Christmas Day is cold and white here in Texas, can you believe that? It does not happen often. So of course I can use that as a distraction for the whole day.

The wonder of it is that it gives me joy to be distracted by cold and white and I gotta grab onto that feeling because it doesn't come often!

These cold, white days can go either way, too. Dark, dreary depression or "wow, I feel so great today!" I'm grabbing for how great this day has been. A true Christmas gift- that I'm not depressed, that I am alone on Christmas Day and feeling joy!

The Unbearable Lightness- I won't go there today- thank you, thank you, brain, for not going there today.

I wear shirt sleeves and walk back and forth to the laundry room in my complex for eight loads of laundry, and the icy feel on my bare skin is sublime. Have to wash curtains, sheets, clothes, everything. I love every second of it. Everything will be clean and crisp.

It's too cold for the dryers to work properly so have to hang the clothes on the patio in the icy cold.

I toss Christmas trash, put out my new stuff- comforter and cannisters, and I drink tea, hot tea. (I never ever drink hot tea.) An event, to fill the new cannisters with tea and then to make the tea and drink the tea.....And I do get on the treadmill because I want to..... but then I eat enough pasta with cream cheese and butter sauce to knock me out cold. So I nap. Then I watch an old black and white movie-- "The Ghost and Mrs. Muir" with Rex Harrison and Gene Tierney.

And I do not give a thought (until now) to my plight, to my promise to myself and certainly not to the promise I made to my folks- what to do with my stories. And I don't even look at my bank account online, not once. Why go there?

I surf the cable. For fun. The year end stuff is going on, though, and all those lists- the best, the worst, the most important- right now there is a report (again) on Susan Boyle- that she was really the only overnight success ever, that older folks who still buy CD's have made her a wealthy woman (hooray!) and that we all loved her "story". We all love that Cinderella "story." They said it on the news. We all love the Cinderella stories. I (somehow) am an exception to that rule.

The word "success" jolts me back to reality, though.

The real story as I remember it- a couple of thousand people rolled their eyes and laughed as Susan Boyle got out there to give her dream a shot. It could have gone so badly for her- that stupid audience wanted it to.

It's the YouTube I saw. Full disclaimer. I don't like those talent shows. They're mean shows. I do not watch them. I don't get the enjoyment of watching people make fun of people who put it all out there. Audiences sitting there laughing, sitting on their fat tails laughing at people who are really out there trying to do something.

(Everyone is potential heartache if we watch how terrible they are treated....all Jean Florette's.)

It would be the scenario I would imagine the day before the show, though, being laughed at.

What I can learn from Susan Boyle is this:

If the imagination is just too vivid, maybe it's best to just be "simple", have a dream, go for it, and not visualize anything in advance, or put anything on a vision board, or any of that--- because an imaginative person who visualizes things, ends up visualizing things like........."oh look everyone is laughing at me trying to pursue my dream."

I don't know if anyone has asked Susan Boyle what the day before her appearance was like. But I would bet if she was creating visualizations or vision boards, she would have gone on that show with her "after" eyebrows. I'm betting she simply believed in her talent and her dream and she just went for it. Simple.

She's a great story because of the journey she must have taken, from the day before, to the day of, to the day after and on. I don't know that story, though. I can only imagine it. And it is scary to imagine. But she was fearless. So maybe she just kept it simple, kept it very, very simple.

Sometimes that takes alot of effort.