This might be the last time I have access to the computer this year, so –

Prospero Año

Bonne Année

Happy New Year

[UPDATED]
…innocently insulted, angered and alienated another drive-by commenter.,

I had a “friend” invite today, from someone in California, using MS Internet Explorer, according to Footprints, referred from a link on myspace, who appeared to have just registered with Xanga so she could comment on my old post about Romeo the friendly black wolf in Juneau.  I’m not sure what impelled the “friend” request.  Maybe she thought of it as the beginning of a collection.

Here is our exchange:

Absolutely geourgous [sic] creature is Romeo! I would be devastated if he ever got harmed! I think maybe we should shoot Governor Palin.. that is what I think!

• 12/31/2008 7:32 AM
• se_deyo

Not really.. about shooting Palin. But she disgusts me by shooting wolves!

• 12/31/2008 7:33 AM
• se_deyo

@se_deyo – I’m guessing you’re not an Alaskan.  If you were, you would have ever so many more reasons for being disgusted with her.

• 12/31/2008 8:27 AM
• SuSu

@SuSu – I’m sorry but somehow you failed to understand what I said. I said “Not really.. about shooting Palin. But she disgusts me by shooting wolves!”. I was joking about that she should be shoot. Your reply to my post suggests that I’m a supporter or fan of Palin. How you came to the idea is beyond me? If your into shooting Palin then that is your business and I would be happy to be the individual to pull the lever during your state of execution. If your expectations are that I would make a laundry list of actions I don’t support that she has made you must understand that your whims of fancy aren’t going to be met and your delusional to think that others can read your mind. There must be something wrong with you, seriously.

• 12/31/2008 10:38 AM
• se_deyo

@SuSu – And another thing…

Stop being a hater. It’s ugly. I’m a good person that has a huge heart and very active in charities that include ASPCA and Christian’s Childrens [sic] Fund. You have no cause or reason to be rude to me. People that attack people for no reason are just as wrong at people that destroy or abuse the earth and animals. [sic and emphasis added]  You seem to be a very bitter and unhappy person. That is of your doing and I won’t feel sorry for you.

• 12/31/2008 10:49 AM
• se_deyo

@se_deyo – If anyone has been rude here, it was you.  Read those comments again:  “she disgusts me by shooting wolves!” and “more reasons for being disgusted with her.”

I was agreeing with you, and adding that there are many other reasons.  I did not imply what you inferred.

I am not “a hater” but you are obviously fearful, irritable, touchy, hypersensitive, defensive and miserable.  Have you considered psychotherapy? 

I’m happy.  Doesn’t that just irritate the hell out of you?

• 12/31/2008 11:53 AM
• SuSu

It’s a little bit absurd, really.  I was talking with Greyfox about this phenomenon yesterday.  It started early this month when I started, first, thinking about the Xmas countdown, and then, when I started researching the new items and revising some old ones.  “Library” research is my second favorite thing to do, right after all that stuff I do professionally and call, collectively, “readings.”

Back in my pre-interweb life, it led to my accumulating an extensive, and now dusty and disused, personal library.  When I wanted to find a fact and my library came up short, it meant travel.  I recall one time I went to the Willow Library and learned there that a book I needed was in the resource section of a library in Anchorage, so I went on into the city, a round trip of about 200 miles.

Not only is it much faster and easier with Google and the giant worldwide electronic library, but I have even more fun finding facts now that I can share them with anywhere from a few dozen to a few hundred readers here.  This month, I was so absorbed and amused by my pursuit of knowledge and the work of condensing, collating and communicating it, that I never gave a thought to mood.

Meandering around here reading blogs on Christmas eve revealed several cases of an old familiar mood disorder:  holiday blues.  Noticing someone else’s unhappiness made me aware of my own happiness.  Writing about happiness, or even just thinking about happiness, tends to amplify it for me.  When I mentioned that to my wise and philosophical Old Fart, he said, “That’s the way it works, isn’t it?”

