2. I'm listening to X-Country, the alternative country station on XM Radio and I'm trying to come to peace with how my happiness seems to depend on keeping contradictory joys and pleasures in my life all going at the same time: Snug, writing, drinking alcohol, drinking coffee of all kinds, Johnny's Bar weak to Seattle's Best strong (all I need is milk), drinking Diet Pepsi with half and half, acting, chewing tobacco, praying, reading Buddhism, Greek tragedy, stories of mountaineering, books about coal, playing Bejewelled2, gambling, eating gravy, hamburgers, sausage, as well as steamed vegetables, teaching, serving others, driving to nowhere but getting somewhere, listening to Regina Spektor, classic rock and roll, classic country, Bach, Gershwin, Crazy Horse, Bob Dylan, Robert Plant (that's enough). I have to come to peace with the contradictory nature of what makes me happy mainly because there's always someone, doctor, friend, family member, fellow blogger, someone implicitly or explicitly pushing me not to enjoy some of these things, especially drinking, gambling, and chewing. No one seems to care if I pray! I'm not very good at denying myself pleasure. Somehow I've gotten the idea in my head that a good life is a life of denial and I tilt more toward indulgence.
3. I had a great time subbing for Jeff Friday afternoon. His WR 122 students are working to understand, among other things, ideas of beauty and I listened to them and within myself kept resisting the idea that our ideas of beauty are mostly received cultural ideas. I tend toward a more romantic idea that something in the human person is alive to beauty and that this soul yearning for beauty can be moved for no reason that makes sense. I like how Wordsworth puts it in The Prelude:
The mind of man is framed even like the breath
And harmony of music. There is a dark
Invisible workmanship that reconciles
Discordant elements, and makes them move
In one society.
