You Decide

Welcome to 2021! Phew! For awhile there, I didn’t think we’d ever make it! I had the most exciting New Year’s Eve! I lit some candles, turned on “The Fireplace Channel”, slipped into something a little more comfortable (meaning an extended waistband) … and read a book. I video chatted with my sister and our girlfriends for awhile and caved to their peer pressure of at least staying up until midnight. When 2021 arrived, I was snuggled under my covers. I sent a few final texts and was asleep at 12:15. I know it was 12:15 because my fit watch tracks my sleep.

All in all, it was a good night, considering. I did a lot of thinking and most of it was about nothing special. That’s always the best thinking in my opinion. I just let my wind wander to wherever it wants to go, and it must have gone a little wilder than I thought because that night I dreamt that my sister bought a miniature cow to keep in her backyard, so she’d always have fresh milk for her tea. If you’re someone who analyses dreams, feel free to have a go at that one because I seriously have no idea.

For whatever reason, I always seem to wake up on New Year’s morning full of piss and vinegar – sometimes a little more piss depending on if I was out celebrating the night before and had some beverages. This year was no exception. I woke up with this underlying energy to get moving and get some shit done. Now this energy wasn’t telling me to go out jogging or start training for a marathon, don’t be silly, but I did feel the urge to get all my Christmas decorations put away and the house cleaned. I love my decorations, but I also love when they come down and I can get the house organized and back to normal. Just feels like a bit of a cleansing of the past year. Also, with the big tree up downstairs, my dance floor shrinks considerably, so it was nice to get that space back, even if it just me dancing there by myself for the foreseeable future.

But seriously, does anything really change when the clock moves those sixty seconds into a new year? I mean, is there this sudden cosmic shift in the universe that is going to propel us into brighter days and rekindled promise? Of course not, but I do think with the changing of the calendar, there is this renewed sense of hope and optimism, that somehow this next year will be different from the last. And it can be if we truly want it to. Unfortunately, we can’t control everything in our lives and world, but we can control the choices and decisions we make, and sometimes different doesn’t necessarily mean better, it just means different, and it’s up to you and me to decide what that different is going to look like.

I have a good idea of how I want my different to go and I know what I need to do to my different rolling, which is why I woke up feeling energized on January 1st. Well, that and I didn’t have any alcohol the night before, so that made it a whole lot easier. Let’s just say, drinks and I do not always get along too well anymore, and if anyone is going to pay the price it’s me and not the booze. My burst of energy inevitably led to an afternoon nap, but that was more because this old girl isn’t used to staying up past midnight anymore.

Napping is very underrated. I’ve learnt this as I’ve gotten older. Now, if I’m tired and I have the chance, I’m closing my eyes for however long I can. As a person who spends the majority of her day on the road and driving, I can’t even tell you how many naps I’ve had in my car in some back-parking lot or side street. I’ve even coined the term “Side-Street Napping”. I think it sounds like I’m some hip urbanite instead of a middle-aged suburban woman who has a trunk full of empty reusable grocery bags and an extra pair of runners in the back seat in case her shoes start hurting her feet.

“Yo Girl, what you up to today?”

“Just a little side-street napping, dawg.”

See how hip that sounds? I know right? So cool. Besides my runners, I also have a blanket, two beach towels, and an extra toque that I use to pull down over my eyes for that nighttime vibe – summer or winter. Geezus help the person who walks by my car and sees my full get up. They’d be so upset at how hip and cool I look laying flat out in the driver’s seat with my feet stuck out the window, a scrunched up blanket stuffed at the side of my head for a pillow, my body covered in towels for warmth (in the cooler months) and a hat pulled down over most of my face, that they’d run home and Google “Side-Street Napping” just so they could feel hip with the vibe I was throwing down. It’s true, they would. And me, I’d wake up feeling a little more refreshed than I was twenty minutes ago. It’s a no brainer for me.

So was my New Year’s Day nap. It was beautiful. And yes, I also have a toque that I wear for “indoor napping”. The front pulls down quite far, perfectly covering my eyes, and thus saving me from having to close all the curtains. I just can’t sleep with any sort of light, so my little do it yourself method works quite admirably I must say.

