Another year...let's keep it positive

As I always post E.B. White at Easter, I think I'm going to post David Foster Wallace on birthdays. Because hey, nothing says let's have a party like DFW. (Okay, maybe party hats and those kazoo type toys say party better than DFW. But it's close. Honestly, nothing says party like a skating rink full of children and me awkwardly holding on to the side and trying not to fall down while everyone else at the party moves around like a young Nancy Kerrigan, but let's not remember those years. Is it cake time? Why this awkward little room? When does this party end? This summarizes most of the parties I went to in my youth and the senior all night party in high school). Anyhow, let's cheer ourselves up with some David Foster Wallace:


“I am now 33 years old, and it feels like much time has passed and is passing faster and faster every day.  Day to day I have to make all sorts of choices about what is good and important and fun, and then I have to live with the forfeiture of all the other options those choices foreclose.  And I’m starting to see how as time gains momentum my choices will narrow and their foreclosures multiply exponentially until I arrive at some point on some branch of all life’s sumptuous branching complexity at which I am finally locked in and stuck on one path and time speeds me through stages of stasis and atrophy and decay until I go down for the third time, all struggle for naught, drowned by time.  It is dreadful.  But since it’s my own choices that’ll lock me in, it seems unavoidable – if I want to any kind of grownup, I have to make choices and regret foreclosures and try to live with them.”

I'm sufficiently cheered. My bar is a bit low, I'll admit. In fact, I'm routinely cheered by staring at fish who aren't dead. In my limited childhood experience with fish, and others fish, they nearly always died. So now, the mere sight of a goldfish, or any kind of fish for that matter, not floating belly up, is a happy occasion for me. I usually tap the glass and say, "Keep doing your thing, buddy." 

I am also cheered by classical music. It's not that I like classical music, or derive any particular pleasure from it. It's that I enjoy that other people take pleasure in classical music, and the mere thought of them, conducting away with their pens or pencils etc. makes me happy. 

I am cheered by what little regard Americans have for the MLS. My coach when I was, eight, nine, made me play fullback for an entire year. What kind of a thankless position is fullback? Any sport that has a position like fullback in it is probably not awesome. Also, if my coach had played me at forward I'd be on the San Jose Fire or Mountain goat eating lions or whatever the name is. 

I am enlivened by the fact that people have finally stopped writing books. I've spent a large portion of my life concerned that I'll never read all of the classics and what about all the new classics that are also being written? How will I read them all? I'm staying up nights and worrying. And now I've read articles that the novel is dead, and I have to say, "thank God," it may give me an honest chance at finally catching up with my reading list. I wished they'd killed it a hundred years or so ago to have made it even easier. 

I am cheered by so many things that it's hard to include them all: pictures of otters holding hands, even if it's platonic, it's cute, songs where someone sings sadly about wasted time or loves lost, children doing adorable things, sorbet, eating the last brownie in a pan, even when I'm full just to make sure I get it, the proliferation of good television shows, family, pictures of otters holding hands in a non-platonic manner, which has a subtext that says, "Hey, I love this guy, look at how adorable we are," and maybe it has a subtitle that says, "I'd have no otter" or something saccharine like that. Let your mind go.