A Gold Star For Having Made It

I'm exhausted tonight. Weary. Feeling a little rough in mind and spirit.

(I am thankful to be at home, in bed, in my plaid bathrobe, surrounded by belovedly garish sheets and blankets, drinking tea, full of leftover chicken/potatoes/veg. Comfort food -- who thought of you? Best idea ever.)

So things are about as good as they can be, in here, right now. Outside? The wind is blowing over Manhattan, over Brooklyn. Chilly-ish. "Those are the winds of change, Katherine," Nikhil said earlier. Maybe so. I hear the leaves outside rustling. Dry twigs shaking. And it's almost Halloween.

I'm full of a fall-type melancholy, or something. Or maybe not, maybe I'm just overextended. The last few weeks at work have been the hardest in recent memory. Not totally sure why. Not even the workload so much as a stressful vibe that's permeated the air; sometimes I fancy I can feel it, it's like a free radical or something, working its way into tiny obscure places inside, making trouble. That's an indulgent way to put it. But. As we geared up to say goodbye to the second co-worker to depart inside of a month, naturally there was a lot of nervous energy in the air.

So I feel a need to shake that all off. Purify. Collect myself. Get back into it in a good way.

Meg's out of town so I'm in the middle of a week of just me here. I miss her, but it's good to have some time alone. Quiet time. Tomorrow morning I'll make toast, coffee, maybe an egg, and read the Times. Then maybe I'll take my wool coat to the cleaner's and see if they can replace the buttons that are missing. I might try to pack a little, and then Theo is having some people over for pumpkin-carving at her place. Then I'm taking my tools over to the new apartment; I told Stephanie I'd help her put together her new Ikea bed, and then sleep over. Sunday I think I'm meeting Larry and his krew for a drink or something.

I told Meg a while ago that when I'm in a certain mood, my life here in New York feels like a beautiful frosted doughnut with a distinct hole in the middle. It's sweet, it's luscious, it's...missing something. I've been feeling that way a little bit lately. It's like fall is bringing the somber-ness with it, whether I like it or not. These past couple of months have felt buoyant, happy go lucky; it's been easy to believe that Everything's Going To Be All Right, that I'm going to Figure It Out or, even better, that I won't need to figure it out because things will doubtless fall into place since that's what things do when you're generally a fairly hard-working and well-meaning person on the up-and-up with the world and...and these last couple weeks I've felt that wholesome sense of well-being slip out from between my fingers without there being the damndest thing I could do about it. Tres frustrating.

Part of me can't wait to be settled in the new apartment (the 28th!), but part of me hasn't quite accepted the commitment, or something. I, uh, left my heart in San Francisco a little bit; at least, I entrusted much of it to a San Franciscan, and it's fucking with my mind a little bit to be feathering a new nest here while that's all up in the air, or out there, or whatever spatial metaphor works for you.

The only sure thing is that everything changes, so I'ma try to have as mellow a weekend as possible, for starters, and I'm looking forward to the plate tectonics of my life bringing things into a more favorable arrangement soon.