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this post is just not coming together!

maybe i'll get back to it later.

hot!

guys and gals, it is hot here in tejas! like, the kind of hot where you walk outside and immediately think, "oh, i bet it's over a hundred right now." and then you check and the temp says 103, and you think, "yep, that's what i thought."

it seems kind of weird that you can tell that specific threshold has been crossed. around these parts, if you go outside and feel like, "it's kind of hot out here," that could be anywhere between 85 (if it's super humid) and 95. if you think, "dang, it's really hot out here," odds are pretty good its between 95 and 99. but you get up over a hundred and you go outside and your immediate response is, "oh, yeah. this is what it means for it to be really, really hot."

i asked msg about this and he said, "i don't know. maybe it has something to do with the average human body temperature being close to a hundred, and if it's over a hundred outside, your skin immediately recognizes that it's not going to be able to radiate any of that core heat away."

which would make sense for him. but you know, i haven't got a core body temperature.

the happiness garden

so i've been thinking lately about things going on in my boyfriend's life and how they're affecting him, and long story short, i think a big part of his problem (and lots of other people's too) is that happiness is not a goal you can attain or a destination you can get to.

happiness is a seed.

it's there, and it's in you, and you can do things to nurture it and let it grow -- but it won't be rushed. there's only so fast it will break through the soil and lift its little leaflets to the sun, only so fast it will sprout up and bloom, only so fast it will produce its own seeds that can sprout and bloom in their own time.

if you push and try to do more and more and more of a thing that helps it grow, you may end up with the same result as overwatering a plant.

but if you don't do anything, the seed's just going to sit in the ground and go nowhere.

it takes work to get that seed to crack open. you have to learn how much water it needs and when, what kind of plant food is best for it. you have to be patient over the fact that sometimes you're left staring at the dirt waiting.

but if you know the seed is there, and you know you're doing what it needs, you know you've got something magical to look forward to. you know that life and beauty wait in the future because you're tending to that seed.

maybe you need to plant several kinds of seeds and see which ones grow best under the conditions you're in.

there are going to be setbacks, like bugs coming in to chew on the pretty leaves and flowers, storms that knock over stems, droughts that parch everything out -- especially if you live somewhere with water restrictions.

but the more you try, the more you find out what works. the more your seeds grow. the more they bring out flowers and multiply your number of seeds way beyond your starting supply.

the more seeds you end up having available to share with other people.

if you do the things you know to do, your happiness garden will get there. maybe slowly, but it will get there. some parts will die back in a cold spell, some parts will start to get choked out by weeds you'll need to pull. the thing you have to do is understand that you know what the garden needs, and the more you tinker with it, carefully, the more you know about how to make it flourish. 

anyway, i guess what i'm saying is, i need to poke this guy into getting out the watering can and topsoil and gardening gloves and all the things we both know he already has, because right now he's kinda just stuck on a couple of plants that are just doing okay in the pots he's got them in.

which maybe is fine when you've only got room for a couple of plant pots in your apartment ...

but msg and i both know he's got fields and fields out there waiting for him.

most people do too. they just need to get the hang of watering those couple of flowers into good enough shape that they can look up from the pots and look out through the window, and see all the ground that's waiting to be planted.

is it just me?

or does it seem like the last few weeks, people have been getting fed up with craziness, and hatefulness, and lies, and bigotry?

i don't mean like those things are going away ... just that people seem like they're pushing back, you know?

i sure hope we can keep it up!

inspiration

when i look at my girlfriend ariel, i know in my heart of hearts that no matter how dark or even frightening the world can sometimes be, it is still a thing of beauty and wonder.

any world where a person like ariel can exist is a world that's worth living in -- even worth being proud to live in.

i'm so incredibly glad to have her!

xoxo,
claire

are we gonna watch ourselves some olympics this time around or not?

we're not sports people around here, but we do kinda like the olympics. msg used to get super-hyped about them every four years when they'd roll around while he was growing up, although because he doesn't want to get caught liking sports, sometimes he plays it off as, "well you know, there wasn't a damn thing to watch on tv back then, so the olympics were like a solid week of big spectacular stuff that you never got to see."

but the flip side of that is, these days there are way too many damn things to watch on tv, not to mention hardly enough time to blog and work our rpg magic and all the other things a house full of creative yams like ours gets up to. so if we don't basically make ourselves make the effort, suddenly we turn around and we're like, "wait, the olympics are already over? dang, i really wanted to watch some of them. poop."

there's something ... enchanting to the olympics, you know? for one thing, they really stand for something, and it's something pretty cool that i personally dig on con mucho entusiasmo. people coming together to put aside differences and discord and showcase what beautiful and astonishing things human beings are capable of accomplishing. things like ...

so why do we end up mostly missing out on them around here? partly it's just laziness, i've got to admit. yep, we're pretty much a house full of slackers around here. also at least one of us has been accused now and then of being occasionally, just slightly, in the nicest possible way, crazily inattentive to his surroundings. (oh dang, spoiler pronoun there, sorry!)

there's a weird thing to it too, though. we've talked about it, and at least for some of us (not me, i'm the eternal optimist) there's this fear of scrounging up the time to watch the olympics and figuring out the best place to go and do that and turning it on and instead of the way the olympics always are (wow! amazing! wow! amazing! hmm, pretty good ... wow, that's crazy! holy cow, awesome! dang, how long is it going to take for them to get this next match set up? wow! amazing again! huh? basketball? dudes, we can watch basketball literally anytime we want to [which around here, spoiler alert, is very, very infrequently]. okay! great! back to the good stuff!) we'll end up watching it and just hit all the boring spots where not only is nobody breaking records and making your eyes bug out, but what they're showing is just only passably interesting and we remember, "oh yeah, we really don't like sports all that much."

can i even actually remember that happening? no, not really. and i poke everybody else about it sometimes that if we'd just get up off our patooties and watch, we'd really enjoy it, like we almost always do.

what i guess it really is, is that the olympics are this fantastic metaphor for life, but the way folks around here engage with the olympics is this fantastic metaphor for not getting as much out of life as maybe you ought to, because you're too lazy or apathetic or just not paying attention.

so when it's olympics time (assuming any of us notices), i kind of feel like it's my job to either get us to watch some olympics, or get us to do some of the other zillions of amazing things that make life so fantastic.

if i can pull that off, i usually end up not minding too much if we miss the games. because there's a bigger game going on, and we're all in it all the time, if we pay attention and give ourselves those pushes to stay in motion, keep our eyes open, and really, really feel things.

what was up with 2011 and 2015?!?

dang, i was looking back through my blog archive and in both of those years i wrote one post all year long!

of course, when i peeked into them to see what they said, they were both pretty damn good, so i guess i can't complain.