Things might be about to change. I had a job interview that went really well. I shouldn’t say much more at this point. But some change would do a lot of good. As would some loose change.

I’m pondering giving up sugar once again, as in sugary treats and sugar in my (decaf) coffee. I’ve done it twice now, for a month at a time. I know it’s doable (even though one of the times, I came down with pneumonia after a month). I’ve enjoyed my lack of dependence on caffeine so much, it would be nice to extend it to other addictions.

Yesterday I attended a tribute to a late work colleague of mine, and had a good time hearing stories about her, and also reconnecting with so many people I used to work with. It felt like a piece of my self was reintegrated, being back there – you don’t spend ten years in a place without it insinuating itself into your identity somehow.

While there, I talked to some people who have been following my story here. I am past the point of panic, I think, where someone tells me they are reading the blog and I mentally scan through my posts thinking, “Oh no! They read THAT post! And that one too!” I don’t think that really matters to me anymore. Or, as expressed in the contemporary idiom of reassurance, “It’s all good.” Like a young adult, this blog now makes its way in the world free of my obsessive control. A weird thing to say about something that is, as they say in Italian, un frutto del mio ingegno (a fruit of my intellect).

I guess that part of my work here is to shed layers of anxiety via writing. I hope, for my readers’ sake, that doesn’t mean they are taking on the anxiety for me! If that is the case for you, dear reader, please think of it more like a shed layer of snake skin. It exists, kind of, but it also isn’t needed anymore.

Which, of course, reminds me of this poem:

How to Meditate
by Jack Kerouac
                      -lights out-
fall, hands a-clasped, into instantaneous
ecstasy like a shot of heroin or morphine,
the gland inside of my brain discharging
the good glad fluid (Holy Fluid) as
i hap-down and hold all my body parts
down to a deadstop trance-Healing
all my sicknesses-erasing all-not
even the shred of a “I-hope-you” or a
Loony Balloon left in it, but the mind
blank, serene, thoughtless. When a thought
comes a-springing from afar with its held-
forth figure of image, you spoof it out,
you spuff it off, you fake it, and
it fades, and thought never comes-and
with joy you realize for the first time
“thinking’s just like not thinking-
So I don’t have to think
    any
      more”