wow. THat’s all I can say.

WOW.

today I am so damn grateful!

My computer was infected with a bad virus and it’s still not clear that I can recover the sucker, but I am grateful because as I was changing all the passwords on my financial accounts (using the laptop) I found out I had a bill DUE TODAY that had not been paid automatically by my bank (which I thought I’d set up to auto-pay this account).

For some reason I guess I must’ve cancelled that monthly autopay and as I was changing passwords I saw this minimum payment due and I immediately paid it. THen I saw the fine print (if you posted this payment before 3pm it’ll be dated today, if after 3pm, it’ll be marked tomorrow) OH CRAP, I thought, and looked at the clock.

It was 2:59PM and I called cust. service and they said, yes, we see you made your payment today. It’s all good.

This happens to be the card that I consolidated ALL my other balances onto this past month, and if I had missed today’s deadline, the interest would have SKYROCKETED on my ENTIRE CREDIT CARD BALANCE of $10K.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

if I hadn’t gotten the terrible trojan virus on the other computer I never woudl have foudn out that i had an unpaid bill today.

There is a god and he is helping me with my life. YAY! Thank you god!

Also grateful just in general, to be alive, to have gotten to run in a rain downpour today (FUN!) and to feel alive and present in my life. Grateful to have been able to take action and get myself out of my sad mood yesterday.

Just grateful for every single bit of my life right now, because my hope outweighs my fear by an order of magnitude these days, and THAT is a miracle.

I didn’t skip yesterday – just didn’t make it here to record it.

• Yesterday I was grateful for the weather. The sunlight. I will never ever take that for granted. Every sunny day feels like a miracle.

• I was grateful Tony was out of town and that I got the kitchen cleaned up quite a bit.

• I was grateful for silence and solitude. I know I do get lonely a lot, but sometimes I just love being alone.

Today, I am feeling a little more hard-put to come up with gratitudes. Some days the sparks are natural, other days it’s like trying to start a fire with a couple of wet twigs. But, of course, these days are the days on which it is MOST important to make the list. And knowing there will be days like this is why it’s important to make this a 30 days IN A ROW no matter what goal, not just a 30 days on which I happen to feel gratitude goal.

• I am free
• I am healthy
• I can choose to take action
• I CAN CHOOSE to DO THINGS that I don’t FEEL LIKE DOING. I can choose to be stronger than the sirens that call me toward cold dark waters.
• I can accept that this is temporarily the way things are.
• I am alive
• My heart is beating
• This is just a mood and moods aren’t fatal. Maybe what you DO about a mood can be fatal, but the mood itself isn’t fatal and I can make a sound decision about what to do to take care of myself. A mood is like a cold. You can make it pass more quickly if you take care of yourself. I am grateful that I know that and I’m grateful I came here to write my gratitude list because it forced me to remind myself of that.

• Today, I’m grateful I’m sober, and bright and cheery.

• and for the sunlight that came into the kitchen all afternoon.

• I’m grateful that, while I got into a traffic jam and then got lost (and only reoriented myself after 30 minutes when I PASSED MY OWN STREET – from which I’d left in the first place) even though all that – and coming too late to the meeting to hear anything… still, I managed to remind myself the whole time that my job was not to “get there,” but to “be here.” And so I listened to the radio and opened the windows and enjoyed the drive.

• That I went out for “fellowship” time with the gang afterward and had a pretty nice time (simple time invested will build relationships – gotta just put in the time).

• That my body is hale and hearty, and if it is a little thicker than I’d prefer, still, it’s a great body and it’s doing a great job, carting my soul around to see the world.

Grateful I made it to the gym and that there was a nice woman afterwards who asked how I liked it.

Grateful I went to the evening meeting even though I really didn’t want to.

Grateful to have gotten to talk with L for a while, even though her schedule is so full.

Grateful to have gotten to talk to S, a bright shiny sparkler of a neurotic and I love her. And grateful she got her new office space and is happy there.

