By noon today, I’d finished two loads of laundry and two cups of coffee. One would think that I could sustain this productivity, but instead I’ve mostly just thought about all the things I have to do at work tomorrow, and then told myself to stop obsessing because whenever I worry about the one million things I have to do, I’m always able to complete them by noon.

My most constant internal conflict as of late is whether to resign myself to the misery of defeat or indulge my slightly new age-y belief in the universe.  While I never realized it in my earlier years the choice IS entirely up to me. And why, you might wonder, would I consciously choose the former? It seemingly condemns myself to more despair.

There’s something to be said for resignation. It’s realistic. I’m 27 years old and all I’ve ever been is a glorified secretary. In eight months of job hunting I’ve had a few phone interviews and a few in person interviews, none of which have gone very well. I don’t have internship experience, connections, and I suck at networking (and don’t try as hard as I should.) The odds stack up and demotivate me further. What’s the point? Why should I do what feels so unnnatural?

There is an insanity in me though, one that nags at me when I’m blindly clicking through job listings and not applying to one of them. There is still the wily brand of hope that I have written about so many times here. It seems to be purely irrational to indulge in it. There is no reason at all to believe that things will get better, just because. The universe has proved itself to be completely random, and since I’m now of the opinion that I’ve used up a great deal of my good luck in my earlier years, there is no reason for me to just have faith that things will get better. I have been at this for nearly nine months. Getting interviews doesn’t make me any closer to getting to DC, anymore than one can be a little bit pregnant.

There is no reason for the madness of my hope, and yet I often find myself with it anyway. When I’m in my car, and my iPod shuffle hits the right song (lately, it’s been hiting Dar Williams “Better Things” quite often) it’s so easy to hope. It’s so easy to get in the state of mind where I think all this whining and angsting and waiting is both worth it, and happening for a reason, even though I believe that we assign reasons after the fact.

I don’t know which is better anymore.

And so we choose between reality & madness

It’s either sadness or euphoria.

I’ve been at my current job for almost two years, and there are still days when I think exactly like this. Even more than two years since being summarily dismissed from the Job-That-Wasn’t, I still, as I confessed earlier this week, have nightmares about it. I still have my moments when I forget that my bosses and co-workers are NOT like the people at the job-that-wasn’t. Earlier this week, I was on the verge of panicking, and was fully cognizant of the fact that there was no reason to panic, but for some reason my brain still anticipates the reaction I would have received at that awful place.

I know I’ve talked about it 1000 times in this space (but it’s my space, and I’ll repeat myself if I want to) but I still don’t know that I will be able to properly convey how much this job has truly been among the things that saved my life since I came back to Jersey in shame two years ago. July 17, 2008, actually. That was the date I knew I was coming back, and that I was coming back for awhile.  Six weeks later I was very lucky to start this job. This job made me feel capable of something again, even when it was just putting together a bunch of meeting materials. The lack of questions I was asked is why March 18, 2009 and everything after were not nearly as horrible as they could have been.

This job saved my life.

Joe’s been in California, apartment hunting, so I haven’t been harassing him with my usual rounds of cover letters and questions. He emailed last night to agree to feed my cat next week (even though the cat is a racist) and I can’t wait to tell him about My Plan. I would not even be capable of thinking about making this plan if it were not for Joe being my sounding board and support system. He said recently, that he never would have imagined the weird friendship we’ve developed, where we hang out and talk endlessly about careers and existential crises (mostly mine) and dating. I’m sure there’s a sector of the population who would call it fate that I ran into him one morning at the bus stop in O-town, almost three years ago now. That, and several other bus rides, is how he came to be the person who drove me to work the week I was stuck and who reads constant drafts of my schizo cover letters.

Joe has saved my life.

Joe is also the reason that Brent and I talk now, constantly exchange emails. We’ll never be the same as we used to, but we shouldn’t. He was still there at my one year in March, because he understood why it was such a big deal. They all did.

