About two weeks ago I went to a wedding of some old friends. It was strange for me seeing them for the first time, really, since high school in all their finery and in front of all their friends and family at the altar. I felt they were transformed. Waiting anxiously for the ceremony to start and the rest of the guests to arrive, I started thumbing through a Bible in front of me. Usually I just skip straight back to Revelations– I know I’m guaranteed a good read if I open up to that book because something exciting is always happening in Revelations. But this time Revelations didn’t catch my interest and I kept thumbing back until the pages fell open to the Song of Songs.

I have really enjoyed Rumi’s ecstatic love poems over the years. One of my particular favorites is

“When I am with you I stay up all night. When you are gone I cannot sleep. Praise God for these two insomnias, and the difference between them.”

But I am completely unfamiliar with the Bible’s own ecstatic descriptions of love aside from David’s famous “Your two breasts are like two fawns, like twin fawns of a gazelle that browse among the lilies” line.

Song of Solomon passage 3 reads
“All night long on my bed I looked for the one my heart loves. I looked for him, but did not find him. I will get up now and go about the city, through its streets and squares. I will search for the one my heart loves. So I looked for him, but did not find him.

The watchmen found me as they made their rounds in the city. I asked them “Have you seen the one my heart loves?” Scarcely had I passed them when I found the one my heart loves. I held him and would not let him go till I had brought him to my mother’s house. Daughters of Jerusalem, I charge you by the gazelles and by the does of the field: Do not arouse or awaken love until it so desires.”

It was the perfect passage to open up to at a wedding– about the difficulty of the search for love and the satisfaction at finding it. About not looking for love but meeting it.

I have a friend who had a great love once and it ended. He has looked for love ever since and not found it, he has searched the city and no one can tell him where his beloved is. But my friends who have given up on finding someone, who have turned their eyes to other matters have suddenly stumbled into love, abruptly and headlong. It’s amazing we’ve been telling the same story for over two thousand years.

The picture up top is “Embrace” by Egon Schiele, from 1917.

I DO have a celebrity lifestyle. My Victorian lit professor once said I have a celebrity lifestyle because I had to miss so much class for extracurriculars and things last semester. It’s only gotten more intense this summer!

But most of all I got really in touch with myself and realized I’m my own hero and I can get myself out of any sticky situation. I had to spend two hours one evening at a Kinkos battling a tour company’s stupid process for printing out my e-ticket and then I lost my check card and had to figure out how to get cash without stealing or hooking. And it all worked out beautifully. Because I am nothing if not freakishly determined and resourceful. And all of a sudden I had this beautiful realization that I am my own hero and that while other people are good for some things, I am going with John Lennon via Ferris Buller’s Day off when Ferris says, “A person should not believe in an -ism, he should believe in himself. I quote John Lennon, “I don’t believe in The Beatles, I just believe in me.” Good point there. After all, he was the walrus. I could be the walrus. I’d still have to bum rides off people.”

Even if you are totally famous and rich and awesome, shit still happens, and it’s a lot easier to deal if you are your own hero.

Sunday was happy because I treated myself to a long, luxurious bubble bath complete with candles, Neil Young on the boombox, a margarita with a little paper umbrella, and a good book. Then I climbed into my clean, freshly made bed and slept really well. It was all very luxurious and lovely.

Monday was sort of nondescript. I honestly can’t quite remember what I did.

Tuesday was a very mixed bag– my happiness was getting up early to go on an 8 mile bike ride to the dam and back. It was beautiful perfect weather, not too cool, not too warm, I had my mp3 player of great music, and the scenery can’t be beat. Plus it felt good that it wasn’t too taxing– last time I did that route it really sucked the life out of me. But that was also the roughest day. To borrow Alex’s phrase, we “ended a significant stage” of our lives a couple days ago and very amicably ended our relationship. Not a lot of happiness there, but I can say I’m glad that it was handled in a respectful, calm, and friendly way and that we will continue hanging out. So that is my happiness for Tuesday.

Wednesday my happiness was getting to see friends who I don’t often see. One was in town from Knoxville, the other from Georgia, and we played Arkham Horror, one of my favorite board games based on H.P. Lovecraft’s literary universe. Board games based on spooky literature with awesome mythical creatures in it? Yes of course that’s one of my favorite things. We also ate sushi, played a neat video game where you kill nazi zombies, the new Resident Evil game, baked a cake honoring one of H.P. Lovecraft’s characters (Cthulu) and drank up some Irish carbombs. It was the perfect afternoon.

