After almost 24 hours, Mr. Boyfriend appears to have only aged and suffered a bout of polio during the night,
Mr. Boyfriend's behavior is in perfect keeping with my feelings about Valentine's Day. (Although it is much more humorous than if he just followed the directions.) I've hated Valentine's Day since 1991. My ex-husband did all the right things for Valentine's Day, but with no heart or soul. I left in 1990 and I think by Valentine's Day 1991 I had already been replaced. I try to treat the day like any other day, but somehow it always ends up being worse than other days, like it was yesterday. For years Dad gave Mom and I giant yellow spider mums for Valentine's Day. That was a long time ago, but I still miss it.
The next enlightenment topic is Self-Image, with a piece by George Bernard Shaw,
This is the true joy in life, being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one. Being a force of nature instead of a feverish, selfish little clod of ailments and grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy. I am of the opinion that my life belongs to the whole community, and as I live, it is my privilege to do for it whatever I can.
I want to be thoroughly used up when I die, for the harder I work, the more I live. I rejoice in life for its own sake. Life is no brief candle to me; it is a sort of splendid torch which I've got a hold of for the moment and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it on to future generations.
Shaw won and refused the Nobel Prize for Literature for Saint Joan and wrote many well known plays and other books, such as Pygmalion. He was also a Socialist. Somehow the author interprets this to mean keeping your ailments, fatigue, and fears to yourself. If you say them out loud to someone, they will become a self-fulfilling prophecy. I am all for positive thinking, but I find this dishonest. If I had not shared my weariness and fear yesterday, I would still be sitting in it, and not had the benefit of people helping me turn it around. No man is an island. A better topic for this quote might have been Hard Work, or Life is an Adventure, or Stop Looking for the Destination.
Today I am off to drop by an ad agency on a fact finding mission to find out if ad agencies in Boise still use illustration and if so, what do they use? Then more coffee and more friendship.
I will leave off with a very different quote of Carl Jung,
The biographies of great artists make it abundantly clear that the creative urge is often so imperious that it battens on their humanity and yokes everything to the service of the work, even at the cost of health and ordinary human happiness. The unborn work in the psyche of the artist is a force of nature that achieves its end either with tyrannical might or with the subtle cunning of nature herself, quite regardless of the personal fate of the man who is its vehicle.
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