sofa king

So I took two days off from running this weekend, sort of accidentally--I just didn't have time! I went to a friend's impromptu birthday party, which was full of margaritas and whiffle ball(excellent combination, by the way, though it did end with getting the whiffle ball somehow stuck in a tree), and then the next day got talked into going to my sister's best friend from college's baby shower(no margaritas but there was that punch with the sherbet floating in it? and a tour of their new house, which was mega super cool--a really well kept 1880s farm house they've inherited). All of this would have been no problem if these people were not spread out over several hours of driving in different directions. But it was fun anyway! In between (on the way down to my friend's birthday party, and then on the way up to my sister's friend's baby shower) I picked up the last few things that I needed for my trip, so that now I should be all set (well, I still need new running shoes) to just pack and go on Wednesday.
The upshot of this was that yesterday's seven miler felt amazing. It was like my body was having a sort of revelation, saying "damn! I missed this!" and feeling really well rested --the end of last week I definitely felt like I was proceeding more slowly than usual, but I felt speedy as they come yesterday! Downside is I've sort of broken my streak, and I have this wish to keep my mileage above 20 for the week, which translates into a couple of long "insurance" runs before I leave--I have a tendency to run short (and slow) when I don't know an area well. I like to look at houses.
Financially, the next couple of weeks are going to be a bit of a stretch. I've been keeping the spending pretty tightly in check, most weeks getting by without spending too much more than $100 (pretty much gas+ food) and this week is going to be different, to say the least. I've got a "fun fund" to tap into for this, but you know how it goes--you have some money sitting in a fund and it becomes a sort of comforting cushion--I've been looking at that $500 as my sort of "pre-emergency emergency fund" and now I am really hesitant about spending it. This is of course ridiculous and entirely a psychological problem of my own, but that doesn't make it easier to get around.

what if the mice get to it first?

This sums it up perfectly:

LIFE HAS NO PURPOSE, COMMUNICATION IS IMPOSSIBLE, THE EXISTENCE OF MAN IS ABSURD

Man, why can’t I get words like that? That’s exactly it; what I’ve been feeling in the back of my head for days now, but my attempts at expressing it are so much more amorphous, when I really just needed to come out and say that, and then it would all make sense.

I went to a memorial service on Saturday and it was really good, in that way that something sad and terrible can still be good, because it is about a whole lot of people getting together and remembering and loving someone (even if it is, okay, a whole lot too late for that person to get much out of it, it is nice to know that people care) and I enjoy the community feeling and the commiseration that make you feel like you are part of this group instead of all alone (as we all are, inevitably, at death). Of course it did make me ponder the point of continuing to live at all because (as stated so clearly above): LIFE HAS NO PURPOSE, COMMUNICATION IS IMPOSSIBLE, THE EXISTENCE OF MAN IS ABSURD. Yeah. Good times.

I don’t know how many people would come to my memorial service, if there was one. I know my mother pretty much planned one once (I was in a bad accident, and on the way to the hospital apparently my folks had the necessary talk about the necessary arrangements, but she still won’t tell me the details). Which is nice to know, I guess. At least there is a plan.

A plan generally makes things better I think. I get more done with planning and deadlines. I enjoy a certain amount of structure. If it were not, for instance, for the need to get up and go to work on weekdays, I would most likely have spent today laying in bed listening to Nirvana. Usually my laying-in-bed-questioning-the-futility-of-living music of choice is Tool, but something in me really wants to hear In utero back to back to back for a period of eight or nine hours.

But I don’t have a choice in the matter (or at least I tell myself there is no choice in the matter) I need to get up and go go go like an animated doll: get in the car, drive ever so slowly through snow and slush to work, and sit and type-type-type and think-think-think and make little to-do lists of the things I want done by the end of the week. My lists are always a little mixed up: I have a tendency to run together all the things I want done in work and out of work in one non-prioritized list:

• Make new book display,
• eat fruit for breakfast,
• finish CSE citation guidelines page,
• get to the gym at least three times,
• do some actual collection development and get the slush pile off my computer desk,
• make Christmas cards,
• lose five pounds or grow five inches, your choice.
• Write something you might enjoy reading sometime in the future

And honestly this probably does not fulfill that last one, I am just a rambler and do not really merit re-reading truth be told.

slack attack

Okay so I totally slacked off this weekend on the writing side of things: I lounged on Saturday--well, I did the bare minimum necessary to keep up; the usual round of bank-post office-bookstore (okay so usually that’s grocery store, but I had paperbacks to get rid of and there was a Nor’easter going on so I needed new reading material). And then I made a bunch of stuff out of apples (I had a shopping bag full of apples in the basement that was about to be unusable, so I made applesauce and apple dumplings and finished them off).

I did a fair amount of laying around feeling sorry for myself, which isn’t really a good thing. I had a ticket to go to an event at the Expo--a sort of showcase of locally brewed beers that had sounded good at one point, and at the last minute (Saturday afternoon, for an event that was Saturday night) I decided I really didn’t feel like going and looked on Craigslist to see if I could get rid of it--and I did manage to make a little profit above getting my money back, which was something anyway.

Obviously I need a specific time dedicated to this little practice if I want it to continue, but I am (as always) having trouble setting aside the time or finding the time to set aside or whatever else I can blame it on.

And now I am kind of “eh” on it, because I haven’t done anything in two days--so why start now, right?

Heh. Yeah, I’m in trouble.

There has got to be something I can do to get this under control, right? It doesn’t seem like anything is totally under my control lately: my boyfriend is leaving me (breaking up with me) to go be Mr. Adventure because a) it “doesn’t seem fair” to him for me to wait around and b) he is not sure he will still want to be with me when he gets back. And its horrible, terrible awful because I loved him before but now I am all hyped on his unavailability on top of everything else and so angry that he is doing this to me: that he can’t see any other future for us than breaking up, that he can’t love me enough to try and make a long distance relationship work for the time he is gone when I am having trouble figuring out what a future without him is going to look like. I feel helpless and tragic and hate it. But I can’t seem to hate him, which is a bad thing. Since he is in the process of getting ready to leave me--cut me out of his life, replace me with something and someone new and all that jazz. Bastard.

And somehow I keep trying to find the funny--find some other stuff to hold my attention and help me deal and instead I keep coming back to this: I can’t understand why he doesn’t love me. What is wrong with me? It’s a horrible place to be and I can’t seem to get out of it.