Night Turns Into Day

All of the art in this post is by Natalie Dee

Mornings are tough for the unemployed. Sure, at first you're getting up at a decent hour, showering and getting dressed, making coffee, having a bowl of cereal, checking email and looking for jobs. Then you start staying up later and watching movies until midnight on a Wednesday, so you get up a little later on Thursday. You still make coffee, get that bowl of cereal, look for jobs, writing, what have you, but just a little later. And maybe you save the shower for mid-morning.

You figure out that this could be over any day now. You could get a 9-5 and have to be up when it's still dark out. I mean, like that could happen tomorrow! So you let yourself enjoy a little late night reading and when the bed looks so warm and inviting after taking the dog for a his morning walk, you feel like you should take advantage of this beautiful time and snuggle up with a dog that also looooves sleeping in.

You say to yourself, "don't feel guilty, when you're working this will be a fond memory." You try to push away the realization that while snuggling, you are also anxious, because you really don't have to leave the house today, and that feels weird. 

You start to get a little bummed out when you wake up because there's nowhere to rush off to, so you sleep in more and breakfast starts to look a lot like lunch. I swear, I have had days where I get a bunch of stuff done in the morning and keep going going all day. Writing, doing bills, figuring out how to get medical care,  junk like that. And then I'll have a totally lazy day where I get up late and take a nap! I have so much time now and it feels like I'm either too anxious to enjoy it. Anxiety, by the way, does not make for good writing. My writing has been really sloppy and I've had the hardest time getting down my thoughts on paper the way I see them in my head. I need a reset button. I'd like to reset to the feeling I had when the apartment was finally free of the last box and my hopes were ridiculously high.

What if I start to get really odd from not having regular decent work relationship contact with people? Like how professors get when they go on sabbaticals that involve researching Civil War-era documents in a library in some small town. I remember one professor I knew looked confused when I said hello after a sabbatical. Not because they didn't know me, but because the situation of being talked to while they were thinking and processing was a strain.

What I'm basically saying here is that I'm not doing bad, but I'm not really doing good. I'm doing OK.

On days where I'm just OK, I'm less likely to post. I've hit a strange point, and not only because it is 3am on a Tuesday (or technically Wednesday). Though in retrospect, maybe check-ins with my psyche shouldn't be done at the witching hour. But having nothing new to write about...sucks. Here's hoping things change soon. I mean, it's Dracula Month so I have that going on. But it would be cool for things to start looking up on any of my fronts, Universe. Yeah, I called the Universe out just now, so what?

Ok, rambletron 3000 has been powered down.....

Maybe tomorrow I'll tell you all about my magical adventures in the nation's first library? Where you can almost hear the ghosts of library patron freaks of the distant past....