Yesterday my happiness was getting a swift kick in the pants that I’ve been slacking off on everything I need to get done this summer in terms of preparing for the GRE and my return to taking math in the fall. So I went into a flash card fury while watching Shakespeare in Love and felt somewhat better about my motivation by the end of the night.

Hope everyone out there (my fours of readers– my mom calls her readers her ’sevens’ but I doubt I have even that many) is find their own happiness here and there even when you have a bad day. Or better yet– that y’all aren’t having bad days.

Happiness is dinner with friends who you haven’t hung out with much lately because they’ve hit a really good spell in their relationship and have been too busy being happy just with one another’s company. Dinner and wine and whiskey and Snoop Dawg. And at the end of the night when you pass the greatly-dreaded RB cops, they pull the guy in front of you over for driving slow and a little bit over the lines– saving you from the terror you have of local police, who are power-hungry douches. Sorry man in a pickup. Thank heaven for nights out with friends!

I’ve been wanting to do this for a couple days, so I’ll do three at once and be REALLY positive.

Day #1: Monday. My happiness Monday was that my friend Bethany joined my family for Memorial day dinner. We ate lots of yummy food (chicken sausages, black bean dip, baba ghanoush, pineapple salsa, homemade potato salad) and played The Game of Life. I like sharing my favorite things with my favorite people, and food and board games are some of my favorites.

Day #2: Tuesday. My happiness Tuesday was that it took 3 hours + to watch a 2 hour movie because my mom and I kept having really good conversations that made us pause and have to get more wine and pop popcorn

Day #3: Wednesday. My happiness today was listening to Arcade Fire’s “Rebellion and Lies” at work, planning my trip to Seattle and playing Clue with my family. Now we are watching the Hurricane and I’m looking forward to tomorrow. It’s been a nice evening and the Hurricane is a pretty positive mantra of a movie. What a determined man!

For the first time since I was ten, I’m not taking a big trip this summer. I’ve known since the fall this would be the case, so it’s not like I saved up a lot of money to travel on like I usually do.

This causes a great conundrum. I feel the pull to travel and see interesting places on short jaunts that I couldn’t if I were, oh, say back in Oxford for five weeks. But I also have no money. So let’s pretend for a moment I’ve met the oil tycoon of my dreams and he wants to take me anywhere and everywhere I’ve always wanted to go.

In no particular order, my top ten destinations at the moment.

1. The Sylvia Beach Hotel. On the coast of Oregon, it is a hotel where each room is themed after a different famous author or work. There are no TVs or telephones, just you and, presumably if you’ve sought out the Sylvia Beach Hotel, a bag of books and the Oregon coast to delight you. If books were putting you over the weight limit on those checked bags, they have a library and a restaurant called the Table of Contents. Though it’s most famous for the Poe room where a pendulum hangs over the bed, I think I’d want to stay in the Tennessee Williams room or perhaps Virginia Woolfe’s.

2. the Sedlec Ossuary . In Czechoslovakia, this little church is decorated with the bones of plague victims, and the chandelier is rumored to incorporate every bone in the human body at least once. Morbid? Yes. A little wacky and weird? Yes. Really reminding you about the bummers that await you if you don’t confess all your sins? You betcha. I not-so-secretly hope that one day I might get married here, or at least have a vow renewal or something. I’ve been fascinated with the ossuary since I was 16 and found out about it during one of my numerous bouts of insomnia kept me up on the internet all night.

3. The Grand Canyon, Bryce Canyon, Painted Desert, Petrified Forest and Sequoia park. I haven’t been out west since I was seven and my family took an epic road trip all the way to San Francisco, where we lived for a summer. We hit up all these places and I’ve been dying to go back, but there’s no way to do it right without a car. I don’t have one, so these destinations are on the list not so much because of my current predicament of being poor, but because I’m saving them up for when I turn 25 and can rent a car. I’m celebrating that birthday by taking myself on a little road trip out west to see what mother nature has to offer.

