A common theme in my blogging seems to be “I started a bunch of posts this week and didn’t finish any of them.” The topic and theme has been the same, but emotions have run gamut from angst to anxiety to excitement.

Anyway.

I don’t want to write about the mundane details of moving and preparing to move, and the stress that surrounds it. I already spend enough headspace on it.

For months I’ve been thinking that when I got to this place, I’d have so much to say. To the point where I even planned out what I was going to say. I had my Facebook status, annoucing this moment, picked out ages ago. There are songs I’ve been listening to for months, just waiting for them to be relevant. (Among them: Already Gone (Kelly Clarkson), Time of My Life (David Cook), I’m Movin’ On (Rascal Flatts), Better Things (Dar Williams). I am a planner, in perhaps the worst sense of the word.

And now, I have very little to say. I’m winding things down at work, and I have a proper amount of sadness about leaving, and I have thank you notes to write once I’m done for good. I’m trying not to confuse nostalgia with doubt.  My new job promises to be a step in the right direction, but I’m not particularly excited about it. It will be a job, and while I hate this phrase “it is what it is.” I can’t wait to move in with Keithers and decorate our apartment, but I hate the moving process possibly more than anything in the world.

What I keep repeating to myself is that this will all be okay in a month. If I can just make it through the next month without a breakdown, IT WILL BE OK. Of course, this “month” keeps getting extended, and by now, I should really say “If I can just make it through these next two weeks,” but I’ll split the difference and call it three. In three weeks, I will be in DC, will have been at my new job a week, and will, logistics willing, at least have a mattress.

Until then, I try to organize my desk, get instructions ready for whatever poor temp fills my place, and try not to have too many maudlin moments about how this job saved my life, and how I will miss the gratitude I associate with it.

I am writing this from the third floor balcony of the beach house in Rhode Island. You can see the water from up here. I’m hanging out with my pseudo cousins, we’re catching up, and I’m trying not to obsess about various things. I stopped in Connecticut on the way up to see David, although I couldn’t stay as long as I would have liked. I had to get up here so we could do the grocery shopping. We are incredibly, awesomely efficient.

Yesterday, I met up with Jill-IAN and Drew in the city, for catching up, wandering around the West Village hating people, and getting delicious Mexican food by our old office. It was, of course, lovely to see both of them. I don’t think we’ll ever all be in the same city and same place in our lives ever again, which makes me a little sad, but we still have the ability to meet up once a year and to go on and on as if nothing has changed.

I know I’m 2/3rd through the 100 day challenge, but I may not be able to do it. In fact, I doubt I’ll be able to write much from up here. Right now, I’m stealing wireless from the neighbors, and I don’t know if I’ll be inclined to make the effort anyway.

Of course, now that I’ve said that, I’ll probably have a million brilliant things to write.

Thank you all for you comments and encouragement yesterday. It helped, it really did. I have been a bad commenter lately. This is partially because I can’t get into using a reader, and partially because any bout of concentration I have during the day is spent on multi-tasking while cover lettering. And trying to keep up with my 100 day writing challenge. I used to actually “craft” blog entries, years ago, and reading them back, they sound crafted. Which isn’t wrong, it just reads like a girl who takes herself too seriously.

Which, to be fair, I probably did (do?). Who knows. Anyway, the point of this, is that writing every day forces me to stop considering my audience. I HAVE to write this. Maybe if I do this for long enough I will stop subconsciously writing for all those pseudonymed exes.

On my Facebook feed, a girl I knew from high school had posted “RIP [Name].” The same name as this guy I went to high school and middle school with, who was a friend, a co-worker, and my date to the eighth grade dance. We’ve kept in touch on and off over the years, and give him credit for “corrupting” me (he always teased me for being a straight edge) and teaching me how to have a good time in NYC.

Before I could even react (it was literally a few seconds) I learned from the comments on her status, that it was not the same person. (He has a fairly common name). But I’ve still gone back to her status over and over, and re-read the comments, to make sure.

I don’t have anything else to say about that, but it happened and I felt I should mention it. A guy from my graduating class did die a few months ago. I didn’ t know him at all, but his last name came right before mine alphabetically, so he sat in front of me for the PSATs and laughed at my Dawson’s Creek reference. It is totally ridiculous, the things you remember.

 Anyway, I should write that cover letter that I asked you all about yesterday, and tweak my resume, so I can submit it tomorrow.

Ok, time to hit post.

I am having an anxiety attack about how the rest of the week is going to go. Typical. I have been completely unproductive ALL week.

