Penned

Lately I've been suffering from a sense of pervasive, um, ick: I just don't feel like doing anything. I wake up. I eat. I go back to sleep. Repeat ad nauseam. It's like ever since I came home from Bradford Woods, and from seeing my sister and niece and nephew, everything is so boring. I have a renewed sense of being trapped. Caged. Stifled. Curtailed. Penned up and pent up.

BW didn't fit for me for a lot of reasons -- chief among them hunger, exhaustion, and being surrounded by people about 10 years younger than I am: I discovered, at BW, that there is a huge difference in outlook and maturity between 19 and 28 -- but I did do a lot of new things. A lot of different things. I slept on a beach. I relived my adolescence by invading Stake n' Shake at midnight on a Saturday to inhale French fries smothered in cheese sauce. I learned about Down Syndrome via the total-immersion method. I heard a member of an American Indian tribe give a prayer in a language I never even knew existed.

At my sister's place, I watched a Monty Python movie adapted into an opera and performed live at the London Philharmonic. I tried kung-pao for the first time. My 3 year old niece told me she loved me and melted my heart into a puddle. For 3 weeks, there was something new, something different, every day, and I ate it up: even before I left I'd been feeling caged in a town that's not big enough to hold me anymore, with no job and no money to move to where I might more easily get one: someplace with more lights, more people, and (dear holy God) a bus system. Think of the novelty: me, going where I want when I want instead of practically begging to be taken to Wal-Mart so I can get out of Lock Haven for 10 minutes every 3 or so months. And it's not that I don't love this town; it's that I can't readily leave it. I'm plunked down in this one valley between the mountains and the Susquehanna, and I know I can't go anywhere else unless someone takes me. It's maddening. It drives me to apathy: Why get up when there's nothing new to do? What's the point?

I've had to start being strict with myself again. Anti-blob rules: 1. You must go outside for at least 30 minutes every day, even if it's raining or hailing or cold enough to freeze your tits or hot enough to melt your face off. 2. You must engage in at least one meaningful exchange with another human being. 3. You cannot wear the same thing 3 days in a row. Do the damn laundry .... and other things along the same vein. Otherwise I'm afraid I'll let my chronic depression slip in through a crack in my defenses and lay me out flat.

So I've been out photo roaming with my new camera. I forced myself to go to a free concert on the riverfront and found that once I was there, I actually enjoyed myself (DO NOT ISOLATE; DO NOT ISOLATE!) Day after tomorrow, I have a coffee-and-books date with a friend. I've joined a group of lovely fellow gamer geeks who are going to start meeting at LHU to play Dungeons and Dragons. I've started foraging, with the intent of learning to make my own herbal remedies and sachets and soaps. (You should see the amount of stuff I canned in olive oil, steeped in whiskey, bundled, froze, pressed and/or tied up to dry today alone, and today was the first day!) I'm devouring books at roughly a thousand pages per millisecond, on all kinds of subjects I know nothing about, just because I get a thrill from learning: the human genome, Nature vs. Nurture (and why it's a false dichotomy), how the brain creates the mind,  early Christianity, early, early, early Christianity, Gnosticism, Jewish and Christian mysticism, saints, deities, pantheons, and on and on and on. (For instance, I'm reading my way through Plato's, The Trial and Death of Socrates, and have come to the conclusion that good old Socrates was quite full of himself.)

I'm trying to be happy. I'm wrestling with my inner naysayer to find inner peace. I keep asking myself why I'm such a malcontent, why I always need more! new! different! to be truly in my element, but I haven't figured it out yet. I remind myself of my great-aunt Carolyn, who was such a wanderer that she built a new house and moved roughly every 2 years just to have something different to look at(!) Here? Same 4 walls, every single day.

You know, sometimes I think I'll never really settle. I can see myself walking around with my feathers ruffled thinking peevish, penned-up thoughts till I'm old and gray. I really don't want that to be who I am ... but what if it is?