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...?