It doesn’t even take that much impetus to turn me introspective.  I gave it some thought and had to concur:  that is, indeed, the way my mind works.  Thoughts of happiness, hearing the word, “happy,” even, can increase my level of happiness.  I don’t need reasons to be happy, I don’t even really need to be happy.  I’m contented most of the time to coast along in neutral.  Everything for me just goes along tickety-boo as long as I’m cycling from postive to neutral and back.

My Bushido training conditioned me to cycle from positive to neutral and back.  When I dip into negative energy, I usually pop right back out.  But sometimes I run with it and use the energy to get things done.  It was like that for me through the fall, up to election day.  I was so appalled at the idea of Sarah Palin being a heartbeat away from the presidency, with only a doddering old dood (who had caved under mind-control techniques in a prison camp and denounced our democracy) standing between her and the Oval Office, that I went to work informing the electorate about Sarah Barracuda. 
Judging by comments received on those blogs, I influenced a few voters.  Maybe, armed with my info, they influenced a few more.  Maybe I helped win the election.  There’s a thought that makes me smile.

Pluto’s entry  into Capricorn is making some astrologers nervous.  It seems to me that an individual’s response to this event is more closely related to the person’s attitude than to his or her astrological expertise.  It makes me wonder what’s going to happen next.  The last time Pluto entered Capricorn, there were revolutions in France and England’s American colonies, and the Australian penal colony was founded.  I ask myself what’s the next higher octave of that sort of change, and I smile.

It has just occurred to me that all this smiling I’m doing might be entirely on the inside.  I don’t know what my face is doing.  For as long as I can remember, people have been telling me to smile at times when I could have sworn I was already smiling.  It is just not safe to try to judge this book by her cover.  …and there’s another thought that brings a smile to my mind.

I was asked recently how much daylight we’re getting now.  Today it is five hours, eighteen minutes, a gain of one minute and 57 seconds over yesterday.  Every time I mention temperatures, indoors and out, people comment, so here we go again:  -28.3 outside, 55 inside.  Wow!  83.3 degrees difference.  Love that new woodstove!  We (the tropical houseplants, Doug, Koji, the four Piebeans, two Fuzzles, three Bagel Boys, Muffin, Granny Mousebreath, Fancy, and me) might survive if it gets really cold.

Still happy, so happy,

I’m running on a sleep deficit, and have been doing so for days and daze.  If I could get a good night’s sleep, I might be able to remember how long it has been since I had good night’s sleep.  The sub-zero weather (down to minus 30°F now), and the demands of the new wood stove for a steady supply of fuel, plus the fact that Doug’s alien sleep cycle has cycled around to where it roughly coincides with my own, have resulted in my getting an average of three to four hours of sleep for the past few nights.

This might help account for my having forgotten in yesterday’s entry, Happiness, to mention one of the most important ways we can sabotage our happiness or enhance it:  self-talk.  If we tell ourselves things that elicit unpleasant feelings, we feel things we don’t want to feel.  If we tell ourselves happy things, our sweet little nueuro-electro-chemical systems respond with dopamine and happiness.  It is marvelous how that works.

I have heard it said that just smiling can make us feel happy.  That never worked for me, but it might work for you.  Consciously working the smile muscles just makes my face uncomfortable, but hearing something funny (even if it is just me talking to myself silently) or thinking a happy thought, gives me happy feelings.  Maybe it puts a smile on my face, too.  Maybe it doesn’t.  That matters less to me than what’s going on behind the face.

Historically, I used to talk myself into fear, sadness, misery and rage on a regular basis.  Education and therapy set me on the road toward breaking those habits, but it has been a long road.  I’m sorta hard-headed, and when I tried “affirmations,” a form of “positive” self-talk that has us telling ourselves a lot of things we want to hear, I would sometimes come back on myself with a skeptical, “Yeah, right.”

