Something To Cry About

OK, so there are worse things than catching up on some leisure reading on a Saturday night with a glass of Oban scotch next to you and Jeff Buckley's album Grace playing in the background. But these brief periods of respite (yeah, I know the rest of the world calls it weekends, Mr. Fancy Pants) just remind me that I really don't like my life.

I was trying to think of some profound imagery. At first I was thinking nautical -- that my work week is a grey monotonous ocean, and spending the weekend with my friends are the sparse green isles few and far between. But I'm not a sailor and my family is prone to motion sickness. And although the ocean imagery is apt in the "look all around you and all you see is the same - but instead of water it's work" sense, it doesn't convey the sense of claustrophobia that I feel. At least you can move around on the ocean.

Maybe a trapped in the closet image is more accurate, but it's also more pedestrian and fuck that noise about being all cliche. Anyway, adding to that claustrophobia is that 1) I'm still deeply, truly, madly in like with a certain someone, and 2) that certain someone has been in the same SmallLaw office for over 15 years. That latter part bugs me because I can't see myself being a lawyer for the next year much less for the next 15 years. I don't want to have fallen for a woman who mistakes complacency for stability. And yet, yet my stupid brain won't let her go. Having a weirdo double date not really a double date thing about two weeks ago doesn't help either.

Anyway, I was truly relaxed today. Part of it was the eighty-plus temperature here in Lalaland, which made it feel like July. But like some cheapo (but less verbose) version of Proust, weather sent me in a tizzy of memories. As the sun set and the air cooled, I thought of summer nights back in Ellicott City, Maryland after a long day of riding bikes and coming home to air-conditioned goodness. I'd read a book, maybe bug my sister or watch TV in the upstairs guestroom. I thought of humid spring nights in Durham, North Carolina, having some beer on the quad while finals approached. I thought of August nights on my patio on Silicon Valley just a year ago, trying to finish up my five pages per day while finishing off my third diet coke, the can slick with condensation. All this felt more real than my current job. And I thought if I left SmallLaw, left a Certain Someone, it would be as if I was never there, and I could be back writing full time again.