Looking For The Light

Looking for light, I spent Saturday evening off and on reading this article about good deed doers.

One of those collections where each story is a few paragraphs long. I am a complete sucker for that shit.

The short stories work well with my ADD. Randy and I were watching music videos and talking. When there was a lull in the conversation, I’d read a few more feel good stories.

I was looking for my happy happy.

This has been a thing for years. When Joey was a little guy just learning to talk, he would say words twice, rapidly. If he wanted to watch Blue’s Clues, he would say “Blue Clue Blue Clue”. If he wanted me to draw for him, he would hand me a piece of paper and a pencil or crayon and say “happy happy”. Which was him directing me to draw smiley faces for him. So now, it’s never just “happy”. It’s always “happy happy”. 

Anyway, it’s been a weird time.

I have people who I love very much who will be going through a painful loss. When? Who knows? Tonight? In a month? It’s just really hard and I want to make everything okay, but I have no control over the “okayness” of anything. I know so many people who have kids in high school and college who are struggling because of the apocalypse. Life includes a lot of suffering. It seems to me that a lot of people are getting extra doses of suffering these days.

Everything is weird and a lot of it is super upsetting.

I decided that I wanted to make an effort to do something nice for other humans more often.

To just take a goddamn moment to try to improve another person’s life or at least make them smile.

Then, I got an email.

An author sent me an email this morning. She said she read my blog and asked if I would consider giving her book a boost.

The email was engaging and funny and her story sounds amazing. Then I realized that she made my plan of helping someone out easy today. I didn’t have to go looking for something nice to do. I didn’t even have to get out of my bed. All I had to do, was write a post and plug her book.

So, while it might seem like I am doing her a favor, in reality, she did me one as well.

Here is an excerpt from her letter:

“I’m simply dropping you a line to talk about a book I’ve written about being a menopausal woman in the throes of a mid-life crisis. Since I couldn’t afford thebook cover Ferrari, and I couldn’t be bothered having an affair, I went from previously perfectly locatable in the Cotswolds in the UK to utterly bewildered living in the wilderness of America when I set about walking from Mexico to Canada.”

So, I haven’t read her book yet, but I did order it for my Kindle. I’m looking forward to reading about her travels.

If you’d like to support an artist, please consider buying Everything You Ever Taught Me. 

I can tell from her email the book will be a funny and insightful read. Plus, she used the word “cheeky” which for some reason makes me laugh. And it makes me think of Michael Meyers on SNL playing Simon in the bathtub. Cheeky Monkey.

Also, I want to make it clear that my plan to help other people as I can is completely selfish.

Of course, I want others to be healthy and happy, but I know there will be a payoff for me as well.

You could join me. We can pay it forward or pay it back. We can pay it over, under, sideways, and down. I don’t care how we do it. But if we all take just a little moment to care for someone else? What’s not to love about that?

 

18 Thoughts.

  1. I’d forgotten the song – thanks for the option to replay it. Still a terrific song and they did a heck of a good job with it.

    Helping other people – harder than it sounds. Every time I think I’ve done something helpful, turns out I was mostly helping myself. Although it gives me a reason to get up every day. A draw is better than a lose any day.

  2. I’m a complete sucker for unusual travel memoirs and I love the fact that the author calls herself Person Irresponsible. If there was ever an appropriate use for the term “nom de plume” that’s it. Also I kind of have connections at a library near me and one of the ways I love to support artists, especially writers, is to get libraries to purchase their books. Libraries tend to hang onto things for a long time and I love the fact that if you write a book and a library purchases it you never know who’ll pick that book up. Someone might like it enough to buy their own copy.
    Also anything even tangentially related to the Cotswolds gets my attention because if you’ve ever had Cotswold cheese you know it is fucking amazing. Even for cheese.

  3. ordering it right now! I love the topic and you helping Michelle! Also I am Canadian so that that she is walking up my way:)

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