when will the snow go away

If it weren't a breach of lawyer confidentiality law I'd start recording conversations I have with my boss. Not because they're particularly hilarious, just odd and funny to me.

"I'm gonna run off into the treacherous snow, Steve. I'll be here tomorrow."
"Well tomorrow is, as Scarlett O'Hara said, another day... another day in which there is four days' worth of work to do. But we persevere."
"At least the city isn't on fire."
"Indeed. And if it were, we could throw snowballs at it."

It is definitely time for me to find a new job. God, change.
____________________________

Last night I dreamed I had to babysit my friend's baby, except in the dream it was this bald newborn infant. It was all floppy and I tried so hard to take care of it but kept accidentally knocking its head against things and slamming its fingers in doors and hurting it while carrying it around. It didn't cry or anything, but I could tell it was disappointed with me. Then I remembered that babies need to have their diapers changed, which I'd forgotten to do. The baby's clothing began to fill up with liquid shit, which oozed out the neck hole while I tried to find a clean place to change it.

This is much like the dream of bizarre responsibility I had a couple nights ago, where I had to get married, to a guy I knew in 6th grade but haven't seen since. It was an "arranged marriage" where the guy had to get married to inherit his father's business in Beatrice or something, and I agreed to for some reason. Throughout the dream I was trying to get ready for this wedding I was not at all excited for; it felt like some duty I agreed to commit to in apathetic martyrdom, because it was something to do. With a half hour to go before the wedding, I realized it was inappropriate to wear a short black dress.

Do not try to marry me or leave me near your children.

It's the last day of 2009, that's weird.

days coming

I was up half the night worrying. My mom always used to say that, "I was up half the night worrying," and I wonder if this is what it felt like, heart beating so fast you can feel it thud deep into the bedsprings. I'd ask her what she was worrying about, and she'd say "You know, you guys and... everything."

I started falling asleep again after my alarm had gone off a couple times. I had what can only be described as a lucid dream; it started with me sky-diving without a parachute and landing softly on dry hard earth like the scrub of an elementary playground.

Then there was a bird in the tangled roots of a tree, with the head of a cardinal but a bright blue body like a jay. My non-dreaming self was suddenly very aware that this bird was a dream, which was an amusing and hard-to-describe sensation. The bird was now a lark, blue and tan and freckled. Non-dream me reached forward in the dream, slurring out forced non-dream words: "Hoowwww arrrrrrreeee youuuuuu birrrrrd?" Then I woke fully.

bluster

I keep trying to graft some kind of "oh what a special day" feelings onto today but it's not working. The most special holiday feeling I am having right now is smelling the bacon my downstairs neighbor is cooking, and knowing that I have thick-sliced bacon in the fridge. I feel the same way when I walk into my building after a long day and the same neighbor has made the hallway smell like a sweetly acrid pine tree. I like this neighbor; he has a cough and I hope he feels better soon.

None of this lack of xmas joy is meant to imply negativity. N(eg)ativity. I am potentially having the best X-mas of my adult life thanks to no familial responsibilities. Thanks to being able to sit around all day and feel my bicycle-legs atrophy some more, and not having to talk to anyone I don't wish to. Thanks to the bacon in the fridge, the rendered fat of which will make my leeks and onions tender for soup. I am going to make coffee soon; god, this pleases me. The snow feels isolating and right; I am feeling decadent in my warm and wind-blown tower. The everything of things still looms but for the past few days I've tripped the breaker back to a baseline of calm, thank you body, thank you mind, I needed.

dec-

For all the presumptions I make about the episodic nature of identity and events, I never presumed my life could feel so neatly divided into decades: the pastoral late '80s bled into the '90s, which tasted humid, like candy and sweat. At the turn of the millennium things grew sharper and more brittle, I plated myself with chrysalis-armor and withdrew though it cracked still.

I am making generalizations; they are inappropriate. What I mean to say is now I find myself at a cusp, in the same positions, but different, and in different positions, but the same. This body feels tough and unfulfilled. There isn't a child here anymore, though; there cannot be. When there is not a girl or a woman or a mother or a lover, can I cease for a moment.

I need to find a way to de-justify my various internal karmic jihads. That is to say, I am aware that only pain is invited when I go about in a state of deserving, even with concurrent awareness of the eternally troubling imbalance of everything.

What does one do with oneself.

What does one do with oneself. When youth feels like winter. Is this a consequence of having already lived though the greatest fear; life becomes an anticipation of pain, regeneration is slow and the story loses elements each time you tell it, becoming fanciful, this is being passive, perhaps. Aggression, too, does no favors.

I am growing less indignant with all of this, you know, just working it through.

well

(pukes on floor)

i graduated!

ugh god

I am just... I'm sorry, I'll be okay in a minute, this shit's really throwing me around.

Everything is cool.

hello again

the process is becoming more rapid-fire

soon it will be streamlined

and the voice in my head that never really goes away, i will come to regard it more fondly, and it will comfort instead of taunt me, it will keep saying "stupid whore, stupid whore, stupid whore, stupid whore, stupid whore, stupid whore, stupid whore, stupid whore, stupid whore, stupid whore, stupid whore, stupid whore, stupid whore, stupid whore, stupid whore, stupid whore" and i will be, i will be