swallowed whole

When I was living alone, I was desperately lonely. Now that I have roommates I am desperate to be alone. It's not just that though, it's a seemingly unending demand on my time, a whirl of Things To Do starting with work and ending with sleep. I am experiencing a toxic overload and I am suffocating under the weight of it all.

It began innocently enough when my days off began to dwindle. I was experiencing two days off a week, a first in my working career, a novelty. I spent one of the days off doing the things you do on your day off, laundry, grocery shopping, maybe some tedious personal grooming. The other day off I spent in a totally frivolous manner, perhaps an afternoon reading a book, or wandering around the park or spending time with a friend. Life was good. I smiled for no good reason.

When my jobs demanded I work another day, I relented with good cheer, certain that having at least one day off was enough, since I had been enjoying myself so much.

Then I got a cold, which happened sometime around Labor Day, and typical of me, I ignored the thing until it knocked me into submission and I missed nearly two weeks of work. Since then, playing the game of getting back to normal, both physically, mentally and work wise has just about ground me down to numbness.

Now I can't remember the last day I had off, I haven't been doing my writing or any of the things that bring me joy, reading, knitting, making things, even having fun with my friends...it's like the only thing I do day in and day out is work and then I go home and sometimes I have the most fun I've ever had in my life with my roommate and now good friend, the sort of friend who I will always be able to resume where we left off, no matter how much time has passed between us. The thing is, I need some time to recharge, to unfurl the stress of the day and I don't get to do that if I'm doing disco lights in the stairwell, giggling over music or enjoying being playful with someone just for the sake of fun.

This weekend and the next will be full of good times; a grown up pizza party at Siena, Gary's studio walk; halloween, Jessica's going away party. I don't have to work as much next week and I'm planning on taking a couple days off to catch up and climb out of the quicksand. There are letters to write, a dinner to make, the book to read, phone calls to make, a haircut to have, a knitting project to finish and at the end of it all, my sanity to reclaim.

Oh the joy! MIKA in concert.

Flower

the statue

He scampered into the open doors with a wide grin. His clothes were all spray painted silver. He is one of those people that stand on busy streets pretending to be a statue and then moves when people give him money. Up close his clothes looked shabby even under the silver sheen. His pants were too large for him and had many rumples from extra fabric. His layers were all silver and he wore them like a hanger, flat and loose. He was a small slight man, malnourished and sad looking.

He spends all day downtown pretending to be an inanimate object so it seemed like no surprise to me that when he was finished and on his way home, he would spend the entire ride speaking to any passenger on the train who would interact with him. His face was painted silver but a long day and the creases of his wrinkles from smiling had worn away some of the paint. Most notably, he was missing six of his front teeth, which made him look older than he probably is, it made him look like a relic, an ancient man in silver, a strange enigma.

The way he spoke was unsophisticated, like a man from some backwoods somewhere, but it was lively and enthusiastic and I imagined he had a million stories to tell and had experienced an array of adventures. I could picture him traveling through the country by hopping trains with nothing more than the clothes on his back. I wondered if he enjoyed being a living statue more than other things he'd done to get by in life.

He spoke to the woman closest to him and she politely exchanged banter with him, and the train car stiffly tolerated his presence. When she got off the train he waved at her and she insincerely waved back, already wording the story in her mind of this encounter with the strange silver man.

The lake today.

Surprise, I'm a writer:

At work today, my boss was showing me a website of an artist she knows and navigating the artwork until she got distracted by a phone call. With her attentions otherwise absorbed, I began clicking on some of the site, focusing on "press" and then finding myself intrigued by the first listed link titled, "Fall Gallery Walk 06." As I began to read the piece, it felt vaguely familiar, as if I had read it before. And then I realized it was familiar because I was the one who'd written the piece.

It's odd because I have been thinking about that thing I used to do, where I would go to events in the "art" world and write about them for a blog. No one really ever read it (except my delightful father, I suspect was our only avid fan/reader), and it was the sort of thing I did just for fun and because my friend Natalia liked to go to art galleries and wanted to do a blog about them and wanted a writing partner.

It surprised me the way it might surprise someone to casually bump into a family member you haven't seen in a while. Enough time has passed so that they seem slightly different, maybe they have grown a beard or put on weight, but with a good scrutinizing glance, you recognize the face from long ago. In other words, my writing, my babies, my work is out there in the world being put to good use and it was heartwarming to see it fulfilling some function. At the time I wrote that piece, I didn't know the artist and had no idea that my boss knew the artist. I simply loved her work from seeing it at a gallery.

It also made me aware that I used to lend a lot more of my time to intellectual and cultural pursuits, opting to skip a night in front of the tv on the couch getting high with Eric and his roommates. Of course, I was still in school and bone crushingly busy so was just part of the rigor I subscribed to without thinking very hard about it and sometimes when you are busy you are more productive than when you have all the time in the world to do anything.

The other thing that surprised me about the piece is before I knew it was mine, I was impressed by the writing. Generally I scoff at most online reviews, finding them dull and meandering or too full of excitable language (written by a marketing major, most likely). Of course, looking at it now, with three years distance, I can see obvious mistakes and edits I'd make. Yet, it just reminded me that writing isn't about thinking about it, wanting to do it, conceptualizing, it is about doing it and having something to show for myself. And though I have quite a lot of words behind me, there are a lot things I don't give credence to, for whatever reasons (those screenplays, that piece on oprah.com, the stuff I do here--hehe--because largely they are not exactly what make me thrilled as a writer) but they are still a part of me.