Tricked you!

So you thought I wasn't going to do it... that I wasn't going to make it through NaBloPoMo and I was going to fail on Day 2. As Bethany used to say, fooooo' youuuuu!

I admit, it's something of a miracle that I'm here on a Friday night, almost 9 o'clock, and I'm sitting alone in my empty house writing instead of out doing something mildly self-destructive. But here I am! Dan is out at a play, and Justin is in LA. If either of them were here I'm sure I'd end up doing something non-solitary, but it's probably good for me. I'm considering this night in a birthday gift to myself. The gift of rest and reflection.

I recently finished "The Mysteries of Pittsburgh," which came to me via a recommendation and loan from Laurel. She told me it was reminiscent of our lives and I think it kind of is, in many ways but not all. The book is about a guy who recently graduated from college in Pittsburgh and finds himself suddenly friends with a new crowd over the summer, and if you boil it down to the essentials, it's about friendship and that kind of madness that affects you when you are surrounded by people you admire so much it's almost painful. In that sense, it reflects where I am now. Since I moved from Palo Alto to San Francisco, just three or so months ago, I have felt maddeningly joyful about my life more often than ever before. It's not that I'm never sad or bored or frustrated, but it's that the highs are so high here... and the lows are just normal. I feel really lucky to have met and had the chance to hang out with the people who live here, who are now my friends.

It's not that I don't have great friends in Palo Alto - I do - but the intensity of the city life is different. I sound stupid right now, I know it - I sound really naive - but really, it's true. We all live now in this crazy, constantly happening environment, where you can stumble across something amazing any moment. That ratchets up the intensity of things pretty fast. Throw into that a lot of really smart, strange people and that's pretty much my life of late. It's hard to really comprehend it, to really grab ahold of that and make it conceivable, because things and people and interactions are too sprawling, too big, too boundless to be pinned down.

All I know is that I'm grateful. I have to remind myself, because I've been really tired and burnt out lately, that it's all for a reason, and that this is a place and a time that I can't live again, not ever in the same way I'm doing it the first time. So I am happy that it's here.

Tomorrow I'm going wine tasting with some friends, some very new, some old. I know it will be another weekend like the ones I've had recently - a blur, a happy blur. I'm excited.