Sleepy but Hopeful

I can't wait til we fall back... it's so hard to rouse myself in the mornings when it's dark! And I'm going to start getting up at 6:15 to have some quiet thinking time before work. If I can force myself up, that is.

I had dinner over the weekend with a friend who is making me think. This was not his intention; it just worked out that way. He's got the guy thing going, where he just goes through life doing things he finds interesting and rewarding without worrying overmuch about who thinks what of him, or being lonely, or the like. Though I know other people like him, our conversation triggered something in me. I mentioned a bit of this in an earlier post.

I'm 41. I'm not going to get any younger (thank you, Captain Obvious, I know). I may or may not spend the rest of my life without a significant other. I can't sit around and wait anymore for some mythical future in which I'm going to be happy.

Lest you think I am now Pollyanna and I am bubbling over with frothy enthusiasm... fret not. I don't think I will ever lose the sarcastic gene, and a certain pessimism is ingrained in me by now, if indeed it wasn't built in. However, I'm making a real list of things I want to accomplish (ones that have nothing to do with guys or love or things like that); I am not letting emotional disequilibrium boot me off the wise-diet-and-exercise regimen I've been on for a couple of months, at least not more than temporarily; I'm actually sitting down and writing every night on the novella-that-may-suck-but-is-mine. I am thinking seriously about how I could not spend my days at a job that gives me hives on my soul, and of ways to get my brain back into high gear, even though I can't afford grad school.

I think it's going to be about an eighteen-month process, and I am plotting it out. Right now with the US economy imploding around us, I know there won't be much in the way of professional movement. But when the time is right, I want to have a game plan. I won't be out of debt for four years, barring the lottery or a miracle, but even in the interim, I am working on building a life that is good.

For now, I am going to curl up with the cats and go to sleep, because 6:15 is somehow a whole helluva lot earlier than 6:40!