It is Friday afternoon, and I've gotten very little accomplished today. I updated the school's website (teaching myself Adobe's GoLive in the process), I've been cleaning my office, I did some minor paperwork. I've read my email, I've read blogs, I've checked all my usual celebrity-gossip sites, which have languished mostly abandoned this week, what with the endless meetings and evening obligations. I'm listless and bored.
Ms. P is gone this weekend, and she's taken R and S with her. J is also going, and I've got a bruch date with his wife N, but that is the extent of my social obligation/opportunity this weekend. Yesterday I was excited to have the whole weekend to myself. Yesterday I was busy planning meditation time and bike rides and book time in coffee shops. Today the prospect of unfettered, unencumbered time is oppressive.
Lately I've felt like I'm spinning my wheels. I haven't felt motivated or energized or excited by things, but it's not felt like depression. It's felt like boredom--endless, soul-deep boredom. Around everyone else's excitements and moments I've been like the proverbial teenager: bored, bored, bored.
On Wednesday I had dinner with the high priest of the coven I am likely to dedicate to later this summer. We talked for so long and so energetically that I didn't notice that the clock had crept to 11:30 and Ms. P was calling, frantic that I'd been in an accident because I never stay out that late on school nights. It's much more common for me to hit a wall around 9:30, be tired and want to go home even when I'm talking to people I quite like.
It was an amazing feeling. I came home buzzed and excited and ready to use Scrabble as a divinatory tool. I came home feeling like myself. I came home feeling sexual and open and as if things are possible.
I want to feel like that more often. I want to feel creative and interesting and powerful. I want to feel engaged and interested and absorbed.
It's been too long since I reminded myself of one of my favorite quotes from Atlas Shrugged: "When nothing seems worth the effort, said a small voice in her mind, it's a screen to hide a wish that's worth too much. What do you want?"
What do I want, indeed?