Gah

I am a malleable kind of metal. If I work for eight days straight I get banged into a completely different shape of human. By Monday I did not know any longer what I was doing here or where my place on this earth was. What if the best part of my day is a fifteen minute break at sunset where I sit outside a grocery store and watch a few hundred birds fly in a circle over my head? Is that somehow lacking, or would that be the best part of anybody's day? Do I have the main components of a life here?

The things I have accomplished this week, though, are:
* Going for a midnight swim at barton creek
* Registering to take the GREs on Nov. 30 (gah)
* Getting a certificate for a free meal (yes) from the cafe by subbing as base operator at CM when Monica had to leave sick
* Not falling victim to the corporate mind control of CM's point-based performance rating scale which I have completely thrown out of whack by a) thinking that my Saturday shift started at 1:30 pm and being wrong and b) giving a guy the wrong change yesterday, which I do not know for sure I did but am almost positive of.
* Seeing Team America [and let's talk about the pussies dicks and assholes thing, ok? put it on the list]
* Watching the last innings of every glorious Red Sox game as soon as I got off work and getting customers to call friends on their cell phones to tell me the score during really key moments otherwise.

In two and a half short hours I will have my afternoon off. I am going to: edit the video that is due at 4; vote; take a nap; go watch The Office dvds and eat pumpkin pie with a girl I met at a party who I have been trying to make friends with, so this should be a good start.

power

Electricity did get shut off due to lack of bill-paying, and I stayed with Morgan and Kristin for a week, but it's back on now and I'm back in the house.

I don't know where Tonja is but she took her internet-connected computer with her, and also all my cds (by accident). She left me a message to tell me she had them, but she's been gone for a week now and I'm a little nervous. I may already know what I'll be asking for for Christmas.

I got a new apartment, and it will be mine in the first week of November. I am SO excited to live in this place. It backs up to the greenbelt so it feels like it's in the woods, but it's just a block off South Lamar, with Sonic on one corner and Kerbey Lane on the other, and Maria's across the street.

Alex is moving all his stuff into storage and going to visit friends in DC of all places, where he may see my doppleganger on the street, because so much of my heart and head is still there, and that's OK. Moves take time. I may miss him, kind of. Or I may not miss anything about that house.

Morgan and Kristin have a new puppy named Abbey, and she is the greatest. Marlo has met his match.

Becca if you are reading this I need your mailing address because I have your birthday present.

My jobs still feel like an adventure, and they are where I am putting most of my time and energy. So far it feels like time well-spent. It's kind of cool to have built into everything I do so much room for the unexpected.

the devil I know

My living situation has devolved dramatically. I am going to miss living in a beautiful house where people paint murals on the wall on a Tuesday morning and come to sleep if they need a place to crash among an ever-changing cast of d.j.s and body piercers and strippers and drifters and me, the 9 to 9 grocery store cashier.

There is nothing wrong with living communally, being a marginalized member of society and bringing down local property rates if you know how to take care of each other properly. But in the past week this house has seen angry exes banging on the doors and stealing shit, disputes over utility bills and drug deals, and fist fights outside my door at four in the morning. Also, Tonja talks trash about people behind their backs to me even when I ask her not to, and the other day when I came home at lunch she was using my pot as a bucket to mop the kitchen floor.

I have an appointment with an apartment locator tomorrow morning. I feel good about finding a place on my own. I've never lived on my own before. It may be the easiest non-decision I've ever made, but I come from a loving little dysfunctional family and it's hard for me to walk away from new dysfunctional potential families. Like so much of the past two months, hard but good.

In other ways the past week was awesome. I got to see Liz McGrew! and her fiance Matt at a belly-dancing show downtown, and Laurel and Tom came for the weekend and we went out for Mexican food and went swimming in Barton Springs, where they claim they were bitten by fish. I don't believe it for a second. Fish can't bite! Nibble, maybe. But, they have no teeth! How could they even get any purchase on your flesh with their soft, small little fishy mouths? And I went to see a Chantal Akerman documentary that was screening at the Cinematexas festival, and it was very good and she was very imposing and French. Alex and I had a talk about Life. Kerry seems to have won last night's debate. I had a nice time watching Star Wars DVDs with Charles during one of my refugee nights. I got some free lipstick that was misshipped to Central Market that is actually a pretty good color on me. What more could you ask.