Don't get your hopes up. Get your hopes up. Don't want it to be more than it is; don't think too much about what it is; research it and find out as much as you can. 

Maybe it's just a store, maybe it's just the gift shop you exit through, maybe it's a carefully crafted and curated mockery of capitalism. Maybe that's enough. Is it overpriced? Don't think about that. There's a store in San Francisco that sells pirate gear, there's a store in New York that sells superhero stuff, this is a store that sells pareidolia peppers and that's the same thing, except what goes on behind the curtain is different. Well, it's not a curtain. For you it's a gardening section; for your sister it was strangely melted soda in a refrigerator door, and behind that an office full of clues. You forgot to ask your son and your parents where they came through. Later you went out through the refrigerator and up through a t-shirt display that  reminded you of a story (or possibly a thing that happened?) of hiding behind a clothes rack. Probably it was something you read in a book. You climbed the stairs and emerged through a file cabinet and started again.

There's a story that starts in the produce department of a man whose daughter is sending messages from a cornfield except it's not his daughter, it's a manifestation of his wishes. The story continues (after the gardening department) as an older woman (your age) meeting a younger woman in something that looks like a music video or actually more like a Jodorowsky film. There are no words. You want to watch it all, but it is very long and you feel like you'll never see everything if you look at anything too long.

Once you spent 30 of your 120 Scottish minutes very happily puttering about in empty rooms on the wrong floor, wondering vaguely where everyone had gone, enjoying yourself very much but kind of missing the point. No regrets because you had another 120 minutes later and however you spend your time you usually have a good time except when you don't, and this was a good time. This feels like that. A vagueness, a sense that there's more that you should be doing but an overall contentment with what you have. There was a pharmacy with herbs in jars there, and you stole a piece of candy.

There are projections. There's a teenager's bedroom with pictures of cute boys on the wall and through the wall a passageway with a rope you use to climb up the rocks. There's a hut with herbs in it and this also reminds you of that wrong floor. There's a factory worker with a flashlight who tells you there's a knock knock joke with seven parts. Well that happened later. There's a room with a strobe light that takes your picture and you remember one of the last times you saw John and there was a strobe light, you were throwing water and watching the droplets caught in the air although of course they fell to the ground in puddles and you slid and danced in them. You stay alone in the room, disconnected with memory for a minute, and a woman comes in and dances and it feels like someone's reading your mind but of course everything is coincidence. Later you think she may have worried about you. Later you think you should have danced. There's a room where you can make music by interrupting light.

There are places where you can converse with a program and you type questions but you know they're the wrong questions. Someone before you has written FARTS FARTS FARTS and that is also the wrong question but worse. There are more and more people and it's stressful. There's hand sanitizer dispensers at every doorway and you put your hand under all of them, rubbing your hands together like a hopeful minion as you move from room to room. A henchman. A particular kind of supervillain.

There are letters to read and you read them with the same mild anxiety that you watch the films, with the pleasure of enjoying a particular medium and the concern that you're maybe supposed to be doing something more interactive. It seems like there's a story being told and you can get the point just by paying attention to the right text, the right visual images. It's possible you're missing the point. This seems like a pretty solid metaphor for how you live.

You run into your sister, who is on a quest to find someone who is missing. Your son is on a quest to find out how to be part of a corporation, or maybe destroy a corporation. This also seems like a metaphor. You meet your parents in the bar because you agreed to do so, but it is not enough and you leave again. They also have missed the part about interaction. A man handed your father a clue and your father handed it back. The amount that you are overthinking this is impressive. There is so much to think about though. 

Once a woman tore out a chunk of her hair and threw it at your feet and you couldn't speak. Once a woman held your hands and made you pour poison down her throat, and her eyes rolled back in her head and still you felt like you couldn't speak. Once a man touched your cheek and went through a doorway with someone else because you didn't know to push for what you wanted. People speak here, and this is somehow more disturbing. You still don't know how to get what you want, or what you want, and whether that's more than what you have. You leave when you can't take any more.

Back at the bar, you drink gin and chew on acmella oleracea and it is numb and wonderful, you feel numb and wonderful, stunned beyond sensation. Four hours of beauty and creativity, beyond what you had expected, and now you can admit that you expected a lot. What more could you want? When you walk outside, it is like walking out of a matinee, the shock of the sunshine, except more so: the sun is hotter than it has ever been, and brighter, and still the shadows of what you wanted and what you got cling to you, days later.

I actually started making notes of things I wanted to write about which is the saddest way to write I know. And yet here we are. I'm leaving for the US next week and I probably won't write what I want to write before then and past experience shows I'll collect a whole basket of new things to write about after. Going off my notes and the top of my head, let's do a little brain dump for 30 minutes. Break in the ol typity fingers.