I can’t concentrate and I can’t focus and I really shouldn’t be drinking Monster Energy Drink.

Unrelated to nothing: my dreams last night were of grizzly bears, poisonous snakes and rabid bats. The snakes may have also been rabid. I jolted awake several times only to drift back into the same dream.  My co-worker teased that we could probably psycho-analyze something out of that!

It seems my nightly dread of having to come to work in the morning is getting worse. Which makes me feel guilty, because as I have said 1000 times, it’s really not that bad. And it isn’t forever, it’s not.

Still, sometimes the circumstances feel more suffocating then others. And three rather serendipitous internet connections within a twelve hour period? That just makes my brain brew more about dreams, and goals, and taking chances.

Maybe I just need to accept it, accept that this will be a waste of a week, and go to Banana Republic during lunch to purchase a cardigan with my 40% coupon, because damnit, it’s cold in here.

I don’t want to write! Why did I extend this anyway? (The answer to the meaning of life, the universe, and everything is 42. That’s about the only thing I know about Hitchiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, and I only know this because I was friends with a lot of nerds in middle school. Well, I’m still friends with nerds (some of the same ones!) but this was possibly at the peak of their nerdiness. They all played Magic the Gathering, and I would go to their Magic touraments, because a couple of the guys had a crush on me. The ones that didn’t probably just found me really, really annoying, and in retrospect, I don’t know how they didn’t punch me in the face.

I couldn’t sleep last night. At 27, I am still on the “school year” calendar, and thus my brain thinks it can stay up late for no reason during the summer. I remember this happening last year; I was pretty useless come late August.

The thing about forcing yourself to write every day, is that there are some days (like today) where you leave the WordPress window open for hours, hoping that something articulate and semi-interesting will come together, and writing and erasing paragraphs because they’re just too god damn boring.

(Brent would describe many of the tales I tell as “cool stories.” This is not a compliment.)

So now it’s 5:30, and all I’ve really done today is make a half-hearted attempt at the gym and sent a couple emails. Oh, and watched 90210. The original 90210, not the remake. It was from late in the shows run, after Brandon has already permanently departed to points East and Dylan (the prodigal Dylan McKay!) has returned, and almost immediately, he starts doing coke again, and almost accidentally kills Tori Spelling. It’s pretty awesome.

Also, I am addicted to reading Above the Law. It is pure trashy goodness and I wish they had an equivalent for grad school.

Does this count as a blog post? I sure hope so.

This NaBloPoMo has been far easier than the exercise was in November.

Sure this little foray into dating has given me plenty of material, as has the whining about the job search. The sad thing is, that I have attempted to be mature, to show restraint, and to acknowledge that things are Not That Bad and Could Be Worse.

Yes, I could whine more if I tried.

Another month approaches, and July 1 means 2010 is half over. I won’t even go into the many reasons why this is depressing. In some ways, it surprises me that I fight so hard to not be pessimistic and doom-and-gloom. I used to be famous for my pessimism.

David (brilliant, as usual) summed it up that he and I are both optimists who have been shown the proof of pessimism. Appetite, with an opinion of attaining, is called hope; the same, without such opinion, despair. – Thomas Hobbes

Oh Thomas Hobbes, how you slay me.

I still often have this (delusional) belief that things will get better, because they have to. But that is total fucking bullshit. Things don’t have to do anything. The universe is completely random. Sure things could get better. But they could also get worse.

That is where I am supposed to pause, and express gratitude, that things are not as bad as they could be. It is something that I have trained myself to do, having been in rock bottom situations far, far worse than the existential angst of not having the career track I want or the vague self-doubt of not knowing what I did to make a boy reject me.

Yes, I am grateful it is no worse than that. But after months upon months of just getting by on “it could be worse” my passion for that brand of gratitude wanes, and I couldn’t care less about the ways in which things could be worse, because things not being worse hasn’t really gotten me anywhere. I am still in the exact same place I was when things were worse. Maybe my head is a bit more together but the raw statistics are the same.

I wish that I had a more eloquent way to sum up what I’m thinking and to emphasis the muted despair I feel. Because I want no mistake about the fact that my despair is in perspective – my problems are white, middle-class luxury problems, the type I am afforded the privilege of fixating on. Unfortunately, I’m still human and all the rational thought in the world can’t turn me into a robot that remains emotionless on these issues.

George: I don’t want hope. Hope is killing me. My dream is to become hopeless. When you’re hopeless you don’t care. And when you don’t care, that indifference makes you attractive.
Jerry: So hopelessness is the key?
George: It’s my only hope!