One of the stupid and harmful things I used to tell myself was, “I’m lonely.”  That was really no more true than some of those incredible sunshine-and-butterflies affirmations, but it took me quite a few years to catch on and come back with, “No, I’m not lonely.  I’m alone and I’m enjoying my solitude.” 

Lately, there have been a few times when I would have enjoyed a little quiet solitude.  We’re keeping all the cats in and the door barred so they can’t open it. A houseful of restless cats isn’t always fun.  I remind myself that their mammalian body heat is useful, and I don’t need to remind myself that I love them.  When it comes to picking up the things they knock over, I remind myself that I’m the one with opposable thumbs.  Whatever works, works.

Here are some of the things I have found useful to remind myself from time to time:

The Emotional Self-Sufficiency Tool Kit

Litany against fear:
I must not fear.
Fear is the mind-killer.
Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration.
I will face my fear.
I will permit it to pass
Over me and through me.
And when it has gone past
I will turn the inner eye
To see its path.
Where the fear has gone
There will be nothing.
Only I will remain….

from Dune
by Frank Herbert

“Be who you are and say what you feel,
because those who mind don’t matter
and those who matter won’t mind.”
 Theodore Seuss Geisel

It is equally spiritually unevolved to take offense
as purposely to give it.

What others think of me is none of my business.

Do nothing to damage your self-esteem.

Time to go feed more wood into the fire and warm my chilled self in front of it.  A large portion of Alaska is under a big, cold area of high atmospheric pressure.  There was an oil refinery fire at Valdez last night and today there are destructive winds there and in other coastal areas.  No wind here, just cold.  You’d think we were in Alaska or something.

While surfing around Xanga on Christmas Eve, I encountered quite a few cases of the holiday blues and somewhat fewer instances of people who professed to having happy holidays for one reason or another.  I observed some correspondences and similarities among those who were down in the dumps, and couldn’t help noticing how fragile and dependent on external things the others’ enjoyment was.  After leaving some appropriate (I hope) comments, I decided to write about achieving happiness.

This has proven to be a tougher subject to address than I had anticipated.  I have changed the title several times.  I started out calling it The Secret of Happiness.  That obviously wouldn’t work.  If it were a secret, it would have to be one of the most open of secrets.  I can’t think of one truly happy person who would not be more than willing to spread the joy.  Feelings create feedback loops.  Happiness shared is happiness intensified and multiplied.

My next working title was, The Key to Happiness.  I discarded that one because it would have led to a short post, one I have already posted.  Then I discarded Some Keys to Happiness, largely because, at about the same time I thought of that one, I started losing my enthusiasm for the project.  To keep my enthusiasm up, I decided to stop dithering over a title and simplify.  Keeping things simple helps keep me from getting in my own way.  When I reread the old post and realized how well it serves as introduction to this one, the words began to flow for me.

Click any link.  They all go to this page, and I’ll assume, in the rest of this post, that you have already read that one.  This one will expand on the earlier one and go into some actions to avoid, things we often do to make ourselves unhappy.

Now semantics  rears its contentious head.  When I say, “happiness,” I am not talking about schadenfreude ([noun SHAW-den-froy-duh] taking malicious satisfaction in another person’s troubles), and not the fiendish glee of breaking rules or testing bounds, nor the little hidden smiles of triumph or superiority that are flashed behind someone else’s back.  I am not even talking about pleasure, contentment or satisfaction.  Pleasure is an evoked response, and satisfaction comes as a result of some action.  Of those three, contentment comes closest to what I mean by happiness, but it is too narrow, too specific a case.  One can be happy without being contented, and can be contented in some specific way without being generally happy.

In a semantic sense, happiness has a few things in common with “love,” another word that is applied to many feelings for which there are also many other, less accurate, and less euphemistic, terms.  For purposes of this discussion, “happiness” does not mean anything but happiness.  Kick up the intensity a bit and we could call it joy.  Boost it over into the transcendental realm and it could become ecstasy, but for now let’s just talk about simple, easy happiness.