After my nap, I decided to finish off the book I was reading. I was first introduced to Erma Bombeck when I was a kid. My Mom had a stack of books hanging in a little rack by the upstairs toilet, so as a child who loved to read and had issues with constipation, I read and re-read those books a thousand times. Besides the latest copies of Reader’s Digest, there were also two of Bombeck’s books, “If Life Is a Bowl of Cherries – What Am I Doing in the Pits?” (1978) and “The Grass Is Always Greener over the Septic Tank” (1981). As a child who hadn’t yet reached double digits when “If Life Is a Bowl of Cherries – What Am I Doing in the Pits” was published, her deep humorist takes on the social subjects of the day were well beyond my comprehension. All I remembered is that I laughed, and I connected with the way she wrote her stories. Obviously, they made an impact on me even though they weren’t remotely a children’s book, nor geared for a younger audience, so much so, that before Christmas I went searching online for her catalogue.

This truly is the strength of Amazon. I was able to find copies of my bathroom reads, plus a host of other books she’d written. The first one, “Aunt Erma’s Cope Book – How to Get From Monday to Friday…In 12 Days” arrived on December 30th and I was so excited to sit down on the 31st and read it. It wasn’t a particularly long book, only about two hundred pages in a typical smaller paperback print, so I knew it wouldn’t take me very long to get though it, and as I read, this time with an adult eye, I discovered the true brilliance of her work.

For those who’ve never heard of Erma Bombeck, she was an American Humorist. The dictionary defines a “Humorist” as “a serious writer (or speaker) who uses humor to make a point or help readers see what’s funny about specific situations or life in general.” Her biography, as found on Erma Bombeck Collection states, “She spoke for the women of an entire generation, revealing that being a housewife and a mother came with its own sets of concerns, and wasn’t necessarily a glamorous occupation. She wrote with hilarity and wit.” She passed away in 1996.

Reading as a woman in 2021, Bombeck’s words still ring true and many of the issues she hilariously wrote about in the 1970s and 1980s are unfortunately still prevalent in our society. “Aunt Erma’s Cope Book – How to Get From Monday to Friday…In 12 Days” is her commentary on the rise of self-help books and our constant need, especially as women, to improve ourselves or make ourselves more “worthy”. Her use of humourous everyday stories as a means to explore the topic is effortless, and this banality only accentuates the absurdity of the idea that happiness and meaningfulness can only come by listening to the explicit direction of others and ignoring your own intuition.

So basically, listen to your heart. You know you best. Sure, it’s okay to seek and take advice from others, but there is no “Ten Steps to Happiness” or “Three Must Do Things To Ensure Love”. Life is not a list and all of this information thrown at you, including what I write each week, should only be taken as a guide or research you’re gathering so that you can make your own decisions based on what you need and want out of life. I am an expert on nothing (except for maybe stocking the freezer and canning room in case of a zombie apocalypse and home office dance parties of course) and I can only offer up smidgens of semi-intellectual (I hope) musings and insights on what works or doesn’t in my world.

The point is people can offer their guidance and their own experiences, but nothing is going to apply perfectly to you or your life. It’s up to you to take bits and pieces, and those little nuggets of wisdom you find, and build your own book with its own chapters and pages. Hell, it’s taken me a good while to figure out the substance of my blog posts, and the direction I want to take it as a whole, and let me just say, it is nothing like what the “gurus” suggested it should be and for that reason alone, it will probably “fail”. It’s not condensed. I don’t write about the same topic every week. I go on wildly ridiculous tangents that have no affiliation with the main context of my posts. This is ALL wrong they tell me. It will never work because that’s not how it’s done.

You know what? I don’t care how it’s supposed to be done. I’m glad what they’ve suggested works for them but there is no way I’m going to define my life by the rules and guidelines someone else uses for theirs. That’s their life, and this is mine. I think sometimes in the midst of searching for whatever we’re searching for, we forget that. We forget that we are all our own persons and we desperately latch onto whatever someone else is pushing because we think that may be the golden ticket or the easy way. There is no golden ticket. There is no easy way. There is only the way YOU choose.

As I said last week, this year I choose to move forward. I’m never going to stop reading and listening and learning but I’m going to take all that outside information and set it on my bedside table until I talk to my head and listen to my heart and hear what they’re saying. Then I’ll decide what gets incorporated and what doesn’t. Maybe it’s all of it and maybe it’s none of it. That’s the beauty of you being you – you get to decide.

Until next week…

Love and peace,

Trish