i haven't blogged of late, not that there's an audience. i suppose i pictured this blog as the spot that hypothetical person from my past could catch up on a little bit of my emotional condition; if this is the case and you are that person (and i am often that person myself), recent blankness should be considered a message and not a defect.

twitter makes it easier, that being both a method of cheating and an implied honest point. i tweet plenty, one-line observations that sometimes echo the sort of thing i would have written out here in long form. laziness, perhaps-- or a symptom of the compression of time guilty full-time, benefited employment brings to the constitutionally bookish and contemplative personality during a recession. i work, and if i can gain bits of respite through experiencing tiny, convenient moments of other lives, and sharing mine. twitter works for this, and i've gone and purchased a blackberry. i text like a teenage girl: it's convenient and it's possible. of course i'd rather write letters, but last time i tried that the letter was overly long, in six (or i suppose seven) parts, and labeled an honours thesis.

that thesis of course suffered three afflictions: it was terrible as art, it was unpublishable as writing, and it was unsendable as the letter it claimed to be. i'm also sure it ruined my health somewhat. i joked back in the spring about filling out a questionnaire for the honours program and how i actually wrote, in answer to a question about possible challenges or dangers i would be presented with by my thesis, something like 'emotional damage from delving too deeply into the past'.

i won't pretend i sacrificed my health for my 'art', but rather lay out what actually happened: my nervous tendency was allowed to flourish for so long both on academic deadline and the deathly feeling of knowing that with the end of school i was going to be separated soonly from some of my favourite people, much in the same way i was four years previous. and four years previous was the time i was writing about.

so i relived one of those as another one was approaching. good plan, me. and the nervousness never went away. so, despite living with laura, which is going great by the way, i'm lonely. i have nightmares, bad ones, and i shake more than would be considered normal. other things. symptoms of a constant crisis or continental emergency.

there was something to look forward to when i lost monica, high school, and home. it was the same sort of massive shift i'm going through now-- the difference is that last time i had sort of a weird summer and hit fall running with college and the romance/extended emotional masochism spree that will probably at least partially define my life. fuck, that was living. now i work in the finance sector and october approaches with almost nothing to offer except a tax extension deadline and a series of empty anniversaries commemorating the myriad strange heartbreaks of my eighteenth and nineteenth years. i had a series of exciting falls and springs. through 2008 this held, but this year a spring that almost killed me extended into a summer of mixed blessings now extends into a fall where all the cultural associations of autumn and death are a bit more visceral, let's say, than i have yet known.

this is to say: i feel my youth slipping away and find myself no longer thinking long, long thoughts.

where i am now was the time i was waiting for, the holding pattern where i would hold a job and write in my spare time, send out manuscripts with a certain carelessness, and hope something went right. not towards a writing career, even, but because that was always the plan. i'm not doing it yet. i still may. i want to need to.