25 November 2007 - 10:14 am

Well, my life, recently. It's been.... depressing.

I find myself alone, at home, wasting time. A lot.

That's about it. Even watching videos is too much effort, though I have many neatly stacked, waiting to be watched, so TV is what it has come down to filling most of my hours when home. When I should be unpacking the last of the boxes I have, so I can easily move about my apartment, so I could actually invite people over, rather than being embarrassed about it. But the two areas that I have made infinitely available to me since the git-go, are the bed, or at least one half of the bed so I can sleep on it comfortably, and the living room, with a choice of the couch to lie on or the comfy chair to sit in. That's it. Those are the only areas that are kept clear since I moved in. Everything else is up for grabs. The cat even has his areas. And the living room floor is definitely one of his. Anything on the floor (newspapers, junk mail, pieces of paper) are his to rip to shreds. I am careful about what I place on the floor, so I really don't care, but I am loathe to take his entertainment away. I mean, he was an indoor/outdoor cat for the nine years I have had him before, so this whole transition to indoor living only I think does bother him, though for the most part he has adapted. I let him out of the apartment to explore the hallway outside my door, but he doesn't seem comfortable with that yet. I just wanted to give him some more space to claim, but only when I think we are least likely to be seen, so after nine or ten at night.

But me, the apartment has felt like the prison it must feel like for him too. Some of that is parking. If I have a premo parking space, say on a Friday night, and I could go out, but that would mean I would lose my spot for all day Saturday and not having to get up early to find another parking spot Saturday when the meters are back on again, that is a consideration, and frequently the only consideration as to whether I go out. Because parking after nine at night in my neighborhood is tricky, and always ends up involving taking a spot with a meter, several blocks away. This also affects when I do my laundry or do recycling. Can I get the car close enough to my building that the several trips it will take to load the car do not involve walking blocks away in addition? Sometimes I make the several trips down the elevator, pile the things at the back entrance of the building, move the car, double park, load the car up. But all in all, it is all just a big pain. I miss having an assigned parking spot, next to where I live. Now, if I didn't own a car, that would be an entirely different matter. Or if I had a Vespa. Or a motorcycle. The problem is, even though those would be good short term solutions, I know I would still want a car, for roadtrips and such. Not for the storage I presently use my car for, but actual room in my car so I could transport things like me and my clothes and possibly car camp.

Anyway, none of this is what I would like to talk about.

I would like to talk about the Thanksgiving Break I am still on, and what I chose to do with it.

I retreated.

I was at Costco Wednesday picking up the Pecan Pie I promised to bring to the Thanksgiving celebration I had been invited to, and was browsing in the book section, as I always do. I saw the book for that children's fantasy movie that is on its way out to theatres this season, starring Nicole Kidman and Daniel Craig, and wanted to know what it was about. The Golden Compass, that's the name of the movie and the book. But Costco had bundled the book with the apparantly other two books that made it a trilogy, and so I had all three books of Philip Pullman's "His Dark Materials" trilogy, a series I honestly had never heard of before seeing the ads for the movie. Okay, I bite, and soon found the omnibus in my possession on the other side of the check out line.

So after going to Thanksgiving, a very pleasant feast that involved lots of girl bonding and giggling and uproarious laughter for most of the evening, with Judi my host, and Tiffany her son's girlfriend, oh yeah, and the son and one other friend of the family, I came back home and did not stir until Saturday night, after I had finished reading all three books and I promised to meet someone in Hollywood for a free show I was interested in seeing. Oh, I did get out of the house on Friday morning to move the car, and ended up at a coffee shop, but didn't stay because it was a little too chilly, even sitting outside in the sun, wearing what I was wearing, and came back home, right after 9, when the prohibition against parking on one side of the street had been lifted. And my car would still be sitting on that side of the street if I hadn't stirred from my bed Saturday night to meet a friend. But she never showed, never called, never texted, never heard a word from her. Still haven't, even the next day.

And I didn't go to the show, because I had been waiting for her outside in the parking lot, afraid of missing her call if I went inside and it was too noisy, and besides, we agreed to meet at eight, and here it was nearly nine, and I was cold and getting hungry. I knew I wouldn't have noticed these things if I had been inside, but I was getting more and more pissed at my friend. This is also not the first time she has done this to me, nor the only friend who has done this to me, and I am just feeling like, what's the point of friends when they don't act like friends?

So it is easier to retreat into a book, lying on a bed, reading for days on end, and only sad when the book ends and there is no more to read, but even that is not a problem, because you can always start all over again, just the surprise of not knowing how it will turn out is gone, but the joy of catching subtleties and connections and hints you didn't catch the first time are available the second time around, and sometimes that is better, because you can appreciate the author's overall worldview that much more. And if this movie does only cover the first book, then I am not sure how they are going to handle the second and third, because like how Philip K. Dick's "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" had a whole substory of that society's religion and its attempt to unify a fractured society, the His Dark Materials books have an entire substory that supports the whole reason for the main story, all about religion, and not a foreign one, but pretty much the traditional Christian one with Old and New Testaments. And the secularists vs. the Church is the source of the main conflict, and their view of what physics is pointing to. So it really isn't a children's book, any more than the bible is, just the main protagonists moving the story forward happen to be children.

Anyway, that was what I did, this Thanksgiving. Retreated into my room into another world, and didn't give myself too much guff about it. It's a four day vacation, for heaven's sake, I don't have to go anywhere or do anything, and I certainly don't relish Black Friday and avoid it like the plague, so where better to be but home?

That's my story and I'm sticking to it.

Retreat, a good thing, and something we should all give ourselves permission to do from time to time.

The idea, of course, is that you come out the other side refreshed and better able to handle the world again. We will see. I have less than a month to go, and then I get another entire week to do as I wish. What will I choose to do then?