• Grateful I got a JOB OFFER for a REAL JOB! WOOOO! I was panicked at first, because I think I’m under-qualified, but then after I spoke to the woman who will be my supervisor, she was SO nice and friendly – not at all the impression I got of her when I first met her for the interview – that it put me at ease and I decided I’m going to go for it. Financial Crisis Averted!!!
• Grateful to be sober and eating right
• Grateful to have had the false alarm of the car not starting, because it finally got me off my butt to clean the sucker out completely for the tow guy.
• Grateful it was a false alarm and he got it started right up, so no tow and no mechanics to deal with!
• Grateful to have in mind all these handy things in mind, from the last few days of listening to Eckhart Tolle: “Don’t oppose anything. Don’t fight against the universe.” These things are helping me mightily to deal with my brother lately who seems to be angry with me ALL the time for EVERYTHING I say or do or don’t do. It gets me a little stressy, feeling like I have to tip-toe around the apartment. BUT! Don’t fight against the universe. Don’t get your feathers all messed up. Roll with it. Be a duck. I’m grateful to have that rolling around in my head today.

• Grateful the car died, prompting me to go to a different meeting and to discover Victoria was sharing there, unexpectedly. I was happy to have heard her story. She told it well.
• Grateful I went out with Victoria and Eddie after the meeting. Socializing was actually pretty nice this evening. It was pretty easy.
• Grateful to have felt so healthy and good again today.
• SUPER GRATEFUL for this gorgeous weather! The sunlight is so brilliant in September. The sky is such a headstrong blue. And it warmed up enough today that I could enjoy the light without feeling pained by the chill that’s taken up in the air lately.
• Grateful that, despite the car being dead again, and despite Brother being kind of his usual jerky self, I kept my equanimity and stayed in a reasonably peaceful frame of mind.

1) Listened to Eckhart Tolle interview on Oprah – downloaded onto my iPod. Man, I don’t care who thinks he’s a fraud or what, he sure does make all the Buddhist-sort-of ideas clear and accessible. I felt very centered while listening to that – and it made me feel much more capable of getting the cleaning started while I was listening.

2) Grateful for my new clean living – and for the fact that I think my skin is starting to look a lot better! I kept catching glimpses of myself in the mirror thinking, you know, well obviously thinking that I’ve got a lot more wrinkles than I used to, but other than that thinking, hey, I look pretty! I’m glowy!

3) Grateful for 43t getting me back into the idea of sticking to some goals.

4) DEEPLY grateful to have had a gorgeous sunny day with my brother out of the apartment. It was BLISSSSFUL! The kitchen was so bright and sunshiny and I loved walking around the apartment (in my undies and t-shirt – how nice to be able to walk around without having to get dressed) and enjoying the silence.

5) Grateful to feel like I’m on the right track.

6) Grateful for the awesome hug I got from Naomi and grateful to have been able to gaze at SUPERFOXY Beautiful Dan. God, he’s so handsome. It’s fun just looking at him.

7) GRATEFUL GRATEFUL GRATEFUL for the cleaning dent today. THANK YOU FOR MY AWESOME CLEAN BED! I’m going to go luxuriate in it now.

8) Grateful for the insightful slogan of the day: “What you resist persists.” I’m locked in these fights with my procrastination and my paper that I don’t want to write and my messy apartment and all that. Being locked in those embattled relationships with things I am resisting is taking up all my mental/emotional energy, and preventing my being able to form relationships with other things that I DO want to have relationships with. That’s going to change.

9) OH! I almost forgot the OTHER insight of the day: You can change your life every single day. Today can be a life-changing day. (that was the thought that prompted me to take a really big stab at making my bedroom more habitable – and, my life DID change today!)

Today was a great day!

I’m feeling sorry for myself tonight, as is my wont. So, here I am to remind myself to snap out of it.

• Paying the clerk at Staples for my pretty new notebook, the man behind me in line offered to brush away a “beast” I had crawling on my back. He swatted it away gracefully. He had a pretty accent. He was handsome. I’m grateful I didn’t have to see the beast – in my peripheral vision it looked giant as it hurtled through the air.