I want to write about "fear of missing out" or "FOMO" and how I don't have it and how I wonder whether that makes life easier or harder. I want to write about the levels of discomfort I will endure before I realize I am uncomfortable and launch myself at apparently insane speeds towards comfort. How that has to do with FOMO and not. I am afraid of being forgotten or unwanted but that's different. I'm not afraid there's a better party somewhere than the one I'm at.

I've been thinking a little about my arrogance but I'm not sure it's arrogance.

I took a personality test that was interesting in that it was presented like a Likert scale but instead of opposites it was like "On a scale from 0 to 5, would you rather be alone (0) or eat ice cream (5)?" I gotta say the results seemed pretty accurate for me and in a real way, not a horoscope-y way.

There's a thing you do where you answer increasingly personal questions and stare deeply into the other person's eyes and then you're supposed to be in love; I first heard of this 5 years ago and despite my enthusiasm and curiosity nobody's wanted to do it with me which I guess is one way to keep from falling in love, to not even try. I try not to take it personally. Sometimes I take it personally.

What else? I had an idea for a short story that I really liked (the idea) and then I overthought it and overthought it until it was a rough thing I had sanded to fineness and then into nothingness. I have dreams that people are telling me what they really think of it and they don't like it. And I have to keep going back to the idea of it, how much I liked that rough wood. 

I asked for some things from one client and I got them so easily that it felt like maybe I should have asked for more (even while I am very happy to have gotten what I asked for; that moment of wondering whether that was the right thing to ask). I asked for some other things from a different client and was ignored and that made me pretty unhappy or if we're being honest angry. I'm glad I am self-employed and can now go forward deciding to work with the people who give me what I want and not with the people who don't, but I wish we could all just agree to do things my way all the time since I'd be happier and so would most of the people who deserve to be. 

What's funny is that if you know what I'm talking about you know I'm being completely honest and that I'm also completely right. This is what I mean about the arrogance. I know it comes off like that but it's really not. I know truth is often subjective. I believe there's multiple true ways to look at a blackbird. 

I probably spend two hours a week thinking about people I don't know at all and wondering why they behave in ways I don't understand. I spend more than that thinking about people I do know but that seems reasonable. I think that I will never cure cancer or do anything particularly remarkable so figuring out why people do things and trying to fill the part of the world I inhabit with a little more understanding seems like a "leave only footprints" way to be, I mean it doesn't seem like a waste of time. But the people I don't know at all, there's no justification. 

Although I love people physically, their bodies and how they move, the curves and angles, the way they smell, I cannot imagine loving someone separate from their mind; I can barely imagine feeling a connection to someone's body without their thoughts being there somehow. It's interesting to me that this is cultural, learned. It feels beyond logic; it feels like instinct. 

Good poems. Art painted from joy. Art painted from darkness, reaching towards joy. Days with no or few clouds when it's warm enough to sit on the ground. The perfect drinkable temperature of coffee. How it feels when I remember to take care of my body. Marking things off "to do" lists. Making "to do" lists. The kindness of strangers. There are some people who are so incredibly unreasonably kind to me and I don't thank them enough but when I'm dark and sad and have to count reasons to live they're on my list. That's probably enough for now.

I have probably mentioned that I love my job. I do! I like working from home, I like being my own boss, I like having a schedule that waxes and wanes. For a while I wanted to focus more on medical editing and stop doing academic editing altogether, and I wrote to I think every teaching hospital in Europe and got exactly two responses and that made me sad. But then I started doing some more academic editing that I enjoyed and I am grateful for the variety. Like, I am really interested in neurology and Alzheimer's disease and almost anything involving parts of the brain that sound funny, but I also like getting to do the history of puppetry in Central Europe.

I also really like doing voice work — dubbing and audiobooks. I remember a time when I did not love the sound of my own voice but uh I got over it. It does not sound as good as it does in my head so you'll never get to hear it as beautifully as I do, but I no longer recoil in horror when I hear a recording of myself. I sound pretty good.

It's therefore kind of sad for me that the last month has been frustrating. I assume part of it is COVID burnout. It's also that usually I just work and do what's asked of me and take joy in finding typos and fixing them, and in finding more significant mistakes and fixing them, and in taking a sentence and massaging it into a thing of beauty, and in snipping off the fat, and in reading something incredibly difficult and then reading it again and understanding it. I like doing what I do so much that I don't need praise, so when I do get it, it's like: ahhhh, nice. But the project I've been working on for the last month, in addition to being full of grammar/ spelling/ syntax/ style errors, which is fine, that's what they pay me for… it just seems pointless. And sometimes that happens; sometimes the work I do feels like the author wasn't interested at all. It's hard, but I get through it; work isn't fun all the time. But this is nearing 400 pages and the amount of nnnnnaaargggh is taking me to dark places in terms of questioning my own self worth, why I accept things I don't want, can I do this for seven more years, etc etc.