This is how I feel about now. My hope dies last in every sense of the word, and it may kill me first. Sorry Andy Duphrane, but right now it’s not fear that’s keeping me prisoner. It’s hope.

Fact: Obsessively checking your email is unhealthy whether you are waiting for responses from boys or from jobs. I know I said in the past that maybe boys could at least distract me from the fruitless job search, but I think at the end of the day I just wind up double insane.

I am going to actually LEAVE THE OFFICE during my lunch break, because I don’t know, fresh air, or some such nonsense. But it never fails: I go out (and while this is, in sum, likely healthier than sitting in front of the computer for that hour) and am so disappointed to return to an empty inbox.

(I really need to get a life) ((I KNOW THAT! THAT IS WHAT I AM TRYING TO DO)) (I am talking to myself via parentheticals. Clearly progress is stalled)

Fact: I will never get a new job or a boyfriend.

And yes, I know that is entirely too fatalistic, and that if I were the type of blogger who had many readers, I would likely get a dozen comments about how that is not true. However, I will never, nor to I aspire to, be the type of blogger with a lot of readers (probaby because I have a bad attitude) and so when I make this statement, I am not fishing for comments but merely admitting to myself that that is what I feel (and fear). Putting it in words means that it is real, so I am loathe to do so, but there is it.

I am not supposed to fear; in fact, fear is supposed to be the enemy, the underlying source of all misery (that is what I have been told, over and over again). But it is there. I haven’t had one in person interview (other than the Libertarian fellowship) and in the past 6 months I’ve generally managed to be waiting on one possibility at almost all times. (It helped that one company took two months of interviewing to reject me). Now I am not waiting on any possibilities, I just have applications out that will not get responses. I am out of places to look. My network is quiet. I am back down to no leads, no prospects, and no hope.

As for boys, I haven’t been on a date in more than two years, if you can even call O-L-B a date, which is likely even more pathetic.

I’m going to go for a drive now, and try to resurrect the decent mood I was clinging on to this morning. Self pity is not a pretty color on me.

At first, the requirement to create content drives me. It inspires me. The topics are as mundane as always, but they’re infused with that certain-something thing that I wish I could reference with utter sincerity. That is one of the first things you should know about me. At least half of what I say is tongue in cheek. Most of the time I am being strictly ironic when I use the vernacular. (I will purposefully use “like” to emphasis a point and hide its’ seriousness in one syllable)

I used to find a lot of things to write about. Life DID feel like magic. I don’t need the entries as evidence, because I remember, but the entries are proof that I used to able to talk about certain-somethings without the slightest bit of irony.

[EDIT] I have posted a bunch of stuff from my paper journals, which has thrown off my post count. I feel the need to note that here [EDIT]

I have written 1,166 posts. This makes 1,167. Some of those are private and I’ve definitely deleted posts altogether, but still, that’s not so many posts for seven years. That’s about 166 posts a year. About a post every three days. When I say it like that, it does sound like a lot, as if my life would be completely and accurately (ha!) documented here. But it’s not. It’s missing the months I spent in Europe in 2003 (although I did write that all down and the journal is Somewhere) and when things are stuck, like now, I’m less inclined to write.  And then there are all the things that I hid from myself that I still can’t bring myself to blog publically about.

So I’m sitting here, on a Thursday morning, blogging about blogging, because NaBloPoMo exists, and gives me an excuse to write things like this. I have to post every day for 30 days, and hey, a post about posting makes one! Great!

But it’s more than that. I thoroughly (and unsuitably) miss my old audience. HWSNBN, for all his flaws, and for all the ways in which the situation with him was bad for my sanity and self-esteem and whatever, got me to write. He is the one who made me feel like writing down all these words was actually important. Which is also ironic, because I don’t think he ever really gave a damn about anything I said. And I cringe when I think of those essays I wrote back in 2004-2005 that I let him read.

Things between us ended so long ago – five years ago, actually. But there is so much of him in so many things I do. He is, after all, how I wound up in NYC in the first place. Five years ago, I remember writing something about how it was so confusing to let the same hands that pushed you away, pull you back up. He was always the master of mixed signals (and I, admittedly, was the queen of selective hearing) and for all the ways in which he made me weak, he made me believe in things again. And for that, I still miss him sometimes.

So Evan, this is for you. Because it’s a Thursday morning, it feels like summer, Skidmore won’t stop sending me emails, I miss the city, I’m trying to cull together words that collectively Mean Something and I’m wearing khakis and that makes me think of you.

