Oct to Samantha, Grace, Jessica, Riley, Sharen and Christian

I'm guessing that three days in a row with this series is redundant and possibly annoying. But, sometimes we need to endure hardship. It builds character. My latest book, Dopamine Nation by Anna Lembke, M.D. has me all fired up to put myself through more adversity. There are so many kinds. The book is compelling because she's a psychiatrist and they are notorious for just throwing drugs at problems. Her perspective is one that looks at a much bigger picture. She suggests that drugs are only one tool to consider as you put together a more elaborate system to deal with the annoyances of life and how those annoyances can manifest in actual illness. 

When I open up my faux-doctor's office, the entire focus will be to eliminate the term mental illness. Your mental is integrated with everything else. Your mental organ is connected to everything else - dare I say, it is essential to everything else. OK - some people are brain dead, but the rest of us aren't.

What, you ask, does this have to do with envelopes? Making art can be a very pleasant pastime where you dabble - or learn a formula that works - and you simply enjoy the process. Other times - you are challenging yourself to learn something new - or looking at how the parts fit together - and there is another level to the process. Or maybe you are trying to figure out why something you just made is *off.*

And then there is addiction. I won't get into it - but - the amount of art supplies that some of us hoard is *out there.* And it's not just art supplies. It might be something else - MrWilson has a thing for CDs - and it's not the kind where it's money in the bank - it's little discs that he claims hold music - but I just hear creepy atonal screeching. One son has a thing for musical instruments. Does anyone really need a piano in the living room, a B3 organ and a Leslie in the dining room, a Fender Rhodes and another Leslie in the man cave along with a Clavinova and a double decker electronic keyboard thing that is more portable - and a drum set - and a xylophone and an omnichord and other drum things and that thing that Jon Batiste plays - and then there are the three organs in the garage that were *strays* that people just gave him..... end of digression.

These envelopes are the end of this series.