Inside Out

"And so it happened again, the daily miracle whereby interiority opens out and brings to bloom the million-petalled flower of being here, in the world, with other people. Neither as hard as she had thought it might be nor as easy as it appeared." - Zadie Smith On Beauty

Been doing a lot of reading lately, Zadie Smith, Jeanette Winterson, even some extremely depressing short stories about India which I put down after about 10 pages. As you can probably tell, I've got a lot of time to myself at the moment. Read the passage above and I thought it seemed so fitting of my situation right now. As difficult as it may be to imagine, I am naturally a bit shy. (My old co-worker called me a chatterbox...haha...I was just talking to try and cover up the vast expanses of awkward silences in that job...) Don't get me wrong. I really enjoy being social and being with other people. I actually really need and desire it but before I go out to spend time with people I don't know that well, I always get a little nervous and have to make a conscious effort to reach out and make friends. Maybe I just got too comfortable with the ones I already have. It's nice not to have to explain yourself, not to have to earn intimacy and trust, to be able to show up at someone's house and pull off your shoes and sit on the floor and drink a glass of wine in your socks. That said, once I've made the leap and met up with people it is, like most things, not as hard as I anticipated and usually a pretty good time.

Spending this time by myself can be nice. I've caught up on household chores, done a ton of cooking, taken long walks, went to the lovely Botanic Gardens, read all the novels that were piling up on my bedside table... but it also gives me a lot of time to think which isn't always a completely good thing. Quite easy to get wrapped up in yourself, to start thinking alot about your life, the past, the future... This last week has been quiet and mostly calm but right now, I'm really craving some noise... a room full of ladies drinking wine, eating snacks and shooting the shit. I could really use a good, cynical bitching session about someone's day, their crazy boss or mad mother-in-law or that Newbury Street / D4-head Biatch who stole their parking space. Maybe I just need a little humor / humour interjected into my situation. So many things in this life are made bearable by the fact that they can be made really funny. Maybe the problem is really that I need more people to tell my stories to. Or more stories to listen to. I suppose that's the point of the blog eh? But it is a little cyberspace impersonal and there's no laugh track, not yet anyway.

Well better to be in flux, between jobs, between countries, between cultures, between weddings (?!) than to be stuck in a really unsatisfying routine as had been the case for a while. Would be nice to have a little more expendable cash so I could fly me over some entertainment ;) but I guess it's up to me to make it happen.

Yay to Friday which means that there is human contact on the horizon. I'm off to meet Michelle for lunch (a fellow self-(un)employed-person) and later will be meeting up with Helen and Co. for some (what else) drinks and hopefully a bit-a-craic will be had. I need to get my bookworm ass out of this house.

Will give you all the job low-down shortly but that's a whole other blog entry for another day.

Lotsa-love to me faithful readers.
D.