Happy Soon-to-Be New Year

 

12:30-something on the last Sunday of the year, my clothes lay across the bed like business and I’m in the sunroom wearing a towel (my stomach growling beneath it, What about me)?

Should I…what if I…maybe I…will I…why won’t you…but I have their hands up begging to be answered first like I have answers for any of them.  Suckers.

I rarely plan my life more than two weeks in advance.  Don’t tell anyone, but I know that I will die young.  Not tomorrow young.  But I won’t ever be the Mother of the Church. 

Yet I believe in it all.  Oh yes, Prince Charming and Publisher’s Clearinghouse.  I have rarely been the beneficiary of such faith.  I will be the first to tell you that doing the “right thing” does not good karma make. I have done the “right thing” most of my life and so far I have a Christmas card to “Professor Scott,” some Frye boots, a bankruptcy, a trip to Brazil, and a ring-less right hand to show for it. 

You gotta believe because you wanna.  Not with expectation that it will pay off for you in the end.  Because it probably won’t. 

People like to say that isn’t what karma or faith means.  But come on, who are you fooling?  If you’re doing x to go to heaven, well isn’t that an expectation?  If you’re doing y to reach nirvana, isn’t that expectation?  If you’re holding the door because you say, maybe somebody will hold the door for me someday that, my lovely, is expectation.  Even the laws of physics teach us to expect: for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.  In other words, the door will probably be slammed in your face and then when you get inside, the same mofo who slammed the door will probably trip you!!!  Okay, so I’m exaggerating. 

But here goes the hopeless girl rule of thumb: act—don’t react.  Don’t love because you’re loved.  Don’t pierce your lip because everyone will think you’re cool; don’t eat it so they won’t accuse you of being siddity. 

Of course I say all this with the great authority of…a fool.

Wiser was I when I was unable to think of these things with clarity or even at all.  Therefore I wish myself ignorance at least, maybe bitterness, too, in the new year.  I think it would make the hands go down.  Or at least give me some bull gravy to answer them with.  Maybe the fairytales would turn to the tasteless, texture-less fog from which they emerged and I could tell academia to kiss my ass.  But I loves de kids.  And it does not profit a (wo)man to gain the world (Frye boots and the like) and lose her soul.

Be good. (Or be good at it) this year,

d.a.s.