an extended meditation on presence (we also have chickens)
Our last day of school before break was December 19. Since then, I have spent:
(I am barely allowed to type this, because CATS NEED PETS ALSO. The elderly one is sitting between me and the screen, and she keeps licking my hands so I'll quit typing and pet her. Any typos are her fault.)
Other family members, those I have not yet seen, couldn't even give me one damn day at home to unpack my suitcase before wanting to know when I'm going to visit them and/or am available for them to visit me.
Y'all. I am an introvert. I just herded teenagers for several months straight and then traveled during a holiday and then did six months' worth of peopling in two days. Y'all can give me ONE WEEKEND of break to myself. Holy hell.
Which, because I've been reading Anna Lembke's DOPAMINE NATION, has got me thinking a lot this season about how messed up Christmas is in our ultra-capitalist, hijack-their-dopamine-on-steroids society.
A holiday that hits all the dopamine triggers - food, lights, music, gifts, etc. - probably made a lot more sense in a time when one was only likely to get fresh meat once in a winter, or *a* piece of candy a couple times a year, or music of any kind at church. But we live in a society that is constantly trying to hack our decision making with promises of more cheap dopamine. What else is Christmas going to do for us? No wonder my favorite part of Christmas is and always has been when I take down the decorations and get my life back on track.
(Well. This year, removing the decorations only made it super obvious I haven't cleaned much in the past month. But I can fix that.)
Even New Year's resolutions make more sense now that I understand that dopamine regulates pleasure and pain on the same axis and that our bodies will always seek to level that particular teeter-totter. Of course we all go "that's it, I'm exercising daily and taking cold showers and only eating raw spinach" for a few weeks after the Season of Excess. We desperately need a break from the Excess! And of course we can't sustain it, because we need both pleasure and pain, abundance and austerity.
Which is to say: My New Year's resolutions aren't usually about losing weight or joining a gym or quitting smoking or otherwise being a healthier version of myself. My normal, non-Season of Excess life is pretty good about keeping me healthy. Mine are more like goals.
Last year, I didn't even really know where I was going with the whole thing. I encountered Janet Vertesi's Cyber-Cleanse round about the seventh of January, and everything just sorta happened from there. This year, though, I want to re-focus on writing.
I've published two novels and a few dozen poems and short stories, but I quit for a few years. Getting hit by an SUV will do that to you. Yet I miss it. And being around teens all day makes writing more fun, for some reason. Young adult/young teen fiction doesn't need to be The Great American Novel. Nobody expects it to be a heartbreaking work of staggering genius or whatever. It just needs to be reasonably engaging.
So I'm going to try something I never have before, and write some YA fiction this year. Or I thought I was. The first couple things I've sketched out are all cyberpunk for some reason. Maybe because I like writing cyberpunk.
I might also come down with a mysterious illness that somehow prevents me from visiting anyone else while I'm on break. I've already sacrificed one week of this break to meeting my obligations in the Season of Excess. I'm frankly exhausted and sick of it. Time to get a little selfish, I think. Like this cat. Who is still licking my hands.
--