One easy way to stand in the way of your own happiness is to place value on its opposite.  Whether you call it sadness, pain, suffering, sacrifice, fear, anxiety, anger, resentment, righteous indignation, disgust, or irritation, if you cling to the dark side and seek to be unhappy, your choice is made and happiness will elude you.  If you adhere to a belief system (AKA: BS) that inculcates guilt and exalts suffering and sacrifice or casts suspicion on pleasure and happiness, your choice is clear:  give up on ever being happy, or question those beliefs.

So many places are having rough weather that it takes a lot of the fun out of complaining for me.  It is cold here, but we are used to it, and our power outages have been brief, little more than enough to reset computer, clocks, microwave, PS2, etc.  Temperatures have been in the forties today here, IN THE HOUSE.  I try, for our comfort and my tropical plants’ survival, to keep the temp in here above 50 degrees F.

Temps have been in the twenties below zero at night (outside) and in teens below zero during the days.  We have had a few gusty winds, but nothing sustained or dangerous, other than knocking some big icy clumps of snow out of trees.  With a lot of attention and fuel, I have been able, at best, to reach a 70 degree differential between indoors and out.  If I sleep, or spend too much time at any other task, the fire burns down and it gets cold in here.

I monopolized the computer in the weeks before Christmas, so Doug is getting his turn at it now.  He has just gone to bed.  I’m thinking about a piece on happiness, but don’t know when it will be written and posted.  I’m happy, and having fun thinking about it for the essay.  I need to work on the fire now.  Then I’ll crawl in bed where I can stay warm while I keep an eye on the stove, and read until I can’t stay awake any longer.

Christmas morning, a crowd of mini-snowmen, about three feet tall, were discovered at the entrance to the Anchorage city hall.  By the time Bob Hallinen, news photographer for the Anchorage Daily News, got there, the riot had been forcibly put down.

They held picket signs with messages like “Heck no we won’t go,” and “Snowzilla needs a bailout.” “Snowpeople have rights,” read another.
. . .

 [Billy]Powers [the Anchoraguan man whose 25-foot snowman, Snowzilla, started the whole affair] said he had nothing to do with the tiny protesters, though he saw the snowmen Thursday while passing through downtown.

“They’re cute as can be,” he said.

It’s unclear when exactly the snowmen appeared.

Sheila Parker, who works at the nearby Covenant House, said she saw the lot of them, each about 3 feet tall, near the door to City Hall on Christmas.

“There was probably a dozen of them out there, with little bitty signs,” she said.

By Friday morning, remains of the protesters lay in frozen pieces beside the heated sidewalk — a mess of twig arms and coal buttons.

Their signs sat in a City Hall trash bin.

City Manager Mike Abbott said the building’s super removed them. Employees at the nearby Kaladi Brothers coffee shop across the street say it was the security guards.

adn.com

What do you think?  Outside agitators, or local malcontents? 

Yeah, I know what day it is, but I got all that seasonal stuff out of my system and have other matters on my mind.

Either Bristol Palin‘s baby boy is a week overdue, or the previously announced due date was erroneous, or the birth has occurred and the governor’s family has succeeded in keeping yet another secret.

Instead of a birth announcement on the due date, December 18, local news carried stories about the arrest of Sherry Johnston, mother of Levi Johnston (who has acknowledged that he’s the father of Bristol’s baby), for sales of oxycontin.  A followup story appeared yesterday.

It is possible that the families have decided to wait until after the birth of Bristol’s baby for the young couple’s wedding.  It is also possible that rumors of the breakup of that relationship are true.  Alaska’s royal family is much better than England’s at flying below the journalistic radar.

Actually, I’m more interested in the storms that are making life difficult for a lot of you and doing a lot of damage out there while we just sit here under an ever deeper and deeper blanket of snow.  If you’re in it, you know and don’t need me to tell you.  Besides, Doug is waiting and sighing audibly because I’ve been on here ten or fifteen minutes longer than he said I could be.

Seeya later.