More humorously, I was asked to do the voice over for an ad that the client wanted to sound "like Galadriel in the Lord of the Rings" movie. Which seemed odd, as it was an ad for a tech thing, but you know people can be weird so ok. So I did that, and then the client was like "Ooh, that's lovely, but it sounds too much like a fairy tale. Can you do it like that, but less so?" and we went a few rounds before we landed on a crisp, businesslike voice that was about the furthest from Galadriel as whatever the other end of Cate Blanchett's spectrum is, but without the Australian accent. This would have been frustrating except that the engineer mixing the tape was more perplexed than I was so it was merely funny and in the end I got paid which is the happy ending for all work stories, isn't it.

We've passed the anniversary of the first lockdown, but since we had the "eye of the pandemic" (like the eye of the storm, not like the eye of Sauron) all summer here I can't really say it's been a year of my life sucked away or anything. I'm working hard now so that if there's a chance to travel safely I can jump at it with no regrets. I might maybe take a weekend off soon though, cause nobody loves me when I'm whining, especially not when I actually have it pretty good. I know.

I have never had fantastic luck with dentists, and it got worse when I moved here. I had a dentist in 1994 who, when drilling my tooth, hit a nerve and told me it shouldn't have been there and when I cried told me that Americans were babies. The dentist who (horrified) fixed that was great, then she left the practice. The next one I found was incredible, private practice and worth it; she emigrated with her husband. The person who took over her practice told me that a good way to lose weight was if you had to have your jaw wired shut and I should think about that. The dentist after her was clearly comparably better, because that was a pretty low bar, and also just a pleasant person.

But after about a decade of perfectly acceptable care, she got… sloppy? The nurse who had been with her since the beginning left a couple years ago, and it was a different one the next time, and the next time again. And I know that's a sign, but I just really couldn't bear to look for a dentist again. I got some fillings that didn't feel quite right, but I thought: maybe this is part of the aging process, that your teeth just start to fall apart. She fixed a cavity and when I told her I felt like the filling was too small, she drilled on the other side to make it match. And it did match, then, and I thought well maybe the previous tooth's filling had been too big? I can't see inside my mouth, and I don't have x-ray vision. I'm not a dentist; I have to trust she knows what she's doing. Before the first lockdown I had an appointment because I thought I needed a filling; I got there and told her my tooth felt really wrong, like the filling was loose in the hole, she refused to x-ray it and told me we'd get it next time because she was busy. It broke during lockdown.

So anyway I got a new dentist. They did an x-ray, which I obviously appreciated, and showed me that my last three fillings had not been exactly full, more like about halfway into the cavity. So those had to be pulled out and done again, plus I had a new cavity. In the last six months I have been to the new dentist I think six times and spent I don't even know how much on getting my teeth back to where they were three years ago. When I close my mouth, all my molars line up, my jaw sits comfortably without my having to jut it into place. And I remember that my teeth used to do that, but it had been such incremental shifts away from normal from that I hadn't noticed how far it had shifted (in fact, it was seeing myself talking on a zoom call when I realized how much my jaw was off).

Despite what you may have heard, if a frog is placed in a pan that is gradually heated until it reaches boiling, the frog will jump out at the point that the water becomes uncomfortably hot. I've been thinking about this a lot lately, the extent to which I adjust to situations. I don't want to be difficult, I don't want to be overly fussy, and I recognize that some things that matter to me don't matter to other people and sometimes we just need to get along with each other and with living. On the other hand, the point at which I jump out of the water, I turn around and stare at the pan, dumbfounded.  The feeling that I have been experiencing is threefold: one, I did not realize that the problem I had was possible to fix or worthy of being fixed; two, how the hell did I think not being able to close my mouth on both sides was a thing I should adjust to? What took me so long? How long could I have been comfortable, if I'd just acknowledged even to myself that I was uncomfortable?; and three, I am so happy to be able to chew properly again. And so now: is this a thing I have learned about dentists, or can I perhaps I apply it to other things?