My old friends have saved my life.

I had actual work to do this morning; a change of pace, as summer here has been dead. Last summer, I exchanged countless emails and was distracted by dozens of gchats with people from Message-Board-of-Note. David, I hardly think of as being from there anymore, such a good friend he was to me when I really needed it. I still have the text message he sent me after that awful, awful seven days that started with the ride to Chicago and ended with my in the hospital: “You have yourself to get better for you jackass. What else would you need?”

David has saved my life.

The rest, some who I’ve met, some who I haven’t, made me feel as if I was part of something other than just my head. From these internet strangers, I’ve gotten career advice, CDs in the mail, and, with Ellie, countless hours of ridiculous conversation about Hugh Laurie, kittens, and petty-judgmental-thoughts. They made me laugh, they agreed that O-L-B was a jerk, they looked after me via text message, and once, at thirteen days, when I fretted how little time that was, Timothy replied “No, do you know how many HOURS that is? Right now, 13 days is awesome.”

The Message-Board-of-Note saved my life.

And then there’s me, who bemoaned the fact that 2010 is half over, and that I’ve gotten nowhere. That, on a Friday afternoon, I am sitting barefooted and cross-legged in front of my computer at the same job that saved my life, unmotivated to finished the three job applications that are 3/4^th done, and also, already ready to give up on dating because it isn’t that much fun, and the distraction it provides isn’t worth the opportunity cost. I am twenty seven years old, very much single, and still answering phones, among my many other responsibilities.

But I am 190 or so days into 2010, whereas two years ago, I didn’t even know 190 hours. I’m pretty pragmatic (some days, pessimistic), still filled with regrets for the could haves, would haves, and should haves, and still could afford to lose at least another five pounds.

But there are days that I hope. There are days that I am able imagine that I will one day have a life that is not this. I still can’t picture myself with someone else, and I can’t imagine a successful career, and really, there’s nothing tangible in my vision of My Plan. But there’s just this vague sense that I can do something else, and that one day, I will have a life again, that things will get better, because they already are. I am quite far away from the depths of Depression and darkness and utter stupidity that made my life a living hell for most of 2007 and 2008.

And I got myself here. I proved my worth and I got myself this job. And then, after many false starts, I rallied the troops and I finally got myself the help I needed, that came in ways I never expected it could. And that’s why, on an ordinary Friday afternoon, I’m sitting here writing this sappy, over the top, melodramatic entry, because I didn’t really realize what happened.

Because somehow, when I wasn’t paying attention, I managed something I didn’t know I was attempting.

I saved my life.

I turned on my car leaving work yesterday, and the Jimmy Eat World song “The Middle” was just starting on the radio.

This song reminds me of driving out of the parking lot of Bergen Community College. This song was always playing when I got out of the Italian class I was taking there the Summer of 2002. 95.5 doesn’t have a very creative rotation, so if you listen to it regularly, you start to notice they play the same songs at the same time everyday. I always thought it was oh-so-appropriate; I had just finished my first (hellish, awful, miserable) year of college at Hampshire, and would be starting at Skidmore in the fall. So I was quite literally, in the middle. So I always thought of that song as my “transferring song.” Years later, I found out that Xina did too.

Anyway, as more proof that my hope dies last, I hear that song, and there is still a tiny part of me that considers it a sign from the universe that I should keep my chin up and keep pushing through, because it will get better. And yes, I’m taking the words of a pop song from 2002 as a message

Today is also July 1st. Half way through 2010. The middle.

I wish I could be the type of blogger that writes, without a trace of irony that “if that isn’t a sign from the universe, I don’t know what is,” (actually, it’s a good thing I’m not that type of blogger, because then Charlotte probably wouldn’t like me, and I wouldn’t have nearly as much of an excuse to go to London next year) but I will try to appreciate the coincidence. I’m trying hard not the think about the 182 days that have already passed, and the waste they have been. So many cliches have been floating through my brain on the subject (“Life is what happens when you’re busy making plans”) and trying not to obsess about the way I see the months and years of my life slip away as I attempt to put myself on track. I’m trying to think it’s okay that I don’t have a precise answer on what I want to do (because there are multiple paths that I’m trying to go, and I won’t know if any of them make me happy until I try them).