I should change my sidebar, because it indicates I am a mid-20-something. Which I am not anymore. Twenty-seven is LATE 20s. Of course, I put my website together last August through trial & error and google, and I don’t even know where I saved the graphic.

 Charlotte (who is starting a new job today, after a long stint of everyone being an idiot and not giving her a job) and I both said “Never again” to NaBloPoMo, but that was November, which seems like forever ago. Plus June, like November is 30 days long. So I’m doing NaBloPoMo, and I will hate myself for it, I’m sure.

I have a lot of other ambitions for the month, which are surely too great, and therefore, sure to shattered. Ambition is a good servant, but a poor master (or is it the other way around). Anyway, my goals for this month are all related to gym, money, and food, all things about which I’d rather not blog and/or get neurotic about. (Too late?)

The 3-day weekend was ok. I drank way too many chai lattes and I think I’m finally sick of them, and yet, that is all I’m craving for lunch. Speaking of lunch, my other ambition for the month is to actually take lunch breaks and not sit here obsessively reloading my email.

I have started a few entries in the past two days about how I am tired/groggy/cranky/still haven’t done laundry. I am hesitant (or lazy) about writing about/posting such things, because they are boring, whiny, and unattractive. The last one goes back to the fact that the old habit of writing for a specific audience (read: ex-boyfriends or love interests who you want to give the appearence of togetherness/happiness/confidence to), which is unattractive in and of itself.

Work is busy.

This upcoming weekend, I somehow have to motivate myself to go to the gym (newly joined, uber cheap), return the quilt I bought online, and return some stuff at Borders. None of that should be at all difficult, but I am in such stasis that such errands seem like Herculian tasks.

Apparently, I am also incapable of writing anything that is not a cliche.

I keep thinking that at least it’s Wednesday, and after the dreaded Wednesday night meeting, it’s all smooth sailing from here (because that is how weeks usually go) but this week is going to get worse before it gets better, and then it all starts again Monday and it will be equally, if not more icky.

I fully intend to do my laundry tonight, which will at least end my bitching on that one.

I have to break some blogger-etiqutte and not immediately pass on the awards that Kim and Stevie  gave me, but both have my thanks, and both are awesome.

I just cannot seem to get it together with writing a blog post today. I get to go home early but that is almost cancelled out by the fact that I have to go to my most unfavorite thing at 9PM. My tendency to dread things I don’t want to do can ruin a whole day for me, if I let it. (I try not to let it) Now that I can drive again, I have a whole list of Unpleasant Things that I should accomplish and get over with (such as the dentist. I hate the dentist). Stop thinking, start doing, etc, etc

This whole NaBloPoMo thing is harder than I thought. At least tomorrow, I can just make a list of things that I am grateful for.

I am debating whether I should stop on my way home and buy pie making stuff. We’re going to family friend’s house for dinner tomorrow, and were told to bring nothing and I wasn’t planning on making it, but now I”m thinking I should.

These are the things that I put down on paper when I’m forced to write. I’m sure that if I were able to focus, I could do better, but that is not happening today.

If I’m not careful, I’m going to stop writing here before I ever really started. I still haven’t linked to here from everywhere, not even from my own LJ, where I have a whole 5 readers.

I started this with the idea of blogging honestly “for like, the world,” but the idea’s a little scarier in practice. So I’m writing here, in this space that nobody knows exists and suddenly I have nothing to say. It’s as if I’ve forgotten how to write without an audience (because let’s face it. Livejournal was an audience. For HWSNBN. For The Ex. For the people I figured read it without telling me they read it.) It makes me wonder how I used to fill page after page in those Mead Spiral college ruled notebooks back in high school.

Browing through other blogs lately, I read things that are so familiar that I want to give myself a lobotomy. It forces me to feel things and it makes me want to write about them, even if someone has already said all the things I wish I had written, and has probably said it better than I ever could.

I can’t help but thinking about four years ago when the Election is all over the news, because around Election Day 2004 is where things start to get really hazy. This perhaps is a lame way to mark the passage of time, but the run-up to the presidential election naturally makes me think back to the fall of 2004.

I remember how far away December seemed at the beginning of that September, and how when December came, September was far away.  But I also know that I have to move beyond the defensiveness and walls that I built up as a result of all that.

I have to remind myself to slow down, sit down, and get the words out of my head. Even if no one is going to see them. And even if the eventual audience thinks it’s pointless. Even if it means admitting to anyone who reads this that no, I’m not perfect, my life’s not rose colored, and their’s might be a lot more together than mine.