{"id":32487,"date":"2022-08-27T16:48:36","date_gmt":"2022-08-27T16:48:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/?p=32487"},"modified":"2022-08-30T06:55:37","modified_gmt":"2022-08-30T10:55:37","slug":"smears-of-happiness","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/2022\/08\/27\/smears-of-happiness.html","title":{"rendered":"Smears of happiness"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

There are certain moments I remember, seemingly for no reason but probably prompted by a trigger.<\/p>\n

One memory of late is the way my mother and I sometimes interacted on the phone. I would call with what was expected to be good news — that I got a job, or found a girlfriend.<\/p>\n

Except the expected good news was more often not deliverable. The news was bad. I did not get the job. I did not get much traffic to my websites. I did not have a good time with the woman I’d been seeing.<\/p>\n

The expectations of good news in these realms always turned sour. We were on the phone but I could see the smiles turn, the eyebrows raised, the instinct to just hang up the phone not far from the surface of her mind.<\/p>\n

It worked both ways. I’d call her expecting upbeat, lively chatter, only to find her complaining that the spaghetti she just ate felt like a rock in her stomach. I could not think of spaghetti as anything but a happy, joyful, child-like food. You’d slurp up the noodles with vigor, no mind to how they slap spaghetti sauce on your face or shirt.<\/p>\n

But when mother talked spaghetti it was no fun. It was as dismal as everything else about her became in her seemingly endless later years.<\/p>\n

I had an elaborate and sophisticated dream last night about a house where an ex-gf lived. Her cat was insane, rushing around tops of furniture and under desks and chairs like the house was a Habitrail cage.<\/p>\n

This cat was no stranger to me in reals. My mother’s cat was insane. That cat climbed up the curtains, tearing them into spindles of fabric. When I got up to pee in the middle of the night the cat would bolt upstairs and try to attack me. I had to run to the bathroom.<\/p>\n

But that cat is not what I sat to chat at. Qat.<\/p>\n

Tiny unhappinesses. Tiny failures. Uncelebrated triumphs.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

There are certain moments I remember, seemingly for no reason but probably prompted by a trigger. One memory of late is the way my mother and I sometimes interacted on the phone. I would call with what was expected to be good news — that I got a job, or found a girlfriend. Except the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[29],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-32487","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-text","et-doesnt-have-format-content","et_post_format-et-post-format-standard"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/paumAn-8rZ","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32487","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=32487"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32487\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":32494,"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32487\/revisions\/32494"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=32487"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=32487"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=32487"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}