Monday, June 06, 2005

Today is the first real day of my new life, my suburban life here in Marlborough country. It’s 8AM and I have my coffee next to me on a glass-topped desk in my den. The brew is especially acidic and sharp, because my coffee maker needs to be cleaned out and the grime and oils coating everything puts its mark on the flavor but that fact is oddly comforting today because it means I am beginning to have a life that feels, even if only a little bit, lived in.

I’m dressed in my cheapest pair of suit pants, a set that has rather wide light blue pinstripes running up and down the length. Also wearing a pair of dress shoes, black socks, and a white collar shirt, with the top button undone. Ordinarily I wouldn’t mention this, but I think it is of note today because the rest of the office will be wearing business casual instead of straight-business attire. It will be interesting to keep an eye on whether or not I feel I am fitting in, wearing these sorts of more-formal clothes when everyone else is supposedly outfitted in more relaxing gear.

Last night I had a wide variety of dreams but nothing that I can remember. Something about folding sheets, or wrapping drapes. Nonsense dreams.

What I just did above is to write without getting too deeply into my feelings, you see. I am having recurring thoughts that feelings are a problem when it comes to writing. During the week I was, for some odd reason, repeating to myself, Don’t let your personal opinion interfere with the writing (or your story.) I have to admit that it reads a little more interestingly than the standard load of crap that I write.

I must have lost the journal entries that I made for april and may. They were in a folder called ‘jstuff’ in the root of the C drive on this laptop, and I removed them in an effort to create enough space for the Comcast activation software so that I could have internet connectivity at home. And I just blew it away – poof. The reason I’m mentioning this is that there can be no doubt, absolutely no doubt whatsoever that 80% of those entries were of this variety:

I feel tired, I’m so drunk, I can’t stand myself, I don’t want to move to marlborough, should I live at applebriar or somewhere else, etc.etc.

Rambling, nearly incoherent spouts of negativity. I’m not saying that they aren’t necessary sometimes, those journal entries. They help me to think things through and make decisions.

What I am saying is that it’s not a big loss to lose these – never mind the fact that I only wrote in those journals a total of maybe twelve times between the two months. I had a very hard time writing anything at all during the last few months in Boston.

As an aside, I read a few of my sister Jenna's journal entries, the ones I secretly copied off her hard drive when she left it for me to fix. I fixed her laptop, sure, but I took a little something for myself as payment, without telling her. Huge violation of trust, blah blah. I don't care. I was curious.

I shouldn't have been. They’re full of the same kind of crap that I write about. I feel like crap, I ate too much, I didn’t exercise, Mom’s place is depressing me, etc.

It reads exactly like one of my own negative entries.

Amazing how at the end of the day our own internal voices are pretty much the same. Focusing on what we didn’t do correctly, or perfectly. Aghast at ourselves for being human. And muttering cliché and rhetoric about what the Right Thing To Do would have been. We’re societally programmed machines that flagellate ourselves when we go against the programming. And we both have our mother's neuroticism.

If you want to know, I think that it is fair to say that I was miserable there, in Brighton. It’s my secret. I don’t know if I can tell anyone else. But the truth is that I like getting in my car and driving to a strip mall with everything I could possibly need. I enjoy not having to walk ten minutes to the T stop in what is, more often than not, horrible weather – too hot, too cold, too rainy, too humid, too cloudy – only to wait for that miserable green monster, packed chock full of more miserable people who don’t particularly want to be going to work, and definitely don’t want to be looking at you while they’re commuting. On the one hand, it always felt good to be with other people who shared a similar nasty fate (soon we’ll all be at work!) but on the other hand, it was exhausting – I showed up to work tired already most of the time.

This was especially true with the crowded commutes – the ones where I’m jammed in between four people in the very middle of the main walkway, right in front of the rear doors, so I can’t even grab on to a handrail or anything to stabilize myself, and there’s probably a really really big guy in front of me who smells and I’m trying not to make eye contact with, or an annoying guy with a backpack on behind me, who continually and unknowingly knocks me this way and that with his artificial hunchback as he turns from side to side because he's looking around like a crazy person. In the end, it’s like anything else that we leave: mixed feelings. I’ll miss parts of the Brighton experience at times, and at other times, I’ll be grateful that I never have to deal with it again.

The conclusion that I’m getting to is that – and keep in mind that this is a very preliminary conclusion, based on being in the suburbs for a total of ten days now – I think it will be extremely difficult for me to ever go and live in the city again, unless I’m within walking distance to work. Four years in San Francisco, two years in Brighton – it's enough. Commuting is just too awful for words.

People are asking me why I moved. Do I tell them I just didn’t like the commute? Or that I’m no longer a city person?

The truth is that I wanted to experience something different. This is certainly different. Plus, like most software developers and Information Technology types, I'm conservative and lazy. I like to lay around and feel comfortable in my house. I like to nest. I don’t like to be challenged and I don’t like change. Maybe I even wanted to move away from Lisa, because she barely wanted to spend time with me anyway, and our respective jobs seem to demand so much of us that we have nothing left for each other. Or, flipped around, we don't care enough about one another to make time to be together. We'd prefer to pursue our ambitions. We'd prefer to work.

Do any of these things this make me a bad person?

No. They make me human.

Time to stop writing and drive the five minute drive to work so I can be there before the 9AM standup meeting. Sucks. Sometimes I feel like if, left to my own devices, without a job, I would instead write forever.