Dulce locura

I like to complain -- today especially I have really liked complaining about the fact that I didn't start my English midterm paper until the night before it was due, when I was already burnt out by an editing assignment I also completed for tomorrow. But I forget that I really like staying up late. My room gets this wonderful vibe late at night, i've got a soft yellow light wrapped around my shoulders, Spanish music on a little too loud, a candle burning, and the waves intermittently crashing outside during pauses in the music. I'm fairly interested in my topic, excited about how my intro turned out, and just awake enough to finish the other half of it tonight.

numb

I feel paralyzed.

So paralyzed I can't motivate myself to eat my leftovers from lunch for dinner or indeed articulate the point I actually wanted to make with this post.

I am paralyzed firstly because my weekend visitor left and now I don't know what to do with myself. Sit on my stripped bed and procrastinate a writing assignment that's due tomorrow and an article to edit. I will get back into my routine, I guess. But after such a lovely break my day-to-day crazy doesn't sound at all appealing.

But tomorrow, once I have forgotten the wonders of the weekend and how nice it is to be around someone who cares, I will still be paralyzed. It's just this feeling i've been getting lately about my wide-open future. I have a mountain of interests, possibilities, prospects, experience, skills--thank you, college. But what i'd like to have is a path. A plan. A rule. Something that will tell me where to go and what to do and how to do it. I feel like if I don't do something different and exciting now (aka, work at Yellowstone) then I will never get to do it, because i'll be trapped in the professional world for all eternity. But I don't want to do something different and exciting now because i'm so tired of thinking about this fork that I just want to make my decision already and get started on my life in a city that is not located in Southern California.

Okay, so get a job. But I have been rejected so many times that whenever I tailor my cover letter, resume, and clips to fit yet another position, I am doubtful that I will ever actually hear anything. I think of my job application materials like the plague, yet I know there's nothing wrong with them. Okay, then find a city. In that department i'm having trouble with my priorities. Yes, a job will help me attain happiness and the financial ability to live in another city, but the friends that live in these places will ultimately decide how content I actually am. I can make friends, true. I will make friends, but how many of these important people in my life will I be able to live without? Move first, job later? But what if I choose wrong?

I am paralyzed.

I have two months.

think more?

I've gotten into the awful, insincere habit of always saying "Good, how are you?" when someone asks me how I am. It's my automatic answer, and it's so hurried that no one could really believe i'm paying attention when I say it, but I say it anyway.

So someone at work, one of my bosses' bosses--part of the design team, he was wearing a vertically striped button-down shirt in lime green, pink, and blue when I first met him--stuck his head over my cubicle wall and said "Hi, how are you?" And because I had just gotten to work--late--and because I had just sat down at my computer and was trying to take the advice of my calming tea, I answered "Good, how are you?" And he said cheerily, "Simply great." And though he asked me a couple of other questions after that, I was so taken aback by his clean and confident answer that I just stumbled through the rest of the conversation, convinced that I should change my rule. Or think more.