Yesterday, I quoted Thomas Hobbes, and to balance of the vapidness of quoting Jimmy Eat World, I will quote Churchill (via Charlotte) “If you are going through hell, keep going.”

So I have two job applications to submit today. I appear to be categorically incapable of not hoping.

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.

Yesterday, a series of things that Give Me Hope (like FML, but with hope), to put me under the spell of “Maybe this time.”

When I have hope, I love it (albeit cautiously). When I don’t have it, I hate it and want it in equal proportions.

I warn myself not to project, not to plan, and not to get my hopes up. But…they’re already up. And so maybe I should just enjoy it? Because I know by now that it won’t last. A job won’t come through. What is easy conversation via gchat will be stilted and awkward. My email box will sit empty.

But, I drove home from work last night, and swear to god I had not thought of this song in years, but I caught myself humming “You Gotta Have Heart” from Damn Yankees. Specifically I’m thinking of this part:

Totally lame, but in the moment, it sounded pretty good to me, for all the obvious reasons. Maybe being stuck as a glorified secretary whilst marooned at my parents house in Jersey is NOT the career/life/whatever death sentence I’ve been seeing it as. I don’t so much buy into “everything happens for a reason” – I believe it’s human nature to Monday morning quarterback things without even realizing it, to attribute significance to things after the fact – it isn’t so much that everything happens for a reason then it is that we reconstruct the now logical sequence of events once the conclusion has already been reached.

But I guess that right then, and maybe even right now, I have enough hope to think that I’m going to get to a place, or something’s going to happen, and it’s going to give me the ability to see what this was all for.

And so last night, I got myself to the gym, where I listend to Atlas Shrugged on tape. I got up to the part where Francisco has become something that Dagny can’t understand and for the first time in their lives she doesn’t understand his actions, and she’s terribly hurt, but has no choice but to go on, and to live with it, and to survive it. I, much younger, used to think that if Dagny could handle that, than I certainly should be able to handle whatever complication I was currently obsessing about.

Then there was an email; not one I was expecting/wanting, but a good email nonetheless, and a short g-chat conversation.  I went to bed feeling good for once.

And now it’s Wednesday, and there’s coffee tonight with a boy I’m not sure I want to have coffee with (bad signs: hard to pin down for a time for plans and has mentioned an Ex more than once. good signs: very polite. seems to think highly of me from what little he knows of me) but the fact that I’m going to have coffee with a boy is a big step. Actually, his mentions of his Ex are what made me realize I am ready to date: At no time in speaking to any of these guys have I thought to bring up any of my exes. It hasn’t been relevant, whereas in the past, it would have been relevant to everything. I knew I had baggage (and I still do) but I hadn’t realized how much I had to put away until I realized it wasn’t there anymore.

And I suppose, even if nothing comes of any of this, that was a great epiphany. And maybe that should be my proof that everything happens for a reason.

I swear I had all these brilliant things to write about. I was constructing paragraphs on my way to work again. Of course, now that I’m in front of a computer screen, they’re all gone.

(Boston lost the NBA finals. Yay!)

I got a fortune cookie last night that said “You will move to a new home within a year.” First of all, it’s impressive that there was an actual FORTUNE (most of the time you just get little sayings or slogans) and second, yes I know it’s a fortune cookie, but…

I can’t help thinking of the last time I got a fortune cookie and scoffed. It was the night before I went back to school for senior year of college. I was so Not Happy then (even though in retrospect, my angst was almost entirely unwarranted) and I really didn’t want to go back up to school, even though it was only for one more semester. I just wanted to be done and leave college as a bad memory.

