Written on Tuesday

I read Siddartha by Herman Hesse again yesterday (it's a very tiny book). It's a quiet book, the kind where you read a paragraph and then sit quietly, not even really thinking about the book, thinking simple things. It made me desire to: sit by a river for a day. fast. make my own mistakes. sleep outdoors. simplify.

I'm always yammering about simplifying. Sometimes it seems it's all I think about. Does everyone's head churn around and around "the right way to live" over and over like mine does? My progress is questionable at best, but I sure like to talk about it a lot. I often convince myself to desire what other people desire, and I think that's where a lot of my anxiety comes from. I don't want these things as much as others do, so I have a hard time getting them (re: Brick walls are there to stop the people who don't want it badly enough) but I want them enough to feel frustrated by my inability to get them. I should really pay more attention to what I have that other's don't. My core is a philosopher. She knows a lot of things. She likes to think about things that are very hard for her. She's shown me that I can survive in almost any conditions without loss of self. Sometimes she leaves for a while but she always returns.

There! That's something!

A lot of my friends are amazing artists. I really appreciate that. Allen keeps posting on his blog about his doubts, and then he posts amazing pictures like they are so many grains of sand. Allen, you are an amazing artist. Who cares what your motivation is? I think a lot of people who need to do art to live are kinda faking it anyway. Eventually they would find a way to live without art, just as we can live for a month without food. You think you're not getting a lot done but you are. The pictures of produce in a square pan and the brocolli forest are like cartoon fantasies of food. I don't want to eat it, I want to run around in it wearing cartoon wings. My artistic ambition is to jump into your photos and live in your beautiful world.

I always used to think New Years resolutions were a waste of time, a Hallmark card version of self-improvement, but it makes me tear up thinking about what Joe is doing for his. Maybe all of existence has been written by Hallmark. Someday someone will gather a collection of cards and make a new bible out of them. Maybe in the post-apocalyptic future, when the collective memory has forgotten the definition of corny, those cards will be thought of as written by a great sage.