jaysaint Getting it all down on paper…

I don’t want to go back to work on Monday. No no no no no.

The punchline is that my job isn’t unpleasant. It’s creative, I’ve got independence. But I’m having a hard time a) concentrating and b) caring.

The joke will be on me when I get swept up in the layoffs.

But if I don’t (which is what I expect) I’m set here until Septemeber 2005 unless I want to pay back the hefty cost of my relocation. Which I do not. I shudder to think what the total would be.

I shouldn’t complain, I’m lucky to have the job I do. Maybe I just miss the news division.

It’s the last hour of calm before I swing into prep mode. We’ve been invited to a potluck dinner, but we’re not expected until 4. So we slept late and now I’m making a pot of spaghetti so that we can get warmed up for eating.

I’ve got my groceries on hand. I’ll be making lemony mustardy Brussels sprouts and red skinned mashed potatoes. Both of these I do really really well.

I dreamed last night that I was back in my childhood home and we were having a big party. I was an adult, but all my relatives were back at the age they were when I was a child. It was lovely — my grandparents were there, older cousins who have also passed away were there. I even invented a new baby for my cousin Joan, who was there with her kids. In reality, Joan is now well past child-bearing age and her kids are grown up. I even gave the baby a name. She handed her to me and told me her name was Anne Carter Caruso. That was when the phone rang and woke me up.

So right now I’m grateful for a dream that put me back in the same city with my whole family, and all of them alive and well.

I am astonished that every time I want to turn on the television I have to conduct a search for the remote control. It’s not like I take it out of the living room. It’s not like I stick it under the couch or behind the radiator. But I still can’t seem to leave in in a place where I can see it. Actually, I just popped a movie on a few minutes ago and now as I look around, I don’t see the remote.

But soon enough we’ll go out, and then it won’t matter. Damon and I are going to the library to hear the guy who wrote ‘The Know-It-All’ do a little thing. I read a little bit of the book in Boston last weekend and it was making laugh out loud in the bookstore. The guy (A.J. Jacobs) is an NPR contributor.

Last weekend we had a visit with Rick and Kellee in Boston. There were several inches of snow on the ground and it was gorgeous. I’ll be eating my words when it’s endlessly frigid here in New York, but I was taken with it. What a stroke of luck to hit the first snow of the season. We tromped through Harvard Yard and saw the snowmen and snowwomen the students built that afternoon. Their snowmen looked smarter than mine did when I was a kid.

Here’s an unrelated but interesting question for the cat experts out there… Zoe has decided she can’t stand for us to sleep. This is no good. She’ll let us go to bed at night but very very early in the morning she will stand in the doorway (well out of reach, smart cat) and just wail. She’ll keep it up until we surrender and at least one of us gets up. And then she’s happy. This morning Damon got up and gave her a can of cat food, which she finished and then went back to crying. Then I got up and shoved her out the bedroom door and closed it. And she just sat right outside and cried. We live in a Manhattan apartment, it’s not like I can closer her up very far away from us. This is something she’s just started in the last few weeks. Maybe we need to give her more food in the morning. Or maybe we need to feed her the canned food at night. She’d freak out in the mornings for a while, but maybe she’d get used to it. Thoughts?

I’m happily home and even more happily in my pajamas. I haven’t seen my couch since Tuesday night. I know it’s only Friday, but I feel my flight home gives me leverage to add at least a week’s worth of complaining. I do not like to fly. I particularly don’t like to fly on tiny airplanes. The most over-rating thing on the face of the earth is a corporate jet. So I’m on the AOL shuttle from DC to NYC earlier this evening and it’s swooping and shuddering and bouncing. I kept thinking “I’m going down like Buddy Holly.” I was coursing with adrenaline and miserable. Fortunately we made our landing on the first try. Did I mention that sometimes they abort landings at the private airport? A last-minute swoop back up into the sky for a do-over. I told the woman next to me that that happens sometimes and she said, “If that happens I am going to cry. I mean I am going to wail.” And we laughed that “This is not really funny” laugh.

Ah — an invitation to go get pizza with my boyfriend. I’m off!

I freely admit that I’m still in the angry, chair-kicking frame of mind. I’m bereaved over what my country has chosen for itself. And my feelings toward many of my fellow Americans are vengenful and harsh.

But I aspire to the position of my friend James, who sent this this morning:

Today is a new beginning. It’s the day I commit myself to be more of an activist. To speak out, loudly, against injustice and unfairness. It’s the day I program the phone numbers of my Congressman and Senators into my cell phone. It’s the day I reach deeper into my pocket and into my heart and give more of my money and my time to support the things I care about most. It’s the day I re-read the Constitution so I know how to defend attacks against it. It’s the day I console those who will be most hurt by this President and Congress who are so less fortunate than me.

It’s the day I give thanks that I live in a country where free and open elections can be held and that the will of the people is accepted and affirmed with no unrest, no violence or uncertainty of government. It’s the day I look to the future and define what I want it to be for me and for those I care about. It’s the day I swear to move forward towards that future–a better one–by putting one foot in front of the other, bringing others with me, even if that means carrying those who cannot walk towards it alone.

It’s the day I promise to bring hope to the hopeless, to become a leader, not a follower, and to “be the change I want to see in the world.”

Join me.