Dear Keithers,

Do you remember, back in the Summer of 2008, (08.08.08, to be exact) we were bemoaning our respective fates, and I, in one of my bouts of optimism said “Yeah, but by 09.09.09? Things are gonna be different.”

Since then, I feel we’ve had a bizarre bond. We had our Year of the Terrapin (a creature who lives in less than salubrious conditions) and while things did not exactly get better, there were some notable improvements. (I got my DUI, but then I got sober. You started Georgetown and made friends) 09.09.09 arrived, and then the official New Year, and we spoke of a shared apartment, on the outskirts of some city, hanging out watching Degrassi, with our cats.

2010 was Year of the Crocodile (because The crocodile survived ice ages & meteors, & he probably was like, the bronze age will be so much better, or the pleistocene will be my time to shine, & then it sucked! But you know what he did? he ate a wildebeest, wrote a sad poem in his journal, & kept on trucking, because thats what survivors do).

Things had brought us down, but Fuck That Noise.

I desperately hunted for jobs. You battled girl drama. We commiserated on gchat.

I remember when The-Job-That-Wasn’t-2.0 was up for review, we were impatiently waiting for an answer, because it would make your decision; would you look for a studio or a 2 bedroom?

I got the call at the zero hour.

The night we moved into that hellmouth in Glover Park, we sat on the floor in the living room, eating take-out, laughing in disbelief that we were finally Here, and you said “I think we’ll always remember this night.” Maybe because it was one of the few happy nights in that apartment.

We agree that nothing good happened between those walls.

(However, I still miss you, roomie)

11.11.11 approaches my friend. We’re both unemployed, we’re both trying so hard to get back on our feet and get back together. We’ve only got one more year of this. One more chance. What do you say? Want to make 2012 the year of the Panther? At this point, we have nothing to lose.

Love, your favorite roommate,

Rachel

I like Thanksgiving time, because it has generally good memories surrounding it. And also, good Thanksgiving episodes of TV – including an episode of House. I did not think it was possible for me to love Hugh-Laurie-as-House more than I already do, and yet he continues to impress.

I started a post last night about how I really didn’t want to go back to work and how I was having this Pavlonian-esque response to Labor Day. My stomach was in knots and I was filled with just this dread that one feels the night before school starts. And I liked school, for the most part!

But anyway, I didn’t finish it, because whining is unattractive and to save myself from future cringing and deleting, I stopped writing. Also, laziness.

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Dear 2007,

I’m so glad you’re over.

No love,

Rachel

Actually, it should surprise actually no one that work is slow. Many companies have this week off. Nothing happens in the business world this week.

Unless, of course, you work for an Israeli-affiliated non-profit.

The end of the year puts me in even more of a reflective mood than usual (who? Me? Never!) Last week, I was thinking how indifferent I was to Christmas, and how I kind of miss liking the season. I don’t mean in the little kid excitement way, I mean in the genuinely good, warm feelings that followed me around during Christmas when I was a teenager. I don’t know why. (Quote Marianne’s ‘carolgram’ to me in 11th grade: “You can’t say no to love.”)

It wound up being a nice Christmas. I ran into Jon on the train back to Jersey on Saturday. My brother gave him a ride home and Jon called me into the house for a minute. Being inside his house brings back far too many memories. Anyway, he got me a Christmas gift (?) and was telling me the whole ride over not to be excited, because it was really small and dumb. He got me “Cheaters” on DVD, which of course caused me to throw my arms around him and shriek “Oh my god, I love it! It’s perfect!” about 30 times.

Sunday, the sibling and I started and finished our shopping in record time, because we are awesome like that. Monday was pseudo-intellectual-Neo-Victorian coffee with the sibling and then Christmas Eve with my aunt’s house, aka the side of the family that I can actually stand. Tuesday morning, I did gift exchange with the family and then my brother drove me back to Astoria.

It was a boring weekend, mostly, with enough restlessness to cause my mind to wander a lot, but it could have been worse. Tuesday night, I did some rearranging of furniture (I still have tons of unpacking and cleaning to do) ordered Indian food and, because my roommate was still gone, listened to my Carrie Underwood CD at top volume.

It actually is depressing to me this year to write this entry. In 2004, I was “infinitely happier” than I’d been at the end of 2003. In 2005, I’m not sure what the hell I was doing, but I wasn’t as ickily self-aware. In 2006, sure I hadn’t been happy at UChicago, but I was managing well at that point with my little study group, and I had to grant it to 2006 for containing the best months and most wonderful people I could ever imagine. 2006 was a banner year.

