Originally posted 11.29.2005

We are gliding fast to the end of my darling month, my favorite, and I’m neither fully satisfied nor ready for December. No, my chilly, quiet gray month was happy and light, warm and relatively sober, well-nourished, friendly, and loving. And sort of loud.

So, there’s a little cognitive dissonance going on here.

I’m pretty happy, I guess, and I have been for a while. All those people who told me I needed to meditate or medicate, search deep within myself, or turn things over to the universe, just believe, put enough positive energy out there, blah blah blah. Well, they were just as wrong as I thought they were. What I needed was a job with some respect and security and I got it. And now I almost never cry anymore. Which isn’t to say I’ve become chipper or can-do; I’m still reserved and skeptical, drawn slightly sleazeward.

But the keen, desperate pain of the last, how many years? Has gone mute. Rubbed out like an errant hash mark on a city sidewalk. Maybe I’m jumping the gun a bit on my job security here, but after talks with both of what could loosely be called my bosses, it’s reasonable to conclude that I have no reason to fear being severed from this regular paycheck. Or from daily interactions with pleasant coworkers. Or from a routine upon which I can indulge my need for structure.

This is what my day looks like now: I get up and I run or I don’t; I select something to wear, sometimes from the rotation of things I’ve always liked that have barely seen the light of day in years; I ride a crowded subway in, which gives me something innocuous to complain about; depending on the timing of my arrival, I’ll say hi to a coworker or not, get an apple or not….

And so it progresses in a mundane and predictable way, and I do the things that 9-5ers do to keep from getting bored. In my case, it usually involves geeking out over combined elements of my work as a medical editor, like looking up rules of grammar in the AMA (American Medical Association) Manual of Style and giggling over the examples that elucidate what to do with quotation marks depending on other punctuation used:

Why bother to perform autopsies at all if the main finding is invariably “edema and congestion of the viscera”?

The clinician continues to ask, “Why did he die?”

“I’ll lend you my stethoscope for the clinic,”—then she remembered the last time she had lent it and said, “On second thought, I’ll be needing it myself.”

And eventually it’s time to go home, and so I return to my pretty neighborhood, where I can now afford organic broccoli from the inconvenience store. I haven’t started eating out, or buying $8 martinis, and my entertainment still consists mainly of Tea Lounge happy hours, DVD rentals, and occasional musical expeditions to Barbes or Bar Tabac. But that’s what I’m comfortable with for now. Comfortable, and trying to get used to it.