My Advice

I am trying to enjoy pleasure, like Italians. This kind of lifestyle involves:
-reading the entire newspaper with a cappucino, every morning
-reading books about other people who are trying to enjoy pleasure. Sometimes outside. Sometimes with an inventive new cocktail.
-half an hour of yoga every day set to the A and B side of an old record
-two double-header 1960s foreign films (Godard, Fellini, etc.) or two double-header 1940s American splashy show-biz musical rom-coms per day. Alternately tasteful and kitschy.
-walking the dog
-a healthy, mildly Mediteranean interest in food.
-exotic plans

I was never really the kind of person who could enjoy JUST BEING, but I think I've discovered the secret. You can keep the rigid tendencies of itemized to-do lists and frenetic day plans even while you live la dolce vita; it just becomes dilletante as opposed to diligent. I do have a schedule. I have things I think about and plan for. I'm organizing family photos, I'm practicing guitar, I'm planning clothes for Paris. I had these thoughts today:

1) Most science fiction movies simply personify a country (with one government, one race, one set of basic customs, etc) into a planet. There's no real difference, often, between space wars and world wars in this way. I wonder what that says about the human ethnocentricity complex. The universe is unfathomable!
2) The ironic, post-modern sense of white guilt etched into shows like 30 Rock is doubly ironic because while it acknowledges latent kinds of racism, it often hammers you over the head with it.
3) I think Israel might be in the wrong about Gaza today!

I'm writing a short story in paragraphs. Trying not to worry about money. But with Elizabeth Gilbert and Auntie Mame as your life teachers, suddenly it becomes a lot easier to sink gently and pleasantly into a solid, selfish love haze. I think it takes two weeks, patience, a full stocked kitchen, access to books and a television with Turner Classic Movies in the cable package. I suggest Funny Girl, It Happened One Night and Auntie Mame with a splash of fruit for breakfast and copies of Eat, Pray, Love, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and various uplifting fiction you have always meant to read. This is how I choose not to look for love -- I think at last, I am beginning to realize that I already have it in spades.