Circling

June 6

3:00 p.m.

Back to the phosphor mines, darlings-- I'm at work again. The sun is shining, and I have a view of the glittering pool from my desk (technically it's a "canoe seat testing facility", but come on, it's a pool). It's very difficult to sit here at my desk, tapping away at the keyboard, with so much niceness outside. Only two more hours until I can go home. Two short hours. That's time to read Strange Horizons, and catch up on Gaiman's journal, and maybe work on poetry slush some more (I accepted one poem already this morning, an amazing dark and horrific fairy tale), research some markets, catch up on the Rumormill, maybe read some journal archives...

Yeah, you get the idea. There's nothing for me to do here at work. There will be, presumably, once things get a bit more settled down and everyone realizes I'm back-- stuff will begin to float my way. But today has been very much dull, once I caught up on e-mail and voice mail. I'd been worried that I'd find a big pile of work on my desk... but in some ways, this lack of work is even more disconcerting. What if they decide they don't need me at all? I find that rather unlikely-- they all seemed really thrilled to have me back-- but still.

Sorry to be such an angst-monkey. More later.

*

4:38 p.m.

Meg says I have the only job in the world where I could come in for my first day after a month off and be bored (Meg's doing well, for any of you who were wondering-- having adventures and enjoying her summer break, getting revved up about Columbia).

I complain, at times, about my job. It can be stressful. My instructions are sometimes maddeningly vague. Two of my bosses give everybody they work with anxiety attacks (I am, as most will attest, a mellow sort of person, and they even get to me at times). And yet... I do have a lot of free time. I do work with good people (the stressful bosses work mostly in Nevada, only swooping in occasionally to disrupt the pleasant workings of the Santa Cruz office). I mean, we all sat by the pool and had ice cream this afternoon. This is not a bad job. It has its moments, but overall, not bad at all.

*

11:54p.m.

Yawn. I'm so *tired*. But then, I did drink a pear cider and two pints of Guinness tonight...

I escaped work, and came home, and paid bills. I talked to Meg on the phone for a bit (she's going on a trip to the beach, and shortly thereafter visiting New York, and so she'll be incommunicado for a while). I sat on the couch and watched television, relaxing-- I haven't relaxed in my own living room for so long!

Around 8 I met D. for beer. We went to the Poet and Patriot (the Irish pub, just a half-block from my house, where I don't spend nearly enough time). We drank and talked about life, passion, purpose, dreams, apathy. A really good conversation. D. is one of my best friends, but too much lately it seems we talk past one another, so concerned wtih the specifics of our own lives that we have trouble empathizing and sympathizing and hearing one another. I didn't feel that way at all tonight-- it was just like old times, and tonight when we both said we should get together again soon, I think we both truly meant it. That's nice. We might try to make this a regular meeting.

After D. left (borrowing Declare for himself and Angels and Visitations for his ladylove), I called my darling Heather. It's so odd to be away from her, after so much sustained time in her company. It makes me lonesome for her smell, for her smile, for the small sounds she makes in sleep. At least I got to hear her voice.

I made myself a late dinner, slowly. Fried rice and garlic chicken, using up the last bits of food I have in the house, except for some pasta and clam chowder and tea. I must go to the grocery store tomorrow.

Now it's late, and I have a cup of cold water on my desk, and I may go eat some of the chocolate that Heather left at my house this weekend-- it's chilling in the fridge. I might take a hot shower before bed. I'm feeling very creature-comforty, reading Sleeping In Flame, marveling as always at Carroll's ability to write movingly and truthfully about love-- though I am noticing this trend in his work, giving us characters to love and then brutally and abruptly killing them. That can certainly be powerful, but he does it a lot, and now I start to cringe whenever I begin to really like a character. It's like Jim Morrow, killing children in his books-- it's powerful, it can be wrenching, but I think sometimes that he does it too often, that when taking his work as a whole it seems either a manipulation or failure of invention.

Or maybe that's just the thing he circles around, and the death of love is the thing Carroll circles around. We writers all have things we circle around, that we come back to again and again, often unconsciously. I don't know what my thing is. I don't want to know, really. Knowing would probably make me too self-conscious, and I wouldn't write it so naturally, and my work would lose its soul...