suburbia and definitions and inboxes

aka me rambling for five paragraphs

After another week of asking myself “am I bored or am I hungry?” every 15 minutes, I am sitting at my kitchen island with my reishi turmeric beverage, wearing my blue light glasses, trying to get myself to focus on something for once. Saying “my kitchen island” feels very upper-middle-class of me. In my old age, I’ve begun to realize how dismally suburban my nature truly is. I was raised in the suburbs and will ultimately probably die in one when I am struck by a stay-at-home mom on her way to get a frappuccino in her black Mercedes. Or one of those Fords that all cops and suburban moms drive.

The changing of the seasons always makes me nostalgic for things I never cared about or enjoyed: cookouts where I couldn’t eat anything, my dad’s front yard, family gatherings where I either didn’t know or didn’t like anybody, etc. Embarrassing as it is to admit, I’ve found myself starting to miss aspects of my old suburban life. After living in both a biggish city and a smallish town, I find myself craving the in-between; a yard and an extra bedroom, neighborhood gossip, not being invited to block parties. I miss having somewhere to hang a hammock, having friends down the street, and having events nearby, without having them take place on the street directly below me. If I think about it too long, I find myself almost craving the too-white New Balances and picket fences, the very thing I spent my first eighteen years of life condemning. Daydreaming about moving to the suburbs feels like blasphemy, like a letdown to myself. I just really want a yard so I can drink in the sun and get a dog, y’all.

The problem with my suburban daydream is that I can say with absolute certainty that, were I to move to the suburbs tomorrow, it would be approximately 3.7 seconds until I started to miss living downtown and walking to literally everything worth going to. What I have recently determined is that I am determined to be unhappy. What I have not been able to figure out is why. Why would I intentionally allow the thing I spend all my time hunting for to repeatedly elude me? (Obvious answer: it gives me something to write about every week.) It seems as though I spend all my time wanting things that don’t improve my quality of life, instead of just enjoying the life that’s in front of me. I do not merely allow happiness to slip through my fingers, sometimes I feel like I flick it away the moment it reaches for my hand, opting for something bigger and shiner instead.

I keep using this word — happiness — without ever stopping to define it. I’ve been aggressively pursuing this feeling, one of the first emotions we learn as children, and yet, I don’t really know what it should entail, only that it should be good. When used to describe a mood, the dictionary defines the word happy as “characterized by or indicative of pleasure, contentment, or joy.” I wonder if we can stop feeling those things if we haven’t felt the opposite. Actually, according to the free course I took last year by Dr. Laurie Santos, that is exactly what can happen. There is a reason that eating one muffin is fun, but eating fifteen is obnoxious. When the brain’s reference point changes, but an activity doesn’t, the activity (like eating muffins or being happy) starts to lose its novelty. Maybe my life is too good, too easy, and that’s why I can’t feel anything but melancholy. Perhaps I spend such a large portion of my time feeling content, and experience so many small bits of joy, that my brain has gone numb to them. I guess this was part of the idea of last week’s issue, where I “set out to make life completely suck, so that the little portions that don’t suck would seem infinitely better.” I promise that I don’t mean to sound pretentious by quoting myself, but it’s something that is more or less unavoidable when your brain is constantly chasing itself in circles (another thing I wrote about last week). I don’t really think that my life is too good for me to be happy, but I do think it’s too good for me to be as perpetually sad as I am.

Since last week’s issue, I have continued to make an effort to stay off of social media and use my time more effectively. I must commend myself for successfully spending less time on the hellish Instagram dot com mobile telephone application, but I seem to have replaced that habit with checking my email, even though nothing good has ever come to me via email (except this newsletter, shameless plug to subscribe). My inbox is almost never interesting, and I have unsubscribed from Allegiant’s mailing list more times over the last month than I can count, and yet I continue to receive emails from them on an annoyingly regular basis. I have come to notice how frequently I pick up my phone for no reason, stare blankly at my home screen, then lock the phone again and set it down, only to repeat the whole process less than three minutes later. I guess that’s kind of what addiction is. Cool how I’m not a professional and yet continue to publicly diagnose myself with conditions, right? Sometimes I don’t know if my sarcasm comes across in writing, so hopefully that did.

I think I’m going to write some poems now. I don’t know if this was good or interesting, but then again, I never promised it would be.

they told me this would be a time of self inquiry but I thought they said injury

the back of my left leg hurts and

the front of my right one does

is that a sign?

I woke up from a dream last night

where I shot myself in the head

I didn’t die but your brother had to

take me to the hospital

thank him for me next time you see him

I ate pineapple for lunch

I felt like writing the other day

but instead I laid on the couch for

another hour, fell asleep, had a dream

that my aunt drank herself to death

do I talk about my dreams too much?

I simply cannot stop having them

they’re never good and I never care

I brought reisling

thanks for introducing me to your cool friends

except for now I’m worried they hate me

thank god polyester doesn’t absorb blood

the same as cotton or hemp or dirt

it’s getting dark in here

will I ever stop wishing I was somewhere else?

Thank you for being here and delving into my silly little brain once more. I won’t make you wait any longer for my world-famous photo dump.

including this photo literally just for my mother so that she can see that i ruin everyone’s photos indiscriminately

photo from the same event without my face ft the honey that my grandma’s cousin makes in the lower right

my grandma gave me a christmas cactus and i had to re-pot it in a much smaller pot because basically all of its roots were gone and now it lives on Chris’s nightstand with the collage of ugly photos i made him

for some reason there is an orange floating in the river nearly every day, and every time it rains, the river is flooded with garbage and this is a photo of those two things happening at the same time

i took this pic to send to a friend when i decided this is the next book i’m going to read. should i do a book report on it?

selfie i took on the way to school ft wet hair, a pimple sticker, Chris’s sunglasses because mine are broken, and my badge tucked into my shirt bc the wind was wild

speaking of school, i’m apparently doing so well that my progress report is blank after seven months of school

my school friend read me my personality based on my favorite color and it was really painful and embarrassing and so here’s what it means to like pink

As my favorite color would indicate, I do violently crave attention and adoration (like a sweet child), so thanks for reading this and supplying me with my weekly dose of both.

lol (lots of love),

serena