4. The South Pacific. My grandparents always loved that region of the world and visited it on many cruises. I got an orchid as part of a big memorial tattoo for my grandfather and my grandmother on the other side partly to commemorate how much my grandfather loved the tropics. I’ve always wanted to see the coast of Thailand, Indonesia, French Polynesia, Bora Bora, Easter Island and whatever else is good sights out there. Since this is my fantasy list and in my fantasy I’ve married a wealthy man, my new husband has given me a sailboat as a wedding gift and I’ll be touring the South Pacific on my own little yacht.

5. Japan. I’ve wanted to go since I was 13 and discovered anime and manga and started going to conventions dressed up as Japanese cartoon characters. I always wanted to go with my grandmother, but she said she was too old to make a trip that big by the time I got to asking. I want to see it all, and stay in one of the infamous coffin hotels while I’m at it. Shinto shrines, Tokyo clubs, Harujuku, Hiroshima, Kyoto, Blue Heron castle, Mt. Fuji…you can tell I’ve been thinking about it. In my rich fantasy world, my wealthy husband not only has the funds to take me every where, but is very cultured and speaks many languages, making him the perfect travel companion and solving the main reason I don’t know if I’ll ever go to Japan– I can’t read the signs or say more than “moshi moshi” and “konichiwa.”

6. The Trans-Siberian railway. I’ve always wanted to take a trip from one end of Russia to the other. I’d like to start and see the great cities in the West and the Red Square and the Kremlin and all that and stop in the little villages and see the Volga on my way over to Siberia. I’ll be careful to avoid Chernobyl though, and I definitely want to make sure I catch a glimpse of the huge old forest that all the scientists say will have a meteor crash into it one day and the whole thing will catch on fire and we’ll all die from smoke inhalation.

7. I want to take a proper trip to a beach. I’ve never had your basic beach vacation– just popped over occasionally when visiting my grandmother down in Florida. I was supposed to go on a beach trip with friends in high school who ended up rescinding their invitation to my boyfriend and I the evening before everyone was supposed to leave. To add the cherry to the whole thing, once they got there they realized they had tons of room and felt kind of bad so they called Alex and I and said we could still drive up by ourselves if we wanted. We said no thanks and went camping instead which was great…except I’ve still never gotten to do the whole sun, surf, and lazy days thing. I want the kind of beach vacation where you have a house right on the sand and can stand on the porch eating grilled shrimp and drinking margaritas before spontaneously running into the surf, because you don’t take your bathing suit off all week and your hair is crusted with salt.

8. California Wine Country. Once again, I need a car I don’t have. I want to drive out to wine country and spend a few days cruising around from wine tasting to wine tasting and enjoy all the lush scenery with a good, expensive bottle of pino grigio or cabernet. Has anyone seen Bottle Shock yet? It really pimps Cali wine country’s scenery AND features Alan Rickman, who is supremely talent and weirdly hot no matter how old he gets.

9. Belgium. The art nouveau everywhere, a comic book museum, beer up the wazoo– what’s not to love? A good friend of mine’s sister spent a semester abroad there and found love and now lives some of the time in her adopted country with the hubby. All the stories I hear makes Belgium sound even more appealing than the websites and tourist guides I’ve checked out.

10. I’d love to go back to Switzerland, Italy and Slovenia. I went a few years ago on a trip with my poetry professor and a bunch of poetry students. The group going was weird and we had some group culture chemistry clashes but everywhere we went was so awe-inspiring, the wine so good, the food so amazing, the tiny Italian villages and Swiss mountain tops and Slovenian coasts and caves so inspiring I want to go again with more soothing company and a fresh blank notebook to try again. I would definitely want to explore more of Switzerland, since we only saw one tiny village where the American school at Leysin is. Plus I never did get enough of the delicious rich cheese dishes. I can’t wait to return to Anghiari, Arezzo, and Assisi again either. The villages have so much history and character packed into each one. The village where all the churches have wooden dolls and a whole museum dedicated to the art form, the one with the especially gorgeous town square and gellato on every corner, or the way they all seem to be perched on impossible hills. Getting back to Skojan’s gorgeous coast off the Adriatic in Slovenia would be wonderful too– we spent the best day there on a boat eating sardine meat off the little bones and diving off the side to swim around amongst some harmless jellyfish.