Hi friends!!
Welcome to another day. I hope you’ve had your coffee or your tea or your celery juice or what-have-you and you are feeling grounded and rested and ready. I can’t make any promises about where the day will go from here, but I will say this: it will probably be just as long as it is short and you will probably feel like you did nothing and everything, again. C’est la vie!
A quick note: it has come to my attention that this email sometimes heads straight to the spam folder. If you don’t want that to happen, it might be a good idea to save this email address (msroseamer@substack.com) to your contacts, or like check your spam/promotions folder if you don’t see it? I don’t know the answer but it seemed like something I should make an ill-informed announcement about.
Okay, thanks for being here yet again (incredible!) and here goes nothin’
This year, my goal was to teach myself to become an optimist. Clearly, I picked the best possible year to do this and I am achieving all of my goals easily!
No, really! I am. It, like, could not be going better for me. 2020 has been an absolute ~journey~ for my mind. Every single day there is something that should make me go “Oh, nothing will ever be good ever again,” but instead I think, “I sure hope things get good soon!” It’s very helpful.
Of course, I can see that things are quite bad. But the mark of a true optimist is not that they are blind to things that are bad, but simply that they believe things will always get better. So, yes, things are bad. Duh. I won’t deny it...But that just means there is that much more work to be done! Yay!
Every day for the last few years, I have thought, “It definitely can’t get any worse than it is today.” But then the next day I have the same thought. And the next day and the next day. Which leads me to believe that it actually can and is getting worse? I know that doesn’t sound very optimistic, but what if I put it like this: Tomorrow will be a completely new experience you never could have thought up nor prepared for because the possibilities are endless! Does that help?
I can tell I’m getting good at this. You see, the key to optimism is to just…say positive stuff. You don’t even have to believe it. You don’t even have to try. It doesn’t even have to mean anything. You only have to speak with exclamation points! Just say, “We’ll get through this!” And then…that’s it! Don’t follow up on it. Don’t do anything actionable. Don’t even think about it again.
That’s what I do! And it’s going great. I am a novice, for sure, but this year – nay, this ~journey~ – has taught me so much. Every terrible thing is an opportunity to exercise my dewy optimism. The glass of water we’re all drowning in isn’t half empty, it’s half full. :)
vive la révolution!
I paid my taxes this week (not cool!!!) and other than that I have no thoughts to share today so I’ll just leave these here.
i took some pictures ??
john’s joke of the week
This part of the email is brought to you by John Jennings Randall.
If I ever have kids I’m going to name them after different vegetables just so I can confuse people at the grocery store.
“Broccoli! Get over here now! Carrots?! Where are you!? You’re embarrassing me.”
postscript
I really am trying to become more of an optimist, despite how snarky this email has been. It’s going…okay. Obviously not 100% there yet, but I don’t even have that expectation of myself. Just seems like now is as good a time as any to learn how to have hope and feel positive.
I hope y’all are doing okay!! You know, “aLL tHiNGs cONsIdeREd.”
Have a good week. Till next time!