Gratitude Explanation

Hello there, tens of readers! If you're new to the blog OR if you missed critical post back in May, I wanted to explain all of this gratitude I'm throwing out into the blogosphere. Basically, I'm making an effort to pinpoint things large and small for which I am grateful (not greatful, as an astounding number of people mistakenly write).

There are a couple of reasons I'm doing this. In no particular order:

1.) Many of my pals only post about things that anger or annoy them. I don't wanna be that guy, because those kinds of posts are depressing when they are sustained. Wow, that's insensitive, huh? "Quit yer complaining! You're bringing me down!"

That's not my intent, though. I'm pretty certain the sad posts are just digital venting, but it's really challenging to figure out how to engage when a friend posts at 1:00 a.m., "Birthday was nice. Time to go back to feeling like a piece of shit.," What am I supposed to do there? Comment "{{HUGS}}"? Powerlessness supreme.

Most of the time when I reach out to see how a friend's doing, they say, "Oh, yeah, I was just having a bad minute."

2.) The bad in life is perceived as more entertaining than the good. I want to see if I can make good seem interesting. Story is in conflict, but conflict doesn't have to mean that someone murdered a kitten in my yard, you know?

3) I am viscerally anti-sincerity. I want to work on that. I want to be able to give my husband one of those lovey-dovey cards on our anniversary WITHOUT joking that it was the only one the had left.

4) Life has dealt me some disgustingly harsh blows in the past year, and sometimes I struggle with them. I will punch people in the face if they try to point out the silver linings of those traumas. THERE ARE NONE. But that doesn't mean that I have to search through each current moment in time to find the speck of heartache in it. The unexamined life is not worth living, but jeez, your don't need to perform a rectal exam on it either.

5) I write for pleasure. And, apparently, tens of dollars in self-published royalties. So, yeah, mostly for pleasure. I haven't been writing, though. Newborn babies, moving, and my mother's terminal illness and subsequent death all in the span of about a year? Well, it siphoned out my desire to create anything. Seemed a little trite to write about other worlds when I was busy taking notes at my mother's oncologist appointments. I thought committing myself to write about something for which I'm grateful each day might get the writerly juices flowing enough that it would spill over into some of my other ideas.

So, there you are. I am not someone trying to create some kind of Hummelverse out of the world in which we live. If I were, I would use more! exclamation! points!