This year, I feel as if I’ve done nothing. Now I’m sure you could come back and say “Listen missy, you got your Masters Degree. You got an enviable job with amazing benefits. You moved back to Astoria, just like you wanted to, to a great apartment and a great roommate, what the hell are you complaining about?”

All of this is true, but I feel as if I’ve done nothing. I haven’t grown, or changed, or learned anything.

But I am nothing if not a traditionalist, and so…

November 13 will be over in 10 minutes and then I am determined to start Day One, Year One, because I am into calendars, countdowns, and the like. And I will. But I’m still allowing myself the cry over the stupid over dramatic SVU pregnancy plot and how freaking appropriate is that? I can’t watch this show until this plotline is over. I am silly.

So as I have said before. Life is funny. The-Ex has disappeared out of my life as quickly as he had embedded and then reembedded in every part. I don’t really miss him or anything, and I’m quite sure in as short as a year from now he’ll be even less tied up in memory recall. And I don’t think it could have happened any other way. And even if it could have, it doesn’t matter because this is the way it happened, and we do not speak, and we will not, and it is not out of hate, but just indifference, and I’m still not sure how to take that.

I want to post this before its midnight and I don’t know what else to say, and so hehe, “and so it goes.”

I’ve traditionally called March-April “this time of year,” and in doing so may have missed the fact that it’s actually October that finds me in a funk. I don’t know if “Seasonal depression” is an accurate description, (or if there is a danger of seasonal depression becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy.) but man, what the fuck, self? Have you not you usually spend October all cranky and on edge and meh for usually no good reason?

Sure there’s been a lot of good in my life lately, enough to cause lots of moments of giddiness and self-affirmation bullshit.

But finding myself wanting to crawl out of my own skin for the fourth morning in a row, and remembering I felt this way last October, and the October before that. And hm. Because I’m self-absorbed, I’m reading over the Octobers, in my archive, and I found this  written one year ago today.

It’s incredibly frustrating to me to just not feel like doing anything. I’m back in Astoria, back where I belong, have a great job, great apartment, etc, etc and all I want to do is curl up and watch Saved! For the millionth time.

I want to force myself to be social to see if I snap out of this. but on the other hand, the absolute last thing I want to do is be social after work. I think about the little things I have to go home and do like clean up and pick up all the change on my floor and thinking about how I have to do little things like that makes me squirm and want to scream.

This is also frustrating, because NaNo is coming up, and I really want to participate full-on this year, and actually go to the meet-ups and write-ins. I want to write the story that’s been following me around for so many years, even though it may be ridden with cliches and horribly maudlin. Basically, I want to tell the story of not wanting to get out of bed in the morning, and what happens when you get out of bed. But it would help me out a lot if lately, I wanted to get out of bed in the morning. Not that I’m horribly depressed or anything, because I’m not. I don’t know what I am.

So maybe it’s time to do what I did after I wrote that entry. Get back into therapy. I have good health insurance starting November 1st. And past experiences with therapy prove that I am indeed one of those schmucks for whom therapy works. Part of me hates that I “need” therapy to stay at an even keel, but…if it helps, I’m going to do it. I like myself too damn much when I’m happy, and healthy, and productive, and peaceful to deny it to myself just because I’m a little hung up on the stigma of therapy.

The $12 a week a pay for it is way cheaper than alcohol as self-medication. That G-d for my amazing benefits package

I wrote a long entry on all the things I missed about New York, specifically about this summer there yesterday, but then deleted it, because I was being unneccesarily maudlin. I realized that “this-time-of-year” is quickly approaching. I don’t know how I feel about that; I don’t see any ‘other shoes’ that are in danger of dropping, but one never knows.

I’m in the middle of writing final papers. I have a lot of words down on the page, but still need to do a lot of editing. In my Machiavelli paper, I think I quote Schmitt and Agamben almost as much as Machiavelli. My liberalism paper is kind of silly, but again, words are on the page, its just a matter of ordering them. I talk about sex a lot. And I’m meeting my goal of turning in 15-20 pages of my thesis next week, because I will graduate in June if it kills me.

As I very crudely put it “An MA in less than nine months, this is way more productive than getting knocked up.”

Dear April 30-May 1,
You rock my world.
Love,
Rachel