And then I got the fortune “a refreshing life change is in your future” and two months later things started to go and feel right again.

I know that there’s no correlation between the two, but when I saw the fortune yesterday “You will move to a new home within a year” I could not help but immediately internalize it, to think “see, here’s proof! It WILL get better! It’s going to happen.” Because I am pretty much desperate to feel genuinely optimistic and I’m having a really difficult time lately believing that anything will ever change.

And while a year is an awful long time to wait (I really wanted to be out of here by this summer) it would at least be an endpoint and a light at the end of the tunnel.

So I find myself sitting here, annoyed that there are never any new job postings on Fridays (or really Mondays too. What’s with the three day weeks HR people?), impatient to see if I’ll hear from this boy I may be trying to have coffee with, and thinking about the fortune.

And thinking please let it be true. Please let it be true.

You wouldn’t know it from my entries but I start each day with optimism. I wake up, brew a travel mug of coffee, and I drive to work with a good attitude about my hours in front of me. By now, I recognize that this optimism is unsustainable; despite my better efforts, it’s often gone by 11 AM.

Today was no different, except I’m writing this at 9:20 am, and won’t be able to post until later because OUR INTERNET IS DOWN. I don’t know what the issue is; internal stuff is working fine.

(this happened once at PLI and I wrote this post about how I wanted time to slow down anyway. I know it is terribly unhealthy the way I envy the girl who wrote that, but I do)

I don’t understand how our IT department cannot solve this, as it has been down for 90+ minutes.

[ok. Internet is back. Thank god]

And apparently, my optimism is crushed once I check my email and find no response from jobs or boys.  I don’t understand boys. I really don’t.  I mean, I would never describe myself as “hot.” But I’ve always been confident in the fact that I’m quite passably cute. But with this online dating thing, are they fleeing based on my Facebook photos? Evidence seems to suggest this is possible. Evidence also seems to suggest I am neurotic and over think things. However, given that NOTHING has worked out in the past 7+ months, maybe I have even more flaws than I realized, and I’ve just been walking around in this haze of self-deception.

At this point, anything thing is possible.

Every single morning, I wake up, believing that this could be the day. The job offer might come (which now has dissolved to “maybe I’ll get an interview…” and finally “maybe they’ll be something worth applying to posted.” Or, I might actually hear back from someone in my (admittedly small) network. Or maybe just SOMETHING good, something that is going to move my life forward will happen. Today could be the day.

I think this every single morning. It’s in my head from the minute I wake up. It’s in every song I skip or linger on my iPod shuffle. Every single day, there is a part of me that genuinely believe today is when it will finally happen.

 And every single day, for the past 6+ months, I’ve been wrong.

I’ve tried really hard to be happy (or at least “okay”) with the seemingly neverending string of disappointments. I really do try. I constantly remind myself of the good in my life and how things are not as bad as they could be. But those mind tricks are becomming less and less effective every day. I could give it a rest, sure. I could stop looking for the summer, try to relax and have fun, but what good will that do me? I will still be HERE in September, a place that I started to put together an escape plan from almost ten months ago.

And June is already half over. Time is moving at a ridiculous pace; and it’s such a valuable resource, and despite all my efforts, I’m losing it.

More than five years ago I finished college and I quoted Rent (Early! A fact I fixated on for a long time. Look at me! I can finish college early! I’m smart! No I’m not compensating for insecurity AT ALL) Then, 2004 was amazing to me. My year in review sums that up quite well. Breaking up with the Ex (who I’d been with for more than 4 years) hooking up/dating HWSNBN, that awful summer, finding “inner fucking peace”…it was pretty amazing, back then. So when the year ended, it seemed logical to ask “How DO you measure, a year in the life?”

(For the record, I did not like Rent, at all. I remember when it was super popular, and I didn’t see it until later in its run, but HATED)

This year, objectively, the changes have not been as obvious. I am in the same job I was a year ago. I live in the same place (…still back at my parents house). I haven’t fallen in love or even had so much as a date. Much of the time, I’m bored. Suburbia drains the life out of me.

