who's opinion I generally find favorable, but I have only read maybe one story by her, and it was okay but very much This Is A Short Story. And today I started one but just got bored and gaggy, it was again, such a Short Story, with its married couple driving to something and seeing something on the side of the road and then one of them gets cancer and they try to go back to the country road and blah blah blah literary something blah blah. Zzzzz. I had just read a Donald Barthelme story about an adult man who inexplicably finds himself back in the sixth grade and ends with him having sex with the teacher in the closet. It was weird and hilarious and playful and smart. Perhaps I'm just not in the mood for Alice Munro or perhaps I'm just never in the mood for her. Unless you, gentle readers, have a favorite you can recommend.

Omg, "Love Power" just came on. I need to do this at karaoke. I wouldn't even mind being Jeffrey Osbourne, you could Dionne. Oh wait, never mind, I want to do the part when she sings "....or can we get it there?"

(Ok, fine, you can be Dionne.)