MonDiary #4 | About last week...
Every Monday, I post here on Tumblr a MonDiary entry, a look back at the highlights of the previous week and/or an account of the expectations I have for the week to come. This Monday, I talk about why I was AWOL last week. Here’s my MonDiary:
So I haven’t really posted anything last week, huh? I’ve been very busy with work and I’m the kind of person who puts everything into something or nothing at all. Which is probably the reason that I haven’t finished my damn novel yet. It’s a bad, bad, bad habit - this waiting for the right moment thing. Still…I do it. It’s a habit after all.
Anyway, work. I was talking about work. I’m a freelance writer. And for work, I needed to read a poem. It’s called The Obligation to Be Happy by Linda Pastan. I thought I’d share it with you.
The Obligation to Be Happy
By Linda Pastan
It is more onerous than the rites of beauty or housework, harder than love. But you expect it of me casually, the way you expect the sun to come up, not in spite of rain or clouds but because of them. And so I smile, as if my own fidelity to sadness were a hidden vice— that downward tug on my mouth, my old suspicion that health and love are brief irrelevancies, no more than laughter in the warm dark strangled at dawn. Happiness. I try to hoist it on my narrow shoulders again— a knapsack heavy with gold coins. I stumble around the house, bump into things. Only Midas himself would understand.















