This weekend has been unusually cool and cloudy and feels more like September than mid-July, which, don't get me wrong, I love compared to battling high humidity & heat without A/C. It's a weird disconnect, since it has me thinking about fall dresses and Halloween at a time when they should be farthest from my mind. But then, I am always that girl, longing for the next season and not content in the current (barring winter, of course, no one is longing for that.)
It's been a weird week. It started productively but then whittled away to a loose around the hinges Friday. Early, I managed to finish all my edits on dark country, and after I get it formatted for size, we are one step closer to a printed galley. I also wrote a few good entries for this very blog on writing about flowers, my own sexuality, revisiting older writing projects, and writing about your exes. I also managed a few more lovely postcard landscapes. Once my work week started on Wednesday, the days are less ordered. I had a crying jag about my lack of retirement savings and ending up homeless on the way to work, which started a collapse of the day early on that I never quite my good mood back through meetings and other library-related nonsense.
I like to say my mid-life crises happens in spurts not overarching periods of time, so while I feel enormously content about my life choices I have my moments of feeling like I've done everything wrong. Devoting myself to writing & art, which has been a trip, when I should have done something more lucrative and practical and won't end up with me living in poverty in my old age (or hell, my young age.) How surely its great to do what you love, but hard to do with what does not love you back. I've accomplished most of my creative goals and some I didn't even know I had, but there's a feeling that maybe I had the wrong goals after all. It does not help to be stuck in a day job where I feel kind of undervalued and overworked due to short staffing and yet don't really want to leave a place i rather like otherwise unless I can go out on my own. (jumping without a net means you hit the ground harder and faster.) Poetry is also undervalued and still a lot of work for not all that much in return. Maybe I should choose a different genre. A different path. I felt this way a lot during the early days of lockdown, intensely, but it still comes rolling back in sometimes like a tide.
Sometimes, my mood will be lifted by talking to co-workers, by getting breakfast, by taking a walk, by working on something I enjoy. Other times, like this weirdly gloomy weather, it stick around a few days. There are days where I question nothing. There are days where I question everything. Rinse and repeat. The cutesy signs and mommy bloggers on pinterest post "Do what you love!" Yeah, sometimes, unless you have a trust fund or a rich husband, that doesn't work out for you so well. But then again, maybe I should just hope that I make into old age healthily and happily and everything will work out. As I said, it comes and goes.
Today, however, is a good day. There is good coffee and early fall-vibes even though it's July. I've been enjoying the Fear Street trilogy on Netflix and am looking forward to the last installment later this week. I have some collages I want to work on over the next couple of days. Also, getting the trailer for dark country under wraps. I need to record a session on library marketing midweek for an upcoming conference. We are at that mid-point of summer where things start moving faster into fall and the next thing you know, classes are starting. It does look like things are looking good in Chicago, so we'll be as close to normal on campus as we have been in a while.
