Thursday Edit:

I should have written this a.m., I had/have a great deal on my mind and it seemed then, in the shower, that I had the words to express it. I just ran out of time and then work has been a circus since I got here. This moment – 2:13 – is the first break I’ve had from meetings and phone calls. I just feel work worn and there are still several hours to go. It’s 2:42 now. Another wave hit just as I was starting to type this.

Mary Beth is making dinner tonight, pasta of some sort. And last night Paul made us a wonderful dinner of pecan encrusted chicken with crisp green beans and various nut breads, olives, Insalata Caprice salad, and a desert of coffee with heavy cream – just his way of saying thank you for the month of hospitality. Here’s the thing, I feel guilty about what a great time I’ve been having lately – perhaps my true lasting hangover is Lutheran guilt – a feeling that I don’t deserve to be happy and have joy lead into joy the way my life has been of late – even the sad things have been edged with joy. At the wedding just past I spent most of the evening in the proximity of my ex. She made it clear that she did not want to interact with me and so we spent the evening dancing around one another. While this is clearly a sad state of affairs the upside would be that I am no longer miserable in a disfuctional relationship hurting and being hurt by someone that I still love. She looks good and is making a new life for herself in a new city, I wish her well with every part of me.

I dreamt last night about stealing cars – it fit in somehow with The Book of Laughter and Forgetting by Kundera, which I started rereading yesterday, which fits also with the Tom Robbins book I just finished. I feel like I’ve changed somehow recently, that my heart is somehow lighter and my moods are somehow softer. Angela’s quote of the day, “For someone who randomly woke up at four in the morning and has been up since then, you’re in an awfully good mood, I love how silly you are.” The universe has sent me three telegrams in the past week – each arrived with an intervening day and each came from an unrelated sender. They all said “lighten up” and I think I am beginning to.