There Is Only Goofy

I landed up in Kinokuniya a little unexpectedly (there was an oven disaster and I ended up on my Auntie Ann's doorstep with batter in hand and when the batter was baked, we decided to go where the wild things are, in our case, the KLCC...specifically, to our favourite bookshop) and I picked up this book I had never heard off by an author I had never heard off...but the fact that she was a blogger and that her first book was called "Drunk, Divorced and Covered in Cat Hair" was enough of a sell for me.

And I read it through, laughed out loud and enjoyed it so much, I am sending it on to my friend Katherine in Perth.

But before that I decided to excerpt the last bit, which smacked of my kind of wisdom.

So, enjoy...

This is the true story of me, who always thought I had to be half of something to be anything at all. My happy ending probably won't even be an end at all, just a beginning to some new bizzare, quirky story with new and strange forms of hair removal.

I am so lucky. I got the chance to see that I can be one whole woman: complete, responsible for my own happiness, responsible for my own well-being, taxes, comfort, choices, decisions - all of it. Happiness is an inside job. There is no list, no catalog from the Universe we sift through to order up a perfect life, a perfect mate, a perfect home. We make our lives. There is no perfect. There is only goofy, flawed happiness and everything in between. I can stop fretting about my unfinishedness.

We wake up each day and make it as good as it can be by deciding to see our lives as a continuum, not as a goal or a single resolution on a piece of paper. Meet a goal and it's over, on to the next goal! But a life lived for harmony, for balance, for goofiness, for jokes, for fart stories, for a bikini wax that you know will make a great story at a party - that is living. It's the tiny spaces in between the big goals that let me live. It's the moment I stood in line with no shame and said, "Table for one, please." It's the moment I smiled at a stranger on a train. It's the day I grabbed my camera because the cat was in a perfect ray of sunlight, all artistic and furry.

It's so simple. It's not the resolutions, the tidy endings. It's all the tangles that make up a life. A glass of wine you pour as your mom tells you about this funny thing the dog did. It's that afternoon spent making tamales with your father and he tells you something you never knew about your family.

Home is wherever you make it, whether you dine alone or dine together or sleep only on one side of the bed, leaving room for the unexpected future.

Home is where you wake up. Home is where you take pride in even the smallest thing - a zucchini you grew, the socks you made by hand, the poster board collage from a night full of laughter and glue sticks.

You take it with you. Home is everywhere you are.

Laurie Perry, Crazy Aunt Purls's Home Is Where The Wine Is