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.

The first day of the story

The stories are there, and actually I've already told them in other forms- plays, and even one screenplay, to say nothing of the countless times I've told the stories to my friends, my co-workers, shown them to audiences at my little theater.

And the support I've gotten is humbling. In fact, my significant other wonders why I think I only have seven stories to tell for my whole artistic life- he wonders why I don't just make up more to tell? He says I'm just that odd writer who doesn't quite want to be a writer. And he wonders why I don't sell them? (Doesn't that take a really long time?)

What's the point of just going from one story to another to another? Isn't seven enough? Seven that have taken a luxurious amount of time to write, not one after another after another, taking minutes or hours to write?

and selling them......something is wrong with my creative self- it has some kind of deficit, losing focus when I feel I've done all I can do to write the story down. I feel guilty because it's a hobby.

After I write them, I move on. And my family wants me to "succeed", they want me to say........."this happened to this work and that happened to that work"......It's Christmas Eve and I'm going to move my stories forward over the next 365 days, I promised them. This is not a New Year's resolution- I mean, who would I be fooling? THIS is spirit. This is BELIEVING. This is FOLLOwinG MY BLISS.

And then after promising them I drive through a blinding rain, 20 miles an hour on freeways, and I get home, turn up the heat, feed the cat and say.....Who am I fooling? I can only promise myself that I can check out HOW people do this every single day for the next year- how they live their dreams, how they get their work out there. I may not act on any of it, but I'm going to find out how they do it. I know, I know, it's territory that has already been covered a billion times.......but this is another distraction, I suppose, to keep me from truly following my bliss. But it's the promise I made to myself and not the bloated one I promised my family.

And as I write this, I just feel inadequate that.... on this silent night, I understand that the words to describe my Christmas Eves have already been written by someone else, so much better than I could write them.....silent night, holy night. sleep in heavenly peace.

Waiting now for Santa. Gonna eat cookies. Night night. Who am I fooling?