There are six or seven things I’ve been thinking about lately and meaning to write about here (Pride and Prejudice, my heterosexual life partners, the end of crappy ol’ 2009, how my hair lady gave me this weird winged mullet with which I am having a hard time coming to terms) but there’s no time, there’s no time to get it all down. I’ve been out every night for the past two weeks, it feels—between yoga and theatre and drinks and dinners and hot chocolates and more hot chocolates I can barely get it together to get on the bus in the mornings and fill up my hot water bottles at night. I never write any more and I want to write more but I don’t and I know if I leave it for longer it will be two weeks instead of one, and I can’t believe there was a time in my life that I wrote this here blog thing multiple times per week, like I had a lot to say and I would think about writing all the time and I would put it right out there where the internet could see it, but those were the early 2000s, kids, and now we’re in the late 2000s, so I better just give you a quick update, if you care, and I know that there are many more interesting things to read about than, like, my busy schedule, but if I switch out Monday yoga for Tuesday yoga I may be able to share my very important and interesting thoughts about the implications of timing vis-à-vis love and commitment in Jane Austen this coming week okay?
Things are going pretty well for me, I’m happy to report: I am switching offices this week so I can work in town instead of in the burbs, thereby exponentially increasing my commute-related quality of life. I have lovely plans for both Christmas and New Year’s, there have been a couple of lovely sunny days lately, and this afternoon I just went to my first bellydance class since April and was able to remember like at least three moves. I walked into town today over the hill and via Oriental Parade and got a lot of vegetables and two punnets of strawberries at the increasingly awesome Sunday market, and last night I celebrated American Thanksgiving a couple of days late with a traditional meal of gumbo and key lime pie. I’ve been reading a lot of good books, lately, and having a lot of good conversations. There are a lot of parties on the horizon and I have a very good dress to wear to at least one of them. My hair continues to be a challenge, it’s true, but I have at least two referrals to new hairpersons so I am hopeful that by 2010 I will have not only a flying car but also a new relationship with someone who really understands curls. In a couple of weeks I will be putting on a wetsuit for the first time in over a year and diving the Cathedral Cove Marine Reserve, for which I am fairly champing at the bit.
So things are good, and things are fine. I don’t have anything to complain about, not remotely. I am glad for that. I am grateful for that, and for everyone and everything in my life that contributes to that very agreeable state of affairs. Yay for everything, you know?
Thrumming underneath the quick everyday joys, barely perceptible, is the restlessness that won’t leave me alone, the constant shiver of the increasingly opaque future. It’s been almost a year back in Wellington, almost a year since the culmination of that heart’s desire, and I still, still, still don’t know if I did the right thing. I don’t know what I would have done otherwise, though, if I hadn’t come back here. I like to tell people here that I’m an economic migrant because usually people with my skin color and my passport aren’t conceptualized as such, but it’s literally true: I couldn’t find work in the States when I came back. I accepted the first job offer I got after three months of looking, and it happened to be in this hemisphere. Plan A didn’t work out; I am lucky that Plan B did because I did not (and do not) have a Plan C. I don’t know what I would have done, and I don’t know what I’ll do next, and that’s the part I can’t stop thinking about.
So that’s me, trying to stop and let go and calm down, trying to dissolve myself into the every day—parties, friends, work, books and movies and plays, hot chocolates, conversations—trying to let the noise wash through and pass on. Sometimes it works.