Some thoughts

     As I stood stirring the batter to a double chocolate quick bread in my nearly luxury apartment (for it to be luxury, it would have to cost 50% more per month), a question came to my mind that has been bothering me for a while now: am I becoming or have I become too "epicurean"?  As one gets older, the opportunities (depending on situation, of course; I don't think this is true for homeless people, for example, but, then again, I wouldn't know.) become more and more for luxury and pleasure.  I've avoided the pain of getting my work done earlier (so I've put off the pain, really), the pain of re-evaluating my life and deciding whether I'm really taking the right path and instead have slipped into a near-comatose state, or an emotional cocoon, maybe.

       One of the professors at the departmental party of which I wrote earlier remarked that at least we, as first year graduate students, were not curled up in the fetal position, and that this was a good sign at this time of the second semester.  I felt temporarily relieved, but soon realized that I've been a mental fetal position for months now, and the end is nowhere near.  I have been avoiding the pain of dealing with my stress, but this tends to cause even more pain.  

     I wanted to put dried cherries in my quick bread, but had none.  I am in pain for not having them, but do not want to take the effort to get to a store to buy dried cherries, which would seem to be too much of a luxury in the first place (going to a store in order to buy a product that I really do not need).  This last thought is tangled up in a back-and-forth debate of what is pleasure and what is pain.  I don't even know which is which anymore.  If I've even briefly contemplated checking myself into some nice institution where I would get to draw pictures all day (in my mind, such places exist!).  When I think about it, though, I know I would get bored and restless in such a place, and that an "institution" really isn't the right place for me; we all have our ups and downs, and I am no exception.  I also have to deal with the fact that I am absolutely petrified of complete happiness.  Any threat of it makes me draw further into my cocoon, waiting it out until the threat is eliminated.

     In order to survive in sanity, we need both pleasure and pain.  Maybe staying in school is a pain sometimes, but it balances out all the happy moments I get teaching (most of the time), hanging out with friends, and drawing the occasional picture, dancing, doing music or ice skating.  If I were independently wealthy or in a sanitarium all day, I would go crazy.  I guess this really is sounding quite like epicureanism, but, of course, I can't say that I subscribe completely to that belief system (I want to be unique, remember?!).  I don't think that seeking out "simple pleasures" is the only thing guiding me, though, and I'd like to think that I have certain moral standards that lead me through my life choices.

     So here's to partial happiness, toward the end of a very long semester.