(You have to start a blog somewhere, right? So please accept this mundane journalistic love letter to the self and Florence Welch.)

I don’t intend to be melodramatic, but I do intend to speak, even if briefly or circuitously, about mental health. This week is the final “spring break” of my master’s degree and of my fathomable student career. Faced with some time in which I could postpone my immediate concerns, I spent the first weekend of the break sleeping. I framed this three day sleep-binge with visits from a friend on Friday and Monday evenings, and these good decisions provided hope that I was still capable of other good decisions.

On Monday, in a decision that I didn’t yet know was good, I justified buying myself a not-in-the-budget cheesecake sampler by conceptualizing it as a celebration of being alive. This sparked something.

Since then, to celebrate being alive (and a capitalist, evidently) I have:

• finally purchased the Florence + the Machine album Ceremonials (which came with a surprise love letter from Emma Forrest in the form of a review tucked into its album booklet).
• made a menu and started cooking–and improvising! Feta-stuffed falafel. Yum. A batch of my kale-carrot soup is still to come. (This might become a food blog.)
• started a sustainable sprout system for my rabbit, Roger, and myself with a 4-tray seed sprouter. (A hippie food blog.)
• started composting again with all of the vegetable waste from cooking. (Yepp.)
• started a creative to-do list on a piece of scrapbook paper featuring interlocking shapes. Like tasks are grouped together in an organic, spatially relevant manner. Good accident.

And, to celebrate being alive, I will stay alive, and I will continue to accomplish the tasks written on that to-do list, including self-care tasks.  All while listening to what Emma Forrest calls “melancholia in its purest, most danceable form.”