Schlumpy

10Feb13

I admit it … I’ve been schlumpy, like I never broke the spell of the grumpy-pants holiday season.

It was a crazy couple of weeks at work, and not just from investigative stories and the layoffs and last week’s sale announcement. More than that, even.

I kinda fell off the fitness and nutrition wagon these past few weeks, and feel a little rounder as a result. I’ll get back on. I always do, but it hurts to fall back into ruts and start behind where you were. The hill to climb just to get my knee back in order seems almost insurmountable. I ran three miles two weeks ago and it ached for days, the grimacing-and-pausing-on-each-stair-of-the-staircase kind of ache.

I’ve also been homesick. I just need to go home for the weekend, but it’s always so exhausting, and then I’m sad the first few days back. Four hours each way is a long drive for the weekend. This month kind of piled up with social events on weekends — not complaining, so maybe next month. I know it’s time to go home when my nieces and nephews start calling and asking when I’m showing up next. Going home always generates a good dose of perspective — reminding me how insular my world is here, and that it doesn’t have to be, and that in the grand scheme of things, everything really is going just fine. And I don’t have to get drunk with my friends from high school anymore, because it’s too awkwardly nostalgic and makes us all too thinky.

I’m also tiring a little of my commute, but I really do love my apartment, and I just can’t face moving again, especially while the newspaper sale, and whatever it changes, shakes out.

Regardless of all that, everything really is good. The thing with The Boy is going wonderfully. It grooves. It adds so much fun and light-heartedness and big-heartedness “that was not there before.”

Re: schlump-breaking, I’ve been trying. It will happen. It might take a tanning bed session or the new Gary Allan CD or a trip home or to Spokane to see Scartown, or something, but it will happen.

I’ve got a possible Sunday Story brewing, and as far as I can tell, it does not involve a death. If you know me, and my stories, you get the significance — and the strangeness — of that.

In the meantime, I’ve been self-medicating with a whole lot of Elliott and Jason and Bay Area rap, ladyfriend email chains, occasional calls to Mom and arguably too much black eyeliner. And escapes to Seattle, taking to the sidewalks to shuffle off the work week, learn new streets and remember what Ellroy describes as “the wonder.”