bout of restlessness

I like my life. I like my boyfriend, my cat, having a crazy dog who loves me, writing every day, talking about writing every day, working from home, the people in my family of in-laws who treat me like family, the people in my family who love me very much. My talented friends, my excellent apartment, thrift stores just blocks from me, a coffee shop downstairs. To-do lists that get done. Despite my general fear that I am going to end up homeless or hospitalized and then thrown in debtor’s prison, errands are being run and life is being taken care of, running more or less smoothly and generally on course, pleasantly and in a fine, upstanding way. And yet lately, I still want to sell everything and go live in a van in Mexico.

In Mexico, there is no snow.

I have discovered the most amazing thing of all about living in the future, and it is that you can call up the nostalgic, rosy past whenever you like, with a click of your fingers and a credit card number. Did you know that onto the Nintendo Wii you can download the classics of your gaming childhood? Did you know that if you had a Wii , and a wireless connection and six bucks, you could be playing the original Legend of Zelda? This is among the most beautiful things that I can think of, and it makes me happier than happy. It makes me the happiest, in fact.

My baby brother and I spent a ridiculous number of hours in the basement with our Nintendo and our enormous collection of games, flailing our arms and yelling at the screen and mashing buttons and throwing our controllers and stomping around and hunching forward filled with grim determination and saying things like YOU CAN DO IT GO GO GO GO YAY YOU WIN YOU ARE SO GREAT!

On Saturday there was a Chinese new year party at a friend’s parent’s house, and it was delightful, as their parties always are, and filled with excellent people who I want to talk to and good food and a lot of booze and I was very excited to go, because people! Conversation! Dressing up and wearing lipstick and socializing! It was all so exciting. I was careful all day, with my eating, because I did not want to embarrass myself with socially embarrassing gas or by getting sick. I wore red for luck, mascara and lipstick and it was all very exciting. E drove so that I could have a couple of glasses of wine.

The house was packed full of people, mostly around the food. I poured myself a glass of white wine, and hugged people and laughed and kissed and fed cheese to the pug and exclaimed and laughed and then had to excuse myself because I had started to feel hot, jangly-headed, flushed and nauseous.

They don’t tell you, in freelancing school, how great the potential for enormous amounts of guilt is, coming at you from all directions and every angle, pew pew pew. Maybe that’s because there is actually no Freelancing School. If there were, there ought be a class called Warmth vs. Freedom: The Pants/No-Pants Divide. Oh, and Are You Really Going to Eat That, Over the Sink, With Your Hands? Isolation and the Freelancer’s Fragile Dignity and Self-Respect. But mostly, You Will Work Every Hour and Regret the Hours You Don’t Work, and When You Are Waiting For More Work to Come in You Will Panic Because You’re Not Working and the Idea of Sleeping in Just a Little or Even Watching a Movie Fills You with Shame. That might be a little long for a class title, though.

So for the past two weeks or so, I’ve had a handful of rush jobs, for the proofreading people I work for.

Two weekends ago I tore through The Amazing Adventures of Dietgirl–Shauna’s awesome book, based on her awesome blog. I knew it would be funny, and that it would be well-written, thoughtful, catch me off guard sometimes, that it would be moving. That I’d do that embarrassing thing where you snort out loud and choke on your laugh because you are in public and doing a Quiet Activity and because you are not supposed to be giggling to yourself on public transportation, because that’s just weird. And I got caught out without a tissue for the emotional parts and I got upset at the stressful parts because there was no one around to exclaim to about how worried you were about how things were going to turn out (even though you knew how thing turned out, because you had read the blog).

One of my very favorite things in the world is that I have been adopted by a sweet, loving, utterly crazy dog. She is a Neapolitan mastiff who belongs to my sweetheart’s brother, A. A is never home–he has work, school, a new girlfriend–and she was terribly lonely, and I took over feeding her and giving her a treat every night and in that way, I won her heart. When I come into the house, she is so excited to see me that her entire back end wags and her tiny little tail goes whap whap whap whap . She rubs up against me and weaves around my legs and between my knees like she is a cat, except she’s almost as tall as my waist and weighs a hundred pounds, so it works out rather less well than it does for a cat.

She is neurotic, anxious, and insecure.

There is nothing in the world weirder than revisiting your past in great and glorious Technicolor surround-sound. I am working on a project about my weight loss surgery, about what came before and what came after, and I am spending a lot of time sitting down and looking through things I want to call relics–my old blog, my body of work posts on elastic waist, the countess emails I wrote when I was thinking about it.

Pictures, lists of measurements, a Word document I found on my computer that listed all the ways my life would change and all the things I would do that spoke more of the great bone-deep unhappiness I was filled up with than any determination or hope or ambition.

I was such a different person, two hundred pounds ago, three years ago. I am also exactly the same.

I’m writing again. Wait, let me say that with proper emphasis and maybe you will hear the awe and wonder and excitement that surrounds every word in that sentence with a sparkly aura of amazement and glee (and even notice the little shadow behind it that says quietly in a mournful Eeyore voice “but for how long?”): I. Am writing. Again.

I am writing words, that combine into sentences that comprise paragraphs that come together to fill up page after page with prose, that I wrote, that traveled from my head down through my neck and split up at my shoulders and zoomed down through my elbows and came barreling down my forearms and out my fingertips which move like lightning across the keyboard, every day.

Every day, for real. A thousand words, I am aiming for, and a thousand words I usually get, though sometimes less, but also sometimes more than that.