I haven’t written in a few days, which isn’t all that typical of me lately, because of reasons I don’t even know how to pin down. I’ve been feeling as though I’m floating lately, not really here all the time. I don’t think I’m unhappy or anything, just sort of bored, tired, lethargic. I don’t know. I can take on things sometimes and try to shoulder it harder or longer than I should and I don’t stop and ask myself WTF, you know? I don’t even think I’m talking about anything in particular.

Perhaps I need more close friends and family here, of course that could be. I’m also feeling a little discontent, wanting to stop freakin worrying about money and never having enough to do or purchase the things I want, which sounds SO lame, I know. But seriously, I’m damn tired of being broke and trying so begrudgingly to be frugal. It’s a pain in the rear. You got your degrees, you got your jobs, congratulations- now you have to pay off all your debt. After that, you can work on saving for college and retirement, or paying off your mortgage if you’re lucky enough to have a home to truly call your own, which it turns out could be incredibly overrated.

And I’ve been sad lately at things I don’t think should make me quite so sad. I let Lil’ E stay up way too late last night and felt like the worst parent on the planet. I found out a close friend who I haven’t been able to really talk to in months is off to a bible college of sorts in the bahamas and I feel so bad that I knew nothing of this and all the different directions every one goes in life. Sometimes I think connections are so awesome. You go for a walk to kill time and end up meeting some one a few blocks down who is trained in landscape architecture and has awesome tips and encouragement about your organic garden. You plan for the right pet and meet a breeder who is a talkative, interesting, informative home-schooling mom, (and has the perfect pet for our family). So in these moments I want to get on this blog or remark to some one in person about how incredibly delightful these connections are- how two people end up meeting or effecting each other’s lives in a way that seems just too strange to not be Orchestrated.

Other times its connections that I mourn – one’s that are falling apart from distance and lack of cultivation. Sometimes I mourn one’s that are just fine, because its terrible events that bring two people together, like earlier this week when Lil’ E and I were walking to the park and saw a cat dying on the sidewalk. With the joint effort of myself and the mailman, we managed to read the ID tag and call the number to identify the pet’s owner’s, who it turns out had just moved in across the street from where the cat lay after being, apparently, hit by a car. It was difficult for me particularly because Lil’ E didn’t get it and kept meowing at the cat and telling me it had a boo boo. When it took its last breath, Lil’ E told me the kitty cat was tired and was going to sleep. And here in this event I connected with the mail man, as we hunched over a bloody feline corpse, because I was grateful some one else cared, grateful he had a cell phone, grateful he was another freakin adult to balance my feelings of sorrow over my child’s first death experience and make me aware of my own sensibilities.

This week I’ve looked a little more at my myspace friends while I’m bored and waiting for Hubby to get back from his 7am-10:30pm work schedule. I don’t know why, but I’m always so surprised, even disturbed, by the fact that so many old and even current friends are doing such vastly different things than I. I get this snapshot, this weird MySpace thing that it is, of their “profile” and can see how they want to be perceived- what they want people to know about them. Are they edgy? Witty? Do they have lots of friends and comments, do they list a slue of fascinating books or movies in their interests? Sure we all do it, right? Without even thinking much about it, we figure out fairly quickly, though it might change as often as we change our shoes, who we want to be to the rest of the world. And in the end, the things I most want to tell people about myself but don’t because it seems so ridiculous, is that I really, really liked reading a book about pumpkins to my son today. I wonder if a lot of stay-at-home moms feel this way, like the highlight of their day was curbing a temper tantrum so they could enjoy a MUG (”for here!”) of java at a coffee shop fairly uninterrupted- I mean this is like a humongous personal feat, people! But when you look around and see other adults in the world DO NOT CARE about whether or not you got your toddler to eat zucchini, it can feel as though the entire ball of earth is a black hole that has just swallowed you up because you are completely, eerily, alone. Like, “wow, this is kinda crazy… what am I living my life for if these are my daily highlights? where is my life going? who am I? Is any one else here? Hello?” (echoes ensue, yada yada yada.)

This is only one small piece of the puzzle as I uncover this strangely not-here-but-here mood I’ve been in, hidden behind a nice tired smile and way too much talking.