I Know it's 2025, this is fine

Happiness can be found, even in the darkest of times, if one only remembers to turn on the light - Albus Dumbledore

I always liked blogs. Most likely because back when I had a blog, I got to spend time writing what I wanted to and then send it out into the universe, rarely to be heard from again. Twitter simply didn't give me enough words; more specifically, not enough characters. I enjoy my semi-colons and dashes and no matter how hard I tried, I couldn't skip the proper punctuation because I am a giant nerd. Facebook gave me an outlet for a while, but then he-who-shall-not-be-named showed up and blew that all to shit.

The thing is though, is that I really enjoyed reading other people's blogs. I liked getting little peeks into people's lives through their words and the occasional picture of a cute toddler or beautiful backyard. I've always been that way; I can vividly remember as a child being in the backseat at night, (probably climbing back and forth, unrestrained as we were in the early 80s) trying to get a glimpse into lit windows, thrilled when I caught a silhouette. We lived in on the northwest side and somewhere over on Irving Park was a lamp and lighting store that kept everything shining brightly overnight, and I adored when we got to go by it. I imagined all the things that happened every day there, the empty corners lit up by dozens of chandeliers.

I don't know about you all, but I can no longer absorb the news at the alarming rate our society currently dictates. I am tired of opening my phone to fresh screaming headlines every morning. I am tired of being in this constant state of holy-shit-what-now-and-what-next. If it's not politics, it's someone else in Hollywood being exposed as a monster or a child being murdered in their bed or the incoming wave of illness or sickness or pandemic-level panic about literally everything being on fire.

That being said, we have to do the normal things even when we don't care about them or feel like it, and when some of us simply cannot, it's up to the rest of us to pick up the slack. There is no giving up on everything, even if we can't see a clear finish line - if there is one at all.

A blog might not be much in the form of a revolution, but I have learned some things in the past few years. One of them is that we don't take enough time to do the things we love, and we're not better for it. We're more stressed, more busy, more angry, more medicated, and less happy than ever. I certainly don't have answers to everything, (or anything, really, but I try a )

But I do know that I'm not alone. I'm not the only one who still believes in the good of people. I am not the only one who believes that there is more good than evil, more love than hate, and more beauty and wonder than mundane and flat. It's hard to be an optimist when the world feels hell-bent on destruction, and these rose-colored glasses I seem to have been born with feel awfully fucking heavy some days.

I can't take them off, though, so here I am. I need an outlet, and I need to share the mundane things and the silly things and the ridiculous and yes, the happy things, and I'm betting there are some of you out there who could really use some happy things. Maybe there are even some of you that want to share your own happy and have no place to put it. Let's share together. Let's shine a little bit of light into those empty corners, if only for an hour or so.