It's 8:15 pm, New Year's Eve. It sounds like a war outside already, all the fireworks. I admit that I've somewhat lost my taste for small fireworks in the last few years (I still like the huge ones overhead, though I feel sorry about the damage they cause, now that I know. I still like them, it's just not unmitigated joy). Still, I'm glad that people are celebrating, however it brings them happiness. Supposedly at 9 pm we should all be safe in our houses, breathing only the air of the people we already live with. We'll see.

Strange year, no? I had a glorious vacation in California in January, loved up on my family and friends, had adventures on planes, trains, and automobiles. I felt loved. Then I came home for about five minutes, turned around and went back to the other side of the US for my aunt's funeral. She was important to me in my childhood and it was nice to see her husband, sons, grandchildren, great-grandchildren, cousins, all gathered. I still have a peppermint lifesaver to remember her by, but my memories are solid anyway.

Then I came home, Czech Theater put on a play, and the next week the whole country locked down in response to the pandemic. It was … I don't want to say "funny" but that's the word I have. I was so absolutely exhausted, like exhausted in my soul, and I needed a break. I didn't mean for the whole world to have a pandemic, I would have just stayed home quietly alone! I did not need existential dread for people in general while simultaneously being personally glad for the time out, and then the whiplash of guilt for that feeling.

People kept saying that Now We Have Learned and Now We Know and When This Is Over We Will Be Different. Will we? I think that some of us already knew that about half of the people around us, many in positions of power, are selfish and horrible. Let's say a third. Maybe some of us learned that another third already understand deeply and intrinsically what community means, the needs of the many are entwined with the needs of the one. I don't think I learned anything I hadn't learned four years ago. I'm glad if somebody did. When this is over, we will go back to how we were before, is what I think, though I'd be delighted to be wrong on that.

In the summer there was a moment where it seemed like this country had made it through by shutting down early and hard. I took a lovely vacation in Greece, where I ate my body weight in feta cheese and swam in the ocean and read and slept and laughed until my sides hurt.

Then we came back and schools reopened and we went back to something like normal and now we're shut down again. If I knew I had a week, a month, a year, it would be easier to just buckle in and sit, see where we go. I try to guess but nobody really knows.

What have I processed this year? I am afraid of being unwanted and of being useless. I've seen how I respond to situations where I feel that way and it's not how I want to be; I've seen it before but now maybe with greater clarity. It feels like I may eventually get to the point where I respond in a way that pleases me; I'm not there but it's a thing I can imagine. I think I've gotten better at accepting people where they are and arranging myself accordingly. I find it difficult to say what's changed when a lot of the things that were hard for me (social gatherings, for example) haven't been a presence, but I think I've gotten a little better at being in the moments I am in, whatever they are. 

I worked a lot. I meditated more. I watched a ton of movies, which mostly made me happy. I slept more than usual but still not as much as I would like. I remember in my 20s if I could sleep I did, for hours, I would spend a day in bed drifting between books and thoughts and writing and dreams. I can't seem to do that anymore. Still, I slept more than usual. My cooking got a little better. Squire and I settled into a pretty pleasant roommate routine. I got better at standup and did ok with shifting to online. I adapted and performed a play with some friends. I increased contact with some people, regular phone calls or longer letters, knowing that we wouldn't see each other in person for who knows. I am sometimes profoundly lonely, but that was always true.

Anyway, it's 8:45. I'm going to go stand on the balcony and look at the moon. It's midnight somewhere. Happy New Year. 

I am the kind of person who likes things to be done properly. I feel that there is a right way and a wrong way to do many, many things and I get quite distressed when people do it a different way. This makes me really good at my job, which is to make things correct in agreement with a host of very specific rules. It probably makes me a little annoying in person sometimes. As I've gotten older I've tried to channel most of this energy into things where there are objective rights and wrongs (and to recognize that not all the things that seem objective to me in fact are).

Here are some things that people get wrong that annoy me:the words to songs, historical costumes, fictional costumes, quotes of any kind but especially movie quotes, sidewalk behavior, traffic rules, spelling, historical facts, facts related to me, correct words for things esp but not only when they get it wrong on purpose, behavior related to public transportation (both official and common sense), manners when there's no cultural excuse, how to break rules, grammar, the use of the word Nazi.
That took me exactly 2 minutes. I'm trying to say that I not only understand this feeling of low-level annoyance, I BREATHE it. 

But some of these things are really gatekeeping — deciding who deserves access. So I am trying really hard to dial back my annoyance not in terms of whether there is an objective right or wrong, but in terms of whether the person could know better, and more importantly in terms of whether the wrong does actual harm. Grammar mistakes from people not lucky enough to have had my education? No harm. Factual errors from non-famous strangers on social media? No harm but maybe avoid those people because they are tedious. A dog off leash at a children's park? Potential harm. A dress with a zipper at a Jane Austen ball? No harm.

