Slow Lane

Some days I stay in the slow lane on the way to work, just to remind myself that I'm really not in a big hurry. I stand in long lines at the grocery store sometimes too, just to grind in the fact that if my life is measured out in such a way that it can't handle three extra minutes here or there, then I've got a bigger problem than being late.

Cold Feet (the good kind)

My feet are FREEZING today and I LOVE it! It's gray and damp and near pitch black by 7:45. Fall is here! And fall, in California, is quite the nebulous season. It is the physical representation of melancholy (which also happens to be one of my favorite words) -- of "pensive reflection or contemplation," as Webster's dictionary would put it. Unlike the people in Berkeley, the seasons here do not announce themselves with distinction. The leaves don't change, the wind doesn't blow. Rather, they slowly creep in -- a degree here, a cloud there -- until one day, when you realize that summer has slipped out while you were sleeping and you awake with a start to find autumn in your bed instead.

I love fall because it is good change. I have had enough of the unknown, unsure, unplanned, unstable kind. Fall comes to my door like a lover returning from a long, pained separation. It is new yet comforting, exhilarating yet rooted, surprising yet utterly known. It simultaneously fulfills my desires for adventure and stability. It speaks to how we are wired -- CS Lewis writes of the seasons in The Screwtape Letters, as he speaks of the undulating nature God has designed in humans... the seasons fulfill our need for cyclical change, or change that brings its own familiarity. Fall, to me, is as close as I will ever come to returning to the womb. It is grave and serious, making the moments of warmth and light stand out, as there can be no levity without gravity. If the other seasons were a bad Cameron Crowe movie with a dumb ending (and there is only one of those), they would say to fall, "you complete me."

Natalie hates fall. For her it is the tragic end of summer. Then again, we never had the same idea of a good time. Forever, she will exult in the beach and the sun. Her season gives mine a bad rap. I love the gray. The damp. The austere. And I will always root for the seasonal underdog.

On a side note, I think I need to become a vegetarian. More on that later.

Rubber Band Girl

Whew - don't even know where to begin with all the emotional dookie from the summer that has hit the proverbial fan that was switched on two weeks ago when Hannah said she wasn't moving back to Alameda. The fear of having one more place in life where I felt isolated left me in tears minutes before the party that would ring in my 29th year. Andrew's return to LA, Becky's move to Bozeman, and two more fall-through-at-the-last-minute Craigslist job connections left me a bittersweetly self-righteous mix of melancholy and pissed off. And a mind-numbingly boring week at work had me questioning which of my options (gainful employment or lack thereof) was the lesser of evils.

My rubber-band-like personality began to make itself evident. I re-shape easily, and it takes quite a bit of change to stretch me far enough that I actually act on the urge to spring back. In the past, I've sort-of gone sling-shot style: quit jobs, cut ties, left town for a while or for good. I think I need to figure out how to regularly take the pressure off the band so it no longer feels the need to snap, which may be a more viable long-term solution.

Online Psychosis

I am full-on creeped out by Nancy the Online Psychic (see below). She has "guessed" my card five times straight now. I refuse to believe that she is really psychic, in fact, I refuse to believe that anyone named Nancy is really sitting by her computer somewhere waiting for me to try to sneak one past her. Then again, if she's really psychic I guess she doesn't even need the computer to know when I'm trying to expose her scamming ways. Even if she were real, wouldn't she have trouble when everyone logs in at once? I mean, God can handle that kind of multi-tasking but Nancy's just claims to be psychic, not omnipresent. But she's gotten it right every single time and I wanna know WHY and HOW...?

Happy Birthday to Me

It's my birthday today, and somehow I seem to have never gotten over the part where you secretly hope that it will become a national holiday, complete with small-town parades, but without the traffic. Sigh. I think I've cried on my birthday every year that I've lived here, which is not a very national-holiday-like thing to do.

I'm not quite sure why birthdays are so emotional for me (or maybe I know and I'm not very proud of it). 364 days of the year I'm completely fine, and on August 27th I become the Princess and the Pea -- a day full of proverbial mattresses can scarcely mask the infinitesimal pea I've let under my skin. I think it's just that it's really important to me to be remembered. And every year, I manage to be quite skilled at getting hung up when a few people don't, and I wind up dissing the many who do, and who often go humblingly out of their way to do so. But now, on top of being bummed -- which I can usually talk myself out of with a quick reality check -- I wind up feeling like a Horrible Person, which is a harder inner-voice to talk smack to. Somewhere along the way the conflicted feelings and general frustration over the messiness of being human usually work their way out through my eyeballs, while my friends sit by in confusion as I have my annual meltdown minutes before the party begins.

At least I am nothing if not predictable.

I brake for OfficeMax

I'm actually drinking decaf coffee this week, for the first time in 28 years. It' s the stepford wife of the beverage world, all gloss and no soul. I can't decide if I'm just consoling myself for having to give up coffee again, or whether I'm trying to fool my body into squeezing out an extra drop of perkiness before it realizes it's been had. It's true, I never thought I'd hear myself say there's just no substite for a good night's sleep.

Things to do today, for those of you in the home audience:
-Give props to your favorite office supplies, maybe even name them. I am currently addicted to the Bic "Wite-out" device, which lays a thin strip of opaque white tape over my messes, and you don't even have to wait for it to dry, like the original and long-suffering (and probably revolutionary for its time) White-out (TM). My second-favorite thing here(though not an office supply, per se) is the motion detector copy machine, which turns itself on everytime I stick my head out of my cube.

-Start a discussion group. For starters, check out www.newpantagruel.com (I haven't read enough to know what I'll think of it, but I've checked out enough headlines to guess it will be thought-provoking, especially for folks who are mourning the demise of Re:generation Quarterly).

-See if Nancy at Online Psychic can guess your card on the first try: http://www.onlinepsychic.com/main/m_testread_c1.shtml. (fyi, she "guessed" mine... twice!! Spooky.)