It’s pretty amazing that we’re all here together.
I’m with the people in my neighborhood who walk down the street in the morning singing to themselves (and also, consequently, to me).
I’m with the people I met in Toulouse and Fès and Pennsylvania who are just seriously all over the place.
I’m with the ones I can run to and drive to and look in the face, and the ones who are gone, and the ones I have yet to meet.
How incredible it is to be together, to be connected, to know and to have known. Once we are together, we can always return to our moments of connection. This is such a comfort, such a precious thing to keep.
I was sitting in the back of a coffee shop, power-proofreading a text for my job, totally in the zone for hours. I love this work. I flew through it.
Then a Shins song came on over the PA and sent me twirling away across memories from high school: roaring around the hills of Harford County in the Nimbus 1985 with Ceci and Hianta singing beside me; dressed up and dancing around my room, singing into hairbrushes; slinking around Bel Air with an ocarina, pie plates and a video camera.
Where was I? Where was I?
Summer has wings. August in two days?
Carob cookie recipes for dogs, because they’re jealous of the chocolate cookies you get to eat?
Seriously?
I’m thinking that dogs are more likely to covet the big bloody hunks of meat we eat than they are cookies…
Although there was the time I was given a bag of pamphlets and chocolate chip cookies after attending service at a church in Houston. I tossed the bag aside and went out for the afternoon. Meanwhile, Stewart’s dog sniffed out the cookies, shredded the layers of plastic, devoured all, and then went nuts for several hours. I think he was nabbed while trying to hop into the big garbage cans outside the house, and there may have been some over-excited regurgitation involved.
So maybe dogs do like cookies, but isn’t it a bad idea for them to get accustomed to eating even doggie-safe versions that might make them think that cookies are puppy food?
Being a receptionist is actually pretty… okay. It’s not an interesting job, but the social observation it affords is lots of fun. Okay, fun is a relative term. The moments I enjoy each day are probably only so rewarding because the rest of the eight hours I spend behind my tiers of black granite are rhythmed to the buzz of fluorescent lights.
BUT being a receptionist gives me a certain kind of power. I am the Social One in the office. Except when I’m really engrossed in something on my computer screen, I make fearless eye contact with everyone who goes by. It unnerves people. There are a couple of attorneys who are so shy they don’t even come through my room any more, but sneak out of the elevators and through the office’s back door rather than face my smile and my little wave.
I also see everyone from the rest of the offices on the floor when they walk around to the bathrooms and the elevators. I especially enjoy the moments when Talks to Herself Girl (sometimes I also refer to her as Looks Like She’s Crying Girl) and Flirty Eye Contact Man pass – probably because there is glass between me and them.
The only downside to my function is that I am basically chained to my desk, and therefore subject to whatever tirades the loud lady in the office feels like directing at me. Today I heard that she doesn’t care if she dies early from all the cigarettes she smokes, that she needed a ten-minute break because she didn’t want to shout at the “tax man” in the office, and that her sister (my boss) must be losing weight because her skirt sits on her butt differently than it used to. Um.
The other super social time of my day is not in the office but on the way home. I cross Dupont Circle, Meridian Hill, and Columbia Heights at prime dog-walking time, and oh, the fluffy little joys of that half hour! Often when I laugh out loud at people’s cute dogs, the owners laugh with me. I love that.
LOVE LOUD. DON’T LOSE LOUD.
I’m feeling great. I’ve been great since, oh, July. This is monumental! Before this one, I don’t know when I last had such a stretch of greatness.
Yesterday was a day that would have been ‘one of those days’ if I hadn’t been feeling great. Part of the heel of my right shoe broke off on the way to work, so all day I had one foot that made ‘click’ and the other that made ‘toc!.’ My right foot was slippery and uneven compared to my left one, but it didn’t bother me that much. I used some of my free time at work to cut out a piece of cardboard to tape over the heel, but the cardboard came off after a couple of trips to the water cooler.
Then, after work, I went to a snazzy wine bar with one of the attorneys and drank a glass of DELICIOUS Malbec ($13! I’m not in Toulouse any more!). It felt new, but good, being in that bar full of Young Professionals having a Happy Hour Drink after their Day in the Office. I didn’t feel out of place. It occurred to me that never before in my life would I have been comfortable there, for a host of reasons, but right now I’m in the honeymoon stage of this new life I’m living, and everything feels charming and fresh.
After the wine, I said goodbye to my co-worker, saw my bus pulling up to the stop across the street, and started to run towards it (with my wine legs and broken heel). I slid across the asphalt like a baseballer into home, shredding my tights and one shin, but managed to bounce back up and trot onto the bus before a car hit me or my co-worker turned around and saw his tipsy receptionist lose it all over Connecticut Avenue.
Success! I am in the working world!
Culture shock! How unexpected to have felt it so strongly this time! What a strange country I have come to at the end of my travels – where people sail around in their huge, shiny cars, one person per vehicle, and people smile when you buy things from them – my own, known-quantity home.
Also, the inertia that I dreaded has hit me. The other day I did yoga on the living room floor four different times while I drifted from kitchen chair to computer chair, plucked some sprouts from my eyebrows, contemplated my pores in the mirror, thought about the crashing markets, drank glass after glass of water… I guess what I am really “doing” right now is Searching for a Job, and I am doing that, but hitting reload on job sites and rewording cover letters isn’t strenuous enough to make me feel like I’m accomplishing anything, and since the rest of my generation has finally succeeded in escaping Harford County, it’s easy to feel at loose ends chez Mom and Pop.
Okay, okay, the pity party is over. There’s no reason why being unemployed means I can’t set goals for my time, so that’s what I’m doing. I’ve joined the gym! I’m choosing good, cultivating books to read! I’m cooking and riding my bike and doing yoga. Maybe I’ll jump-start some knitting projects or something, too. It’s just funny how after a certain point, having more free time does not result in getting more things done. Every time I start getting a little nervous about the future, or sick of seeing the same ads on Careerbuilder, or stir-crazy from a day spent in the house, I STOP -
and think about:
walking down the street in Budapest a little before sunset on the last day of our trip, fresh from the Turkish baths, Sophie and I smiled at each other, and then our shoulders shook, and then we were just laughing, loud hoots and little burbles that trailed off and came back again for blocks. That’s how life should always feel. I just have to remind myself of it.
My relationship with punctuation has changed!
This is one of those times where everything gets churned up. It occurred to me today that I’m LEAVING FRANCE in a week. I think the thought happened while I was bent-over sleeping with my head on my purse on a train to Tarbes. Or it happened when I lifted my head and my eyes opened and surprise!, there were the Pyrenees.
Churned up because the chances that put me on that train were slim, and I have been talking straight with EVERYONE lately, and three days are left of life as I have made it comfortable…
So today I got off the train and then I was sitting in this person’s living room while he talked about the battle he parachuted into in 1954, and the people he was talking to were all eyes and ears but they spoke no French and he spoke no English, so the words from my mouth were the ones that helped them understand each other. A lot of things were shared, and it reinforced something for me. I LOVE THIS WORK.
It’s probably not a coincidence that two people in three days have told me that “the universe gives you just what you need and nothing more.”
It’s difficult, really difficult, to set out on my own again. I’m stripping my life down to me and the pursuit of what I want. Sophie calls it following the enthusiasm. Good, improbable things have started happening since I decided to follow my enthusiasm, so I guess that’s the ‘what I need.’
But I don’t think it’s the universe giving me a fresh burst of energy. I think that being honest with myself about how I feel and what I want is what is showing me how to find what I need, and nothing more.