[You’ll never be as cozy as this cat in her Christmas bowl. Might as well give up.]
The first gift of the new year seems to be the head cold that I watched everyone else suffer from over Christmas, and felt truly sorry and sad for them, but figured, wrongly, that I had already had it. Now that they are all feeling sort of better I guess I will descend once more into the murky thinking of a brain compressed by sinus trouble and other terrors.
It seems fitting, though, what with the hideously cold weather. And the fact that Hygge, after only a year, has been declared dead by someone who seems to know. We don’t have universal healthcare, see, and have to work longer than 38 hours a week, and so we can’t have Hygge because we care about things more than people. And also Donald Trump. I love how everything eventually comes back to our broken political sphere, even and including the weather, and whether or not we can be marketed thick socks in the name of reaching that highest rainbow bridge of cozy comfort.
I mean, I love that 2017, for me anyway, was a year of reading both about assembling lots of extra cozy junk (Hygge) and the year of Kon Mari, who is anxious that the soul of the sock (that’s not a typo, it is the ‘soul of the sock’ not the ‘sole of the sock’) be allowed to rest from its labors when it’s not on my foot. You ping back and forth between obsessing over having too many things and then trying to acquire more things because of needing to be comfortable and not freeze to death, but then trying to get rid of them because you confused need with want, but then being sad that you did get rid of them because it turns out you could have used them after all, back and forth and back and forth. Then some Danish Knowing Person comes along and wags her finger that it’s about the People, see, not the Things, but it doesn’t matter what you do or buy, you can’t win ever because of Donald Trump.
See, I don’t think we Want to win. I think we in the west like feeling bad and guilty. And then we like complaining about how the guilt is making us unhappy, and so then we feel bad about not being happy. Round and round again. I use ‘we’ and ‘us’ loosely of course. Making pronouncements about Us Americans is unhelpful because we, of course, are all different. Only some of us are full of self flagellating angst about how much stuff we have. Others of us are full of anxiety about the people. But all of us can do with a better pair of socks.
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