Smile in your liver

I don't think the Indonesian medicine man meant for this to sound like an endorsement of alcohol...

So, I just finished reading Eat Pray Love. It was good, but pretty annoying at the same time. As I was reading this woman's adventures in Italy, India and Indonesia I realized why some of her writing was bothering me. She sounds much like me. Complain, complain, complain, oh poor me, my life is so chaotic, I have so many demons, yada yada yada. In the book, she learns lessons from her travels in these countries to basically recover from how annoying she is. By the end of her tale she is doing two different types of meditation every day and talking to the four spirit brothers that protect her. Whoa.

But at the same time the lessons are important. From her Indonesian medicine man she learns to smile. Now, I don't know anything about meditation- it's really not my cup of tea- but it seems like a nice idea. Apparently, you are supposed to sit and smile every day for an hour. Smile. Smile all the way down to your liver. I think that's good advice. It's sort of like being awesome. Just be awesome. Again, good advice. Worrying does you no good. Obsessing about stuff is pointless. Just live your life (oh ay ay ay... ). Like how T.I. made it in here, too? So on that note...

Summer school is over. The ending was fairly anticlimactic, but that always happens. Today I have to write the final evaluation letters for my students and then I can officially close that chapter. I'm in the in-between time now. I am still working on setting up a part-time job here for fall but it continues to look promising. It even seems like I may be able to set things up in much the same way that they were back at school. I was feeling nostalgic about going back "home" now... back to school... but then of course I realized this is home and I have to start feeling that way. So I am focusing on the positive: setting up part-time work for fall, getting my dissertation schedule on track, taking a bit of a break, and remembering that I am getting married in about 6 weeks! TMH and I have a couple of fun short trips planned for the next two weekends (our annual beach trek- cannot WAIT- and then a VT wedding); so excited that we'll be getting away. We really need it! I am also starting to get excited about our wedding, and seeing friends, and doing fun stuff. Yes, some things are unsettling in my life right now, I don't really have any friends here and things are not always that easy. Yes, it's hard to be in transition in some sense. But yes, I also have lots of reasons to smile, all the way down to my liver.