But then other times, like last Thursday night, I feel that there is no other place I could be, and no other way I could have gotten here than exactly this way.

Brent, Jon, Joe, and I went out to celebrate my one-year. This was originally supposed to include Lisa, but she’s recovering from surgery. We took a (very bad) picture of the four of us, but I look at it, us all looking awkward and stuff, and these are my boys. A year ago, I wasn’t on speaking terms with one of them. My relationship with one of them was fairly cold and way more off than on at best. And yet, they rallied. “Why didn’t you call us?” Jon (the one with whom my relationship was fairly cold) asked. “We would have helped you.”

Jon has had the occasional coffee with me, and because I always kind of feared Jon thought I was a total flake, his encouragement means a lot. Brent was once the person I labeled my best friend. And he was. Until three years ago when I fucked it up, royally. I hurt him worse than I have ever hurt someone in my life.

But there he was last night, telling me it was good to see me getting things together, with a cryptic note that I was better than I was three years ago. He is still, in so many ways, my best friend. We are not as close as we once were. In our nearly 20 year friendship we have hugged maybe 2 dozen times. But we still finish each other’s thoughts with just a glance.

And then there’s Joe. Joe, who took me out to lunch on weekends. Joe, who has helped me write and rewrite cover letters. Joe, who one week, when I was stuck and fretting, and didn’t want to ask my parents for yet another favor, drove me to work, about an hour (round trip) out of his way. It’s funny, because late into high school, Joe and Brent became close and I was jealous. And then, like many groups of high school friends do, we had a falling out of sorts, and Joe and I barely spoke for years. But he is the one I hugged the hardest Thursday night.

They are my favorite people on the planet, and the people that know me better than anyone. This is not to discount the other awesome things and people, which in themselves deserve their own entry. But really, there are a thousand scary-relevant song lyrics reserved just for this.  (I already did that here) In my car, I unabashadly sing along with songs that talk about old friends, and home, and hope, and love.

There is an immense amount of love in my life. Even if I were to only count the three of them.

In just a few days, it will have been one year. One year since I finally hit a point low enough to start climbing back out.

The past 360 days don’t erase the approximately 1,095 that came before it. There are still things (many things) that make me cringe. I don’t dwell, and I don’t even obsess, but the thoughts do come up. I suppose the fact that I can deal with it when the thoughts enter my head is proof of progress. At least I hope it is.

I don’t exactly know how to talk about what this year has been like. Are things better? Yes. Absolutely. But am I really that different? Am I better person? I don’t really know. My father said to me, maybe 355 or so days ago, that he knew the real Rachel had to still be there, somewhere. And if that’s true, and this is the real Rachel, then do my parents like her any better? Sometimes I think my mother expected a personality transformation; that I would suddenly embrace my “family” (we have never been at all close to my blood relatives. I have no feelings for them one way or another. There are close friends of the family who I spent far more time with growing up who I consider family before the people related to me by blood) or I don’t know. And then, it frustrates me that she doesn’t see the ways I’ve changed. My anxiety level has dropped. I deal with things like disappointment better than I have in probably my entire life.

You can’t control what other people think of you, but my parent’s opinion still matters to me. I know they love me and they put up with an awful lot of nonsense from me in the 9 months leading up to 360 days ago, but I don’t really know if they’re proud of me, or if that think that I’m better than I was a year ago, or if they will always, in the back of their minds, think I’m hopeless.

I didn’t expect to go into this here; I guess I didn’t realize that it’s on my mind so deeply. Because I’m not sad today; maybe resigned would be a better way to put it? Although that seems too fatalistic. I mean, I feel pretty GOOD today. Yeah, I’m annoyed that I lost one of my favorite earrings somewhere between the convenience store and my car and home (maybe I”ll get lucky and it will turn up in my car), and it’s a little weird at home because my dad has a bad cold and my mom is annoyed at him for acting like a total baby for being sick, but it’s not a BAD day. I don’t feel depressed when I think about all these things that my parents may or may not be thinking/feeling about me.

