Done that.

I've been good and just about got all caught up on my blog reading, although I just saw that there was a new batch waiting for me. It will have to wait for later, maybe after I am done writing this, if I am not ready to go to sleep by that time. I have been known to be very stubborn and attempt to stay up and try to blog and do its associated activities when I should be in bed sleeping. I am now trying to imagine how nice it is to get my pajamas on in a while and to turn the heater up for a bit and to get all toasty warm before I hit the sack, as the Americans say. I assume they mean a sack filled with straw or grass that some people slept on way back then. In the pioneer days, maybe.

I don't know if I would have made a good pioneer, I think I would have preferred the comforts of some small new England farming town and stayed there, or a fishing village on the coast. I would have been a damn Yankee.

That's all talking by the wayside, because I am what I was meant to be and that is just an ordinary plain Dutch woman who doesn't stand out much one way or the other, except that I dress rather funky for my age and I get looked at for that reason. Oh, I know people stare sometimes, but I think, just let them, give them some cause for conversation, the small minded people. I have fun and that's the main thing.

I finished 2 projects in creative therapy today, because I suddenly knew what to do with them and did it. I have to remember to bring my art folder next week so I can bring things home with me and decide on what I want to frame and hang up. Did you know that hairspray works as a good sealant? It gives your work a bit of a shine too.

I have felt no desire to call the Exfactor and frankly he has been removed quite a few steps from my mind since Joost has been here. I find that a very healthy development and I feel like I've let go a lot this weekend. I don't feel any urgency anymore or the desire to be close to him or to see him or to be the apple of his eye. I think he is a rather silly man who doesn't know what in the world he is doing and I'm not going to help him figure it out. He will fall out of love with the Paramount and then he won't know what to do with himself and all of us will have moved on to different places.

That's the way, aha, aha, we like it. Excuse my silliness. For some reason, I didn't have a dip today and I was my normal cheerful self all day long. It was mighty nice and it comes as a great relief to me. Maybe the crisis is past me now and I can go on again as I was and get on with living my life the way it was with me concentrating on what concerns me and not on what supposedly hurts me and what is in the past. I think that talking so much with Joost about all sorts of things has helped me a lot and we only talked about my divorce briefly, it wasn't our main subject.

We talked about politics and economics and integration and the Holocaust and immigration, you name it, we talked about it. We see eye to eye on many things, except possibly Israel, for which Joost has a soft spot, because he is half Jewish. Not practicing, but still...He has many Muslim friends, however, and they respect each other.

I always feel a terrible compulsion to write, as if I have something very important to reveal to you, but when it comes down to it, I just tell you my ordinary thoughts and actions. I don't know how deeply I let you look into my soul. Sometimes I wish to be very profound and let loose with en enormous stream of consciousness and just let the words come pouring out, but I suppose I have an editor sitting beside me looking over my shoulder who prevents me from doing that.

I have experienced a lot of different things in my life and a lot of it reads like movie script or a made for TV six part drama. There were times when I thought that happiness would forever elude me and that life meant the same as serving a long sentence in a restricted prison block. No parole. Things happened that seemed to be extremely bad and cruel jokes that god played on me and were proof to the fact that I must be a very undeserving person. It's only in these last years that I have looked happiness right in the face for long periods of time and realized that I was entitled to it and that I too could lay claim to it and call it my birthright.

It is your right as a human being to feel long periods of happiness. Not because you're wealthy or because you're living in a palace and your wish is someone else's command. I mean happiness simply because you are alive and things basically go alright and the one day is as predictable as the next and no catastrophes wait around the corner for you. You get up and do all the normal things that belong to your day and go to sleep at night and you realize that it has been done successfully without a big hitch and you made it to the end of the day and now you are good and well tired and ready to rest your tired body. That's happiness by my standards.

That's why it is easy for me to say that I am cheerful now, because I had no dip this afternoon, I had the money to pay the mediator's fee, I did not get rained on once, I am not longing for the Exfactor and I am going to sleep in a little while in a comfortable bed and hopefully tomorrow will be a similar day. If that is in the least bit possible, I will be happy tomorrow too.

Well, so much for my philosophizing for tonight. I really am going to go to bed now after I take my medicines and make some warm milk to drink.

Ciao...