The daily to-do: Wednesday August 24

Today is one of those days where I want everything, I need everything, and the fact that I can never be everything confuses me.

The first time I went out of the house this morning, I smelled the first autumn day of the year. Back-to-school smell. Possibilities. The world is big and I can do anything. It’s only still August, too soon for summer to be over, but the feeling has persisted all day. Early fall. Once fall truly sets in, of course, winter soon follows and everything becomes the exact opposite of possible.

I have always been governed by the seasons. It fits that the book I’m reading right now is so deeply entrenched in them. But I’m feeling this way because of the air outside, not because of the book.

Simultaneously, right now, I feel compelled to be both very productive and very useless. I realized this morning as I walked Cosmo around the yard that my fierce drive to work, to get a job, seems to have left me for now. This is a good thing in a way, since the lack of a job amidst such a drive was causing me a lot of anxiety, but it’s bad because I need that drive; I do need a job; and I need to actually get to work on the various commitments I made to people. I feel like sitting at my computer and gaming mindlessly: minecraft, or cities: skylines, and even, for the first time in a long time, lotro. I feel like mowing the lawn and pulling weeds. I feel like lying outside on a blanket and reading my book. I feel like cooking, too; my mind keeps imagining all these recipes and I want to shape them into reality, much like I made that delicious shepherd’s pie yesterday.

What I don’t feel like doing are the things I really should be doing: that volunteer website work; going to the feed store; walking the dog and running. I’m having second thoughts about camping, too. It’s not that I don’t want to go camping, ’cause I really do! It’s just that the timing doesn’t feel right. Trying to make sense of where we are in place and time, having been traipsing around the country and having major work done on our home and becoming increasingly buried under work (that one’s mostly Bear), I (we) can’t seem to find myself in the right “place” from which to start a camping trip. We are just not mentally there. Maybe such an escape is what we need, but I’m thinking what would be better than anything is just a few days off, together, at home. Of course, in most cases when we are granted that, we never figure out how to make the most of it. We should just go camping, as planned. I’ll just keep going through the planning motions, and soon enough we’ll find ourselves on a mountain with no electricity and nothing much to do but hike and read and prepare food, and it will be great. Of course, if I do get my period in the days between now and then (or if I get strong signs that my period will start while we’re camping), I’m pulling the e-brake. Because no.

Anyway, all this stuff, it’s not so bad. It’s not so hard. It’s in my head. I never did walk Cosmo for real yesterday, but I can make it happen today. That and all the other things. The electrical inspector is coming today – between noon and 12. That gives me license to laze a little longer, perhaps.