Siddity In The City

Whinge.

Welcome to my whingefest. I try to limit this kind of pointless self-flagellation to my journals, but tonight, I just felt like sharing. Fuck. I've been thinking a lot lately about how my life is not what I want it to be. What it needs to be. My life is a shambles. (Ish. Shamblesish. I'm not breaking up marriages, or cussing out old ladies, or kicking puppies, or fucking other people up or anything. Just me. Even in my up-fucking, I'm pretty self-centered.) I'm 27. Instead of spending my days "in the field," conducting doctoral research on the Sikh diaspora or something (like I thought I would be doing at this point waaaaaay back when I was 21), or researching in-depth articles on education and minority students and supplementing my income with trend-monkey magazine front-of-book freelance whoring (like I swore I'd be doing when I finished J-school at 25), or at the very least finishing my terrible and generally intellectually masturbatory first novel, I'm doing...something else. This year I'll earn about ten times what I earned at 24. I can actually pay my bills. And afford to do fun things with my free time. And yet I'm more stressed out now than I was then, because who has time to have fun when you're working enough to have money and then some, really? I'm used to a lot of fun. It may seem like I'm having lots of fun in my blog-life, but hell, do you know how much time I spend on this goddamned blog? And how much time I spend working or on-call? So no, not so much fun as I had when I was po' and hanging out with similarly un- or under-employed college friends. Oh, and hello, friends?!? All so far away! Why the hell am I in New York?!? Booo, isolating, high-rise, box-people city! I really would rather live in a wooden house where making more friends would be eeeeeeeeezaaaaaaay.* I don't get nearly enough sleep, even though I usually work afternoons and evenings, so I don't have to get up early in the morning. But I blog and then go to bed late and then make myself get up a few hours later to scurry to the gym an hour before work. Then I rush through my workout and rush back to shower and work and I'm already exhausted halfway through my fucking day. I'm not eating or exercising the way I should, or want to. I'm an excellent cook, in perhaps the greatest food and shopping city in the world, and money is no longer a barrier to getting the kinds of high quality, varied health foods I love. I love walking, and used to do it, just for the hell of it, for up to four hours a day, depending on what I had to do that day (think walking from my apartment in Brookline to the Boston Haymarket on a summer afternoon. And walking back. And then walking over to Cambridge for my internship, drinks and fun with friends. I used to do that shit. Now, I walk to the gym, maybe three, four days a week, and spin myself to nowhere for 40 minutes at a time). I've gained 25 lbs in the last few years. And while, weight-wise, I'm not anywhere near where I was fifteen years ago, that's a friggin' lot, goddammit. And my apartment is a fucking pig-sty. All of this is my fault. All of it. And it's making me nuttier than a box of Cracker Jacks. So why I am sitting here doing this, not sleeping, not cleaning, and definitely having just finished a bowl of cold sesame noodles delivered to me at greater-than-I-should-be-expending-expense? Wait a minute. Why am I sitting here doing this? I'm going to go clean. I'll go to bed when I've finished. And tomorrow morning, I'll get up early enough to go for an actual walk to a place that doesn't involve other people all walking in place. And I'll make plans for my new day off, since I'll be cutting back my workload by a day per week. Those plans will include a weekly pitch research-and-writing session. By the end of this month, one of those fuckers better result in an actual pitch. I haven't written for anyone but myself since last August. The loss of income from that day I'm not working will be a nice motivator, too. And seriously, I have got to stop with the dinner delivery. Goodgod. If I just put aside what I usually spent on delivery each month, I probably won't notice the lost wages, anyway. I'm pretty sure that if I iron this stuff out, my desire for new Pumas and electronics will fall off sharply. Not to nothing, but to a far lower level of insane desire for shiny wired things and bright suede shoes. Speaking of which, tomorrow, more posts about shoes. Promise. No, really, because I spent, like, an hour today at Puma.com making up a fantasy list, and, my, was it fantastic. I could spend $600 at Puma.com eeeeeeeezaaaaaaay. What? All that other shit is going to take some time. I'll probably take this stupid post down in the morning. Dammit. *That would be Coldplay.

posted by Sid @ 4/04/2005 12:06:00 AM