(I’m sure this raises an obvious question; why don’t you just ask them?” The answer is that because truthfully this does not cross my mind very often, I believe that I cannot control what they think; I know that I’m doing the right thing and at the end of the day that will have to be enough)

Perhaps the fact that, even with this ambiguity, I am able to go about my day, and still feel pretty good about a lot of things (my boys, without whom, this year would mean nothing. my internet-stranger-friend-boys who also were a network I needed. the six months of expenses sitting in my bank account. the pair of jeans I have on, a size smaller than a year ago) is what really speaks for making progress.

At least, I hope so.

Complaining/wallowing is something that I have trained myself not to do in the past 7 months. Part of it has been that if I started to think of everything that I COULD complain about I would never find any time to be reasonably content. Part of ithas been, because I didn’t feel so stuck or so impatient a few months ago.

Part of it is because part of me still wants to believe that I can train myself to feel what I want to/think I should feel, when I want to feel it. It’s a good party trick, one that seems to work perfectly well when one is in decent spirits. The execution sort of falls apart when it’s week number umpteen of the same old-same old, and it’s all you can do NOT to dissolve into a whiny, complaining baby.

I don’t want this space to become an angst-fest. I don’t cry prettily. But I don’t want to coat it with the layer of gloss and veneer that made the entries of my Livejournal shine with alleged contentness time and time again.

Part of me is calculating. I am “grown-up” enough now to know that This Too Shall Pass; to remind myself that even in the depths of this utterly exhausting same-old-same-old there have been some very good things too; to write this and think that one day, maybe one day not too far in the future, I will look back on this angsting and be thankful for it because it got me to the place that I’ll be standing in that one day.

And then part of me thinks that that hope is delusional and misplaced, because how can I know? How can I think that I will get out of here, that I will find something better, that I will be happy, really happy like I used to be? How can I be so delusional as to think that one day I can live in New York City again, that I will fall in love, that I will be okay?

Depression is a tricky thing. In a strange way, I miss the very old days, when I didn’t know it was Depression, when I didn’t know how therapy could work (if I’d only let it) and when I truly did not believe that there was anything better for me out there. It was a dark time in my life, and I would not want to relive it, but I had blinders on, and sometimes I miss tunnel vision. With tunnel vision, it is impossible to hope, but then, it is impossible to be disappointed.

This is the darkness I sometimes find myself in, and I never know how long it will take to find a clearing. And because I don’t know, I’m afraid to let my eyes adjust to the dark and I create these artificial sources of light. I’m afraid to get lost in the woods, because if I get turned around, I might encounter a blackness that goes deeper than the vague grayness that I have known, mastered, and conquered time and again.

So I try not to complain, and I try not to worry, and I try not to angst. I try not to be that melancholy girl that I was back in college, the one who ruined things for herself because of her inability to see beyond the black, for her delusional belief in the terminal uniqueness of her dramatized misery.

But sometimes even the strongest of walls can’t hold what is hiding behind them, and that is why on an otherwise ordinary Thursday, I am angsting my way through an entry, rolling my eyes at myself, thinking about Thoreau’s take of  “lost in the woods” (because I am an overeducated elitist) and thinking of the song “War on Drugs” by BNL, and how I first heard it in January 2004, and how it represented that something, SOMETHING had to give, and soon.

It’s going to be January 2010 soon. Something has to give. And Soon.

Since fall always feels like a New Beginning to me, moreso than January 1st, it is appropriate that my New Year and Day of Atonement fall in September/October.

I am technically Jewish. When I tell people that I am a Jewish Atheist they usually don’t get it. I don’t believe in God, but I still consider myself a member of the tribe. I don’t have the name and the nose for nothing.

