"Whatever we see is changing, losing its balance..."*

And somehow, the writing flickered back and then slipped away again, I kept having to pour myself into projects and planning, and I've been trying to focus on this whole idea of living in the present, of making a conscious effort to live in the world as it is, this world of impermanence, the world as I find it instead of the world I want it to be--and this is not something that comes at all naturally to me--my earliest memories are of wanting to be someone else, somewhere else, some other time, and at a certain point that allowed me a very simplistic misreading of Nietzsche, Derrida, et al., that I'm slowly beginning to address--and in the meantime I am trying to learn how to live in a world that I can't control, to do things as simple as talk to the neighbors and not take every roach in my kitchen personally. And slowly I am beginning to get better at this as I keep sitting zazen and remembering to focus on my breath and to practice with losing balance.

What I have begun to find, what I have found over the past week or two is, in general, an enormous sense of gratitude. In spite of the nadir of exhaustion that came towards the end of August, I am immensely grateful that the school year has started again. Somehow it's less of a psychological effort to be in grad school than it was a week ago. I'm excited and energized about my new teaching gig, about having a class full of women, and even about the chance to remember what Manhattan looks like at 7:30 in the morning when I'm not either up too late or waking up at someone else's home. And somehow this feels very close to a real job--not that working within my own institution wasn't real (and in many ways this new gig is much more rarefied), but more that part-timers have a different place in this culture and I feel like I've left the nest a little bit. I am very, very, very lucky that this almost just fell in my lap, and it's a good reminder for me about the relationship between lemons and lemonade, considering that this all started because Erstwhile Teaching College caused me so much grief back in December.

And then there is the cute boy from the coffeeshop, the one who passed me a note and missed his bus for me and killed the mouse in my bathtub at 5:45 in the morning, the guy who has had me grinning like an idiot all weekend and no doubt disgusting all of my friends with the sudden glowy-ness, and I feel like I've told the story so many times this weekend that if I tell it one more time or write it down I'm going to completely jinx this. But all I know is that it's been a long time since I've felt this way about a guy--there are shades of E (the Lawyer Dude of the old blog, who I actually had a couple of emails with today and who is totally rooting for me), but with a lot more confidence on my part. I feel like I'm 14, but I never actually had this much fun when I was 14.

(And I haven't told The Poet much about this, but I do plan to have some kind of talk about this during the week. I'm hoping that it will be okay because I do care about him, but he's been saying a lot of things over the past week that are making it clear to me that he's beginning to worry about the ethics of our relationship in a way that wasn't necessary even a month ago--or maybe it was, but just less overtly--so I think this might even help him not have to feel bad about stranding me in some way. But there are a couple of things that could go awry this week.)

At one level, all of this makes me incredibly nervous. In the cycle of my year, the second week of September is always somewhat treacherous, especially when I think things are going well. 2001 is the obvious example, but last year was kind of a doozy as well--one night, I'm celebrating the end of my PhD coursework and the start of a year that looks nothing but promising with a hot lawyer at one of my favorite restaurants, and the next morning my grandmother's dead and I'm pregnant and don't know it yet and it's pretty much all downhill from there. So I am trying to hold all of this lightly right now, to take care of the people around me the best I can, to take care of myself, to stay on top of things and to practice with composure. And, of course, to hope the mice don't come back unless the cute boy from the coffeeshop does too.




* From Shunryu Suzuki's Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind, which is arguably the most important book I read this summer.