Nil by Mouth

Some Thing is Different

I suppose it’s not a bad thing to have only two posts this month, one on the first day and another on the last. January is never easy. Things are ostensibly new. You have to remember that new number on all your dates. Though less so these days. Most everything but your hand is rigged up to some world-wide clocking device that does it for you. Hands might get rigged up too some day soon. That’s a scary thought, but it would also be pretty functional. All my checks to the shrink this month have had the wrong year scratched out. The last thing I’m doing is thinking when I’m all shaky at the end of a session. In the little “So You’ve Decided to Seek Therapy” pamphlet I got at my first session it recommended writing the check out beforehand. Just like there are no new ideas, there ain’t no new problems either.

Things in the new year are never that new. My jobs are the same, my unluckiness in love is the same. My apartment has new lighting and a new (tortuously difficult to assemble) bookshelf. But my shit’s all over the place still, and I’m so daunted by all the new storage space I have now that I keep looking at the piles of stuff, the empty bookcase, sighing, and retiring to another room.

What’s new is that I left my internship at the paper this month. Alternately liberating (only for so long can you wake up at 8am and trudge through the weather to work in an office and not get paid – that sort of thing doesn’t much fly after age 22), and frightening (since never before have I been published with any regularity, my fear is that it will never happen again). I was joking, that in two months, I’ll be begging for my old blueberry iMac back. A joke laced with fear.

I wrote a Valentine’s Day piece this week, which was kind of tricky assignment for me. I’m as cynical as I should be about these things. But I’m also secretly longing for a big bunch of flowers and a heart-shaped dinner. Aren’t we all? Damn ad people. The only real Valentine’s day I ever had was quite a few years ago, and it was so unexpected after the typically self-absorbed poops I associate myself with that I could barely take it all in. Most years I kind of forget about it, but since it falls on a Saturday this year (I know this from my article – thanks a lot) it might be harder.

On Wednesday I’m off to LA for a week. It seems like I’m running off to LA for a week quite a bit these days. Besides that I’m dreaming of any temperature above 30 C, it also acts as a big paragraph break in the big plans I keep planning to make. You know what they are.

I might need to throw a party.

• Jan 31