Resolution and possibly some stab at independence

Summer Mondays dawning with possibility, though it's a possibility with a couple of asterisks--okay, so I futzed around last night doing the crossword online and whatever, but I still slept for almost eight hours and I didn't drink last night, so why am I so tired? The only thing I can think of is the humidity, so I may have to run the air conditioner tonight. Greyskies again, which I don't mind so much now that I'm inside, but, again, humidity and the like. My one heavy framed picture (an animation cell from an old Sunbeam commercial with Linus and Snoopy, signed by Bill Melendez) fell down again this morning. This is completely my mother's fault--she claimed I was hanging my pictures too high on the wall and moved this one down--it fell once while she was still on that visit, and now this. Argh. At least I've been there both times this has happened. (In other domestic news, the soapdish is back on the wall, but now my tub isn't draining all that well--a problem that I have never had in this apartment. I think that the guy who repaired the soapdish must have just washed all the excess plaster down the drain. Brilliant.)

But I'm back here for another week, a new set of goals I haven't failed at yet. I've passed through another period of wretchedness, sloughed off another set of distracting desires. That's what a lot of this is about, after all, and I don't need to be a Buddhist to know that, just a midwesterner. Because it's Monday and still the morning, I can say things like I will not be distracted, I will not spend 2:30-4:00 obsessing about whether K. will show up, I will not spend 4:00-6:30 obsessing that he is here. I will make it to the gym, as this is the one day I know I can go in the evening. I will make do with what I have. I will write five pages today and hope that two and a half of them will be good. I will simply write to write and edit later. I will not obsess about whether I'm actually going to see E. tomorrow. I will bracket all the other conflictedness that might have been raised over the weekend. I will use the online timer I found last week. I will not get bogged down by reading things of minimal relevance and maximum frustration. I will stick to the plan I had for this piece of writing, the one that impressed the guest editor--if there was something horribly off base, I will assume she would have told me in February. I will concentrate, I will be in the moment, I will take on one thing at a time.

In all of this, of course, I feel very close to Coleridge. Because I often forget things that I blog about (something that has always added a kind of frisson of risk to all of this), I can't remember off the top of my head whether I mentioned here or not the fact that I was so tired / hung over / stressed out by K that all I ended up doing on Friday afternoon was writing out stanza VI of Coleridge's "Dejection: An Ode." The resolutions I am making here, the ones I have been making for the last several days, are all indebted to this example--for better or worse.