Taking the year from September to September, there are plenty of things for which I owe atonement. This I know. This year is the sum of its mistakes, including one so big that I’m sure David would yell at me for merely giving it the label of ‘mistake.’ So far, I have atoned for it the only way I know how – by one days at a time and by the next right thing, by actions and attitudes I was trying to take at this time last year, and failing miserably.

I’m being purposefully vague. Moving on.

I tried out blogging “for like, the world,” at this time last year, but the idea didn’t quite work in practice. Lack of discipline was one of the reasons, my inability to decide what the space was for was another. I’d written in Livejournal so long, directed those words at audiences that no longer existed, and now with a space where I could create my own audience, I was at a loss for how and what to write in it.

People talk about how blogging has changed their life, the real honest to goodness friends they have made through blogging, and that’s something I’d like to do too. The internet has been a source of friendships to me for nearly a decade now. But, just like I stumble socially in real life, I immediately come up with a half a dozen reasons why blogging won’t do for me what it has for dozens if not hundreds of other people. I’m too late to the party with nothing interesting to say and trying too hard.

But I have to write right now. My life is boring and stuck right now, and for the umpteenth time there is nothing I can do about it at this particular moment, but it’s not always going to be that way. I have to believe that, even when I look back on last September, when I was saying such similar things, even though a year later I’m still stuck, I have to believe that this year I’m going to find a way to change that.

No spoilers here, but I very much enjoyed the House season premiere. Yes, there were some things, especially in the last 20 minutes, that required a suspension of disbelief/were fixed too easily, but that’s why TV is a guilty pleasure (for me, at least) – I don’t want to analyze it to death. I definitely teared up at the Talent Show part and the music box.  Hugh Laurie was oh so good in this episode.

I would like to pull together some coherent thoughts on a single topic, but after an hour of trying and failing, I am thinking it is just not going to happen. There are about five different things I could babble about and yet I keep starting paragraphs and erasing sentences.

Do you know what I HATE? Overhearing people talk about TV shows and getting really simple plot details confused/wrong. I also hate overhearing people talk about “you know that movie, with that guy, when he’s doing that thing and there’s that other guy…” when the movie they’re trying to figure out is REALLY OBVIOUS.

This should not bother me because a) I rarely see movies. I have not seen most of the “classic” movies of my generation (Dirty Dancing, Back to the Future, Ghostbusters, Star Wars,  Pulp Fiction), and therefore, have no place to judge others for not being able to figure out a movie and b) Ditto for TV shows.

HOWEVER, given that, if the movie is something that even I know, then EVERYONE should know it without having to play the “you know that movie where…” game, because I’m pretty sure that everybody knows that movie with Morgan Freeman, where they’re in prison, in like the 50s, and the other guy, Morgan Freeman’s friend,  Didn’t Do It, and he escapes.

I hope I didn’t spoil Shawshank for anyone. That’s actually my favorite movie ever, even though a) based on the evidence, Andy Duphrane would have never been convicted. Prosecution definitely doesn’t meet burden of proof and b) I actually had someone explain to me a long theory about how Andy Duphrane was actually guilty, and I was just like “No, shut up, Andy Duphrane would never kill his wife, but then it had me thinking and is that the point? Are we really not supposed to know if he’s guilty or not? Because the movie does a pretty obvious job of the “Andy is like, for real innocent” angle. I’ve really only skimmed the short story, so I don’t know if it’s more ambiguous in writing.

I would like to adjust my attitude as of late to be more like Morgan Freeman in the last ten minutes of that movie, where he hopes because “Hope is a good thing. Maybe even the best of things. And no good thing ever dies.”

Given the details that I’m not going to go into exactly WHY House last night was especially touching,  maybe I would do well to remember that thing about hope. Especially given my daily existential crises about the future. But that’s another entry all together. Although not one of the five things I was thinking of when I sat down to write today.

“You can’t buy back time. So stop and love. And sing and live. And laugh until you cry”

Off to New York.