if that's all there is, my friends, then let's keep dancing

i am feeling a bit like peggy lee in the later years of her life. a little fat, a little bloated, way too comfortable in clothes with no waist, and inclined to ask "is that all there is?"

maybe it's the inevitable letdown from having lived off of adrenaline for the past two years. there was always some crisis ready to rear its ugly head, whether it was illness or death in the family, a monstrous cash shortage, or impending academic deadlines. i hated it all and i kept telling myself to keep slugging it out, to just hang in there, and it would be over eventually. and now it is over, and how do i feel? bored and lazy, that's how.

you know how good it feels to have a productive day? when everyone you call is there on the end of the line and you can put a satisfying "tick" next to yet another item on the mental "to-do" list? sometimes i have those days. but more often then not, i'll take the crazy jack-pug out and then collapse on the couch to do some reading. and readings all well and good, but not if you fall asleep until four in the afternoon.

sadly, days at work aren't much better. it's so still and quiet here, in this cubicle within a room with no windows (if such a thing as a blip in space time exists, it'd be in a contemporary office building). i have enough to keep me busy but every task is made up of thousands of other little tasks that never seem to go anywhere, like a recipe with thirty ingredients and forty steps that winds up as scrambled eggs anyway. i lack fire under my ass.

so i've adopted the one-thing-at-a-time philosophy. i'm employed and i'm going to pay my bills. i'm going to finish organizing my apartment. i'm going to focus on my health and look for a job that challenges and excites me. i'm going to go to europe next summer and i'm going to publish my last MA essay and i'm going to keep on dancing, because there are few things so terrible that we can't find a way to live through it. the fire, she is a leetle smoulder now. but the lighter fluid, she gets added drop by drop until we have brisk, beautiful, dancing flames.

manana.