Crack and Couch

Time to be honest. I have fallen off of the new thing wagon in the last few months. I blame it on home renovations and the new class I'm teaching: these new things have made it harder to find the energy and inclination to try more interesting things. As a result, I listened to the siren song of the "crack blanket," and I've returned to the couch in the evening. Bad news. The couch means TV and a 9pm nap. Have I mentioned the crack blanket? For Christmas, my sister gave me this furry, fleecey blanket that is about the most comforting, sleep-inducing piece of fabric ever created. I tried it on my bed, but it doesn't work there: too small? Too warm? I have no idea. On the couch, though, it is magic. That yellow fleece blanket is like a drug. Sometimes, at work in the late afternoon, on days when I'm really stressed out, I think about the bliss of coming home, eating dinner, and crawling under that blanket for a couple of hours. It's addictive. It's crack.

Like many addicts, there comes a day--or a series of days--when you realize that the drug is going to take you down. You just have to get that furry, yellow fleece monkey off your back. My days of reckoning came when I started writing about China for my creative writing group. The more I wrote about the power of the new and about the way that my travels in China brought something in me to life, the more I realized that my new thing campaign had run off the rails recently. The narcotic appeal of the couch and blanket had made me return to the path of isolation, and that's not good. Plus, the external new things--a roof, a closet reno, a new lit class--were just not the same as a personal challenge to change things up in my life.

Last night, my friend Wanda and I went to a concert that was step one in my return to novelty. I'll write about that in another entry, though. When I got home, I looked through the spring Communiversity catalog of non-credit classes offered at my university, and I saw a couple of couch-busting possibilities. Dear readers, help keep me on the straight and narrow: send me some ideas, ask me what I've done. Most of all, if you see me out and about, and you notice a haze of yellow fuzz clinging to my clothing, organize an intervention.

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