I'm not trying to say that people who experience irritation at other people who are not on their level are WRONG because that's too meta even for me. I'm just saying I don't think it's making me better in any way to be so irritated by people who don't care as much as I do, and if you're like me, maybe you would benefit from that perspective.

Yesterday I met a Czech woman who doesn't pay any attention to international news or news in general, and she doesn't speak much English, so she likes social media but only for the pictures. She had been surprised on Tuesday when instagram seemed broken, and all the artists that she follows had black profiles. She looked into it, learned about it, was shocked. She wouldn't have known. 

So if all you did was black out your profile photo, I personally don't think that's enough. But I don't think that's nothing. And I don't think you're doing it wrong, if you're trying. And I think that — just like correctly quoting Monty Python and not standing in doorways — I'm gonna keep working on just doing it right myself, as well as I can.

The problem with talking about seeing the light at the end of a tunnel is that it presumes that you are in a tunnel, a unpleasant place, dark, and that you will see, at the end of this, something hopeful, an end to your suffering, light. A light you will want to go to. Emerging, blinking, dumbfounded, into a new fresh bright reality. Well that’s not really the problem; the problem is that it leaves out my father’s joke about the light being an oncoming train. But I digress.

When I have emerged from darkness, blinking, as I say, dumbfounded into a new fresh bright reality, my main feeling is that there has been a revelation, that I have learned something, which something I promptly forget when I plunge back into darkness again. My life in this way feels less like a nice straightforward journey by train, from tunnel to light, and more like a carousel, going in circles. A noisy circus ride, endlessly up and down on the same horse and then a moment when I catch a glimpse of myself in one of the mirrors on the center pole and I see everything with sudden clarity. Then the horse keeps going, the alignment breaks, I lose sight of that moment, epiphany glides into memory, is gone. The cacophony of calliope music, the pre-recorded organs of hell, until at some point we align again and I remember: Oh, right, this clarity, I knew this once, here it is again. At this point all I’m hoping for is that when the ride grinds to a halt I’ll be in a bright spot, though in any case the ride will have ended.

I was in therapy last week gazing at my kind therapist’s kind face. He has a terrible haircut, the balding ponytail look and on the greasy side usually. I can’t take him entirely seriously because of that but when I’m talking he looks at me full in the eyes like he has nowhere he’d rather be and I appreciate that. Also sometimes he looks genuinely moved by stories I tell him and sometimes I’d pay for that, so I do. I was telling him a story about how I was working on believing I was loved whether or not people said it out loud, and it felt like a great insight was coming on except I could see that he saw it coming because he’d seen it before, I’d seen it before, nothing new. Turkey in the Straw.

Okay but what if I think of it as a train ride? What if I imagine the revelation that I told Dr. Anton last week as being a train ride through a tunnel, to the light at the end. What if I imagine a train. A compartment. You and I in a train compartment, two people sitting across from each other. What if I imagine we are traveling somewhere, somewhere we have never traveled, gladly beyond, so to speak. The train is central European, the seats the cheap but durable wine-red vinyl of every train seat, forty plus years of sausages and lard-smeared bread eaten by people sitting here, forty plus years of beer cans bought at the train station and popped once the train is in motion, forty plus years of children who didn’t want to sit still, grandmothers whose support hose constricted at the waist and inevitably sagged at the ankles, couples trying to lessen the monotony of their relationship by taking it on a trip. We have already run out of things to say and we are sitting in what I like to imagine is a companionable silence though I’m not looking at your face in case anything there contradicts me.

I see the tunnel as we approach it and I see my chance. Before we go in, I force my eyes into yours. “Why won’t you just say that you love me sometimes?” I ask, and then we are plunged into darkness. My plan, to the extent that I have one, is that you will tell me the truth in the dark. This is why I have always preferred darkness: because that’s where the truth is. Late at night, the house will tell you where it hurts; the tiniest wind and it creaks and moans. People whisper the best secrets in the dark. And even my own darkness is so much more true to me than my own light. So we will enter the tunnel now. You will tell me the truth. Here, in the darkness.

But the tunnel is too short. I always forget that European tunnels are shorter than their Asian counterparts. As if they know that what can happen in the dark is more trouble than they want. A scream. A murder. So we’re plunged into the light at the end of the tunnel in no time, and I haven’t even shifted my eyes from your face yet. I have the full brunt of your gaze when you say it.

“I won’t say I love you because I don’t.”

That’s it then, the light. The revelation. The moment of blinding, absolute clarity. The thing I could have seen coming, if I’d looked.

*joined a writing group and this was the prompt