It's August
August is weird, no? August is definitely weird.
Well hello.
Here I am, back in the no-pants zone that is my balcony, drinking kefir out of a vintage Coca-Cola glass in an effort to repopulate my diminished intestinal flora.
I’m writing this because I told myself I would write something today, but trying to brain-wrangle The Bigger Project feels like a bit more than I want to deal with. The last couple of weeks have been kind of a slog - I’ve had a weird cascade of minor health issues since early July, none of which are serious, but it’s been a while of feeling not-great and then having to take meds that make me feel not-great in other ways, and the cumulative effect has been wearying. I defrosted salmon to cook tonight, and it’s taking every ounce of willpower I have not to leave it in the fridge for another 24 hours and order french fries instead.
I also think some of this ennui is just the onset of August, which I feel goes under-recognized as weird vibes sort of month. It’s summer, so you feel like ~life~ should be happening, but nothing is actually happening and you’re just sort of in this holding space waiting for things to get serious again, which creates a weird mix of anticipation and dread.
I think this dynamic is a bit exaggerated for me this year because I deliberately set out to have a very low-key summer, and I’m looking at a busier and rather expensive fall, full of competing priorities that I already feel a bit boggled by. For a couple of years I felt very aimless and had absolutely no ideas about what I wanted to be doing; now I suddenly have several competing ideas about what I think I’d like to be doing and I feel a bit paralyzed, which is throwing me back into an aimlessness loop.
No small part of the problem is that a lot of the things I feel best about for the longer-term would require investing a lot of unpaid time in the shorter-term. And while my personal economics are pretty stable at the moment, they provide me with very little leeway, which is one of the problems I’m trying to remedy in the first place.
I really should have gone the trophy wife route.
So anyway, instead of confronting any of this in a meaningful way, I’ve spent the last couple of weeks being kind of tired and achy and nauseous, while watching the spectacle of American politics + Olympics drama unfold on social media. The scrolling, though for once not doom-fueled, has gotten so out of control that I finally paid for a fancy content blocker to try to reclaim some semblance of control over my mind.
I’ve got it running right now, in fact, which is probably the only reason I’ve managed to string this much text together. And this is really not my best text, by a mile. In fact, I I’m going to cut it off because I can’t think of much else to say that won’t just be whining about my bullshit, and it would be better to cook my salmon and watch HBO.
Next time I may actually have a bit of a crowd-source / survey assignment for all of you, but it’s going to wait.
Toodles!