Tuesday

A few nights ago a friend from home called to catch up. She’d just come back from a three week trip in Southeast Asia and was met with news of not one but two engagements of her closest friends. In a week she would travel again to Canada to cheer her husband on in his Ironman, and after that, enjoy the three weeks left of summer vacation, courtesy of her Master’s program, to which, summer plans all said and done, she was looking forward to returning. 

“I felt like I did most of the talking,” she said, when we readied to hang up.

“You did,” I said, though not meanly, “But honestly there’s just not much to report around here.”

I mentioned an upcoming weekend trip to Toronto with friends and the strange but creeping thoughts of leaving New York, but around my words there hovered a feeling of stillness. Of unsettled settledness. Does that even make sense? I don’t know.

That’s kind of how it’s been. There’s a lot going on in the lives around me – pregnant friends, moving friends, dating friends, engaged-and-wedding-planning friends, working friends who are getting promoted or calling it quits. Lots of onward and upward type stuff. And even now finally gainfully employed I somehow feel stuck in the mud of New Business (not exactly administrative but not exactly not), despite the obvious hustle and bustle around me.

Meetings. People really love meetings. Though I guess I’m lucky that people don’t tend to invite me to meetings, and if they do, they seem to wonder at the end why they invited me. I wonder too. Mostly though, when the people sitting around me are tucked away into conference rooms, I’m left with some time here and there to read the paper or catch up on my favorite blogs, but more often than not I toggle back and forth between windows in the name of “looking busy,” and wonder how depending on the day and how I’ve slept, the grass is very green or very brown on either side.

It’s not that I don’t like my job. I do, but even the head of the company herself, who recently announced her departure at the end of the month has said, “It’s still a job.”

Physically I am kept busy as well – visitors, dinners, friends – but in my brain there seems to be some kind of traffic jam between what I know I should be doing before and after work and on the weekends (write), and what I want to and inevitably end up doing (Watching TV. Specifically, Inspector Morse).

But tonight, while I didn’t feel something bottled up and waiting to come out, I thought about the blog I kept in high school. Filled with like, anything and everything. I’d come home, finish homework, dinner, piano, and Chinese, turn the computer on and chat on AIM with friends for at least another hour or so before opening up Xanga and just writing about whatever I felt like.

None of this anxious silence I afflict myself with these days.

They say women in their 30’s are more confident than women in their 20’s and their teens. Yeah, maybe. But I distinctly remember a time when I felt that the blog was, despite the small scope of what I wrote about (school, movies, books, the twenty or so people I called friends and family) proof of a skill I didn’t could be called a skill. But that’s what it was. That’s what it is. Right…?

Anyway. Not sure what this was all about.