Introspection: Day One

Every year, I give myself until the end of January to figure out my new year's resolutions. This prevents me from trying to take stock of my entire life while I'm still exhausted and sad from the six-week Festival of Consumerism And Family Joy, and concluding that I'm a terrible person and need to burn it all down to the ground. I always try to fix everything at once, and that... does not work.

This year, one of my small stupid resolutions is to finish a senbazuru. Senbazuru are the "thousand paper cranes" of Japanese folklore, usually tied together in twenty-five strings of forty cranes each. They are perhaps most familiar to Westerners from the story of Sasaki Sadako, a young hibakusha -- survivor of the atomic bombings -- who developed leukemia some years later, and began folding cranes out of scrap paper while she was in the hospital. She finished 644 birds before passing away. Her classmates finished the rest. A statue of Sadako stands in Hiroshima today, in a small plaza where others leave their bundles of cranes in her honor.

Tradition has it that if you fold a thousand paper cranes, the gods (unspecified) will grant you a wish. Or wishes. Or health and long life. It's a bit vague. One of the Japanese flamencas asked if I was folding mine on behalf of someone sick, which is a common thing to do.

I told her I was folding mine in the hopes of generalized good luck, because I didn't feel like explaining that I'd spent a week wrestling with myself over whether I am allowed to make completely selfish wishes.

I don't know why this is even a question. The answer ought to be yes. Superstition aside, the purpose of a senbazuru is to allow you to feel like you're taking some kind of action to get what you want, while simultaneously occupying enough of your time to keep you from going out and doing something stupid. It's more a statement of dedication and intent than anything. It serves the same purpose as my tarot cards. I only break those out when I know that I am going to ask the same idiot question fifty thousand times because there does not exist an answer that will make me stop gnawing my nails over it, and I don't want to annoy any actual humans.

I feel like I'm being inappropriately demanding for wanting a particular person to do a particular thing. I'm not making them do it, I'm just sitting here wanting them to do it, as hard as I can. Me sitting in bed, folding paper, has literally no effect of any kind on any part of their life. And yet I feel like I am intruding all the same.

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