enfinblue's Bluey (credit to Fifi for the nickname!) Diaryland Diary

"I am seeking, I am striving, I am in it with all my heart." -Vinc3nt V@n Gogh

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Warning: I'm feeling good.

I'm having this really weird epiphany about life, suddenly: What I've been missing all these years is that you have to build your foundation on solid ground. When you do this your crazy dreams are not so crazy. I've been sitting on shifting terrain for so long that it has been difficult to hit my targets.

I say this as I feel a spreading calm come over me as I settle into my routine and my job. It settles around me as I get up and enjoy the comforts of my beautiful apartment and realize that I can go out and spend a little bit of money if I want to and not worry too much about it. The miraculous thing is that when I am earning good money I almost never spend very much. I'm much more judicious with it. I've been meaning to buy a pair of jeans and a new top or two for weeks, and yet I've bought nothing. All I ever buy is food. It feels...nice. I feel calm and in control of my life. I feel like smiling.

The thing is that when you sit on solid ground you can weather storms more readily. You can also give more back. It's a cool balance, a rhythm--not boring at all.

I have an appointment with a good book this afternoon, an appointment with my running shoes later on, and a meeting arranged with the scientist for a coffee and a stroll of bookstores tomorrow. The scientist thing is not going to go anywhere--he's suffering through a marriage breakup and is not even divorced yet. But I like him as a friend and find I learn interesting things from him. He seems to like the comfort of having a new friend, in a new city in which he has only a few. No problems here.

I've made an appointment for a consultation to do something about my hair. I'm going to grow it back to its natural colour (although it's not too much different now, just a bit too reddish-brown), and I think it will look good with a few highlights and lowlights to blend the colour into my roots. I'm thinking a more-brown J3nnifer Annist0n; I pretty much have her hair colour and the cut is the same right now. It would be nice to wear my hair down rather than in its perpetual ponytail or updo for a change.

I'm drinking the world's best coffee at the moment. I'd forgotten how good it is. There is a little shop on St. Laurent in Montreal called La Vi3ille Europe in which they roast and grind their own beans. Claus brought me some last weekend. Marvelous.

Seriously, it takes so little to make one happy, and yet so much. As I work on my child poverty paper I think about the number of families in this country and in others (it's only a cross-country comparison using microdata from Canada and the U.S., although I know a bit of the international literature) that have one-fifth of the financial resources for the whole family that I have at my disposal for my little self. I think often about the people who work half again as many hours and still have no money left over after basic shelter and some shitty food. It makes me more grateful and determined to help; and I'm yet abstracting away from my intellectual, health, and education endowments. And then there's love and support. I have those things too. And of course I'm not even straying to think deeply about far more horrific poverty and lack that exist all over the world.

I've been trite in the last two entries and maybe it's embarrassing. And maybe I'm a victim of the regular shift in my hormones from one extreme to another. But I seriously feel grateful today and that is a wonderful feeling. Writing it down seems to give it the solidity it deserves.

So I don't know, but everything seems clear to me today--particularly the way that contentment grows when you let a little seed of it in. And I'm reminded of the importance of sleep in maintaining this view: I slept a long night last night for the first time in a long while.

So the weekend is shaping up to be good. I'll try to think of something compelling about which to write, later, but I thought I'd like to put down my thoughts as I sit here in my comfy fleece pants and my sweattop and think about having a shower and washing my hair in anticipation of my visit to the hair salon. Kind of funny that we always feel a need to look good BEFORE we go to the hair salon.

12:49 p.m. - 2006-10-14

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