• My cholesterol is good. I made a little chart of all the ranges of different cholesterol numbers and triglyceride numbers, and ratios and whatnot, and colored the desirable ranges green and the moderate threat areas orange and the high risk zones red, and then I drew little stars at my numbers, so I could relish how green they were. I’m grateful I can take pleasure in crayons.

• I read today that drinking, even moderately, can be a factor in compromising female fertility – I’m grateful for more motivation to stick with my sobriety experiment.

• I said a prayer for a man in the car adjacent to mine at a red light, that he would have the motivation and strength to quit smoking. Then I had a talk with god and asked whether praying for other people was just empty b.s. since you can’t back it up with any kind of action. Talk is cheap, after all. Anyway, god, I said, here I am, trying to be less selfish, so I’m saying a prayer for that guy over there. Please help him stop killing himself. Then, an hour later, sitting in an AA meeting and thinking, what in hell am I doing here? I looked around absentmindedly. Sitting directly next to me, to my right, was the very same man I had said the prayer for earlier. I wouldn’t have recognized him for sure except that he had funny 50’s-style eye glass frames. I took this as a sign that little efforts to care about people count. I’m grateful to know that.

• I’m grateful the sun came out for a few minutes today.

• I’m grateful I got 20 minutes of walking in.

I’m grateful for my cool new shrink, that he’s so smart, and seems to get me, and seems to like me. I’m grateful for how he understands that things are complicated. He gives me a renewed sense of faith in professionals.

Also, I’m grateful for my brother. I’m grateful we’re working on rebuilding a friendship.

AND, I got presents from my sister today!! in the mail, and it made my day.

I’m struggling to be positive. I want to believe that if I have faith, and stay focused on bright silvery sparkling possibility, feelings of gratitude! Opportunity. Pleasure. Feelings of satisfaction. JOY. Enjoyment, engagement, aliveness… somehow, this will recalibrate the magnetic field around me. Compasses will all start to shiver and point to ME. Men, beautiful, smart, challenging, soulful men will start bumping into me near the organic dairy. Ideas, brilliant insights, incisive conclusions will spring to mind. I’ll write. I’ll make money. Jobs will fall into my lap. I’ll find friends. I get healthy and Stay healthy. Things will TUMBLE into place! The universe will simply RIGHT itself all around me.

But it’s F!@#$%’ing hard! It’s hard.

I have been slipping into this damn boggy depression again! This damn hopelessness! Eating and eating and eating. Drinking too much, too. Thinking about how I should really stop drinking or cut back and how I know I need to exercise and wake up before Noon!!

And yet, I am feeling so inexorably PULLED! Into a lumpy slough of despond. DAMN IT.

I want to have children. Do I want to have children? I want to find a partner. I want to get married. Whom shall I tolerate? What vile compromise should I make? I hate sex with him, is that okay with me for the next 15 years? I hate listening to his stupid thoughts. I find it pointless to talk. Maybe this is okay, so long as he is not a cheater, nor a liar, nor a thief.

He’s ugly. His prose is purple. He kisses like a woman. Which of these is something to shrug off?

He is no Francesco. Francesco would never have me though. He is no Jean Paul. Jean Paul would never have me though. At least he’s here, right?

I have this frantic grief. I feel my mortality. I saw a fox the other night, crossing the street below my window, and then a large spider in my room, in the wee hours of morning, after I had not slept all night. I didn’t kill it and I don’t know where it went. It is alive, somewhere, in here. I thought, everything you see today is a sign. And then came all these signs, indecipherable, but still. Signs.

Something is pulling at me. A confusion. Something I can’t name.

I guess this is just what they mean when they say Everybody Dies. And, You only live once. And, Life isn’t Fair. And, Life isn’t a dress rehearsal. And all that. They must be getting at this feeling I’m having right now. Oy vey.

Note to self: SNAP OUT OF IT!!!!