Are you thrilled that we’re at Friday? Not only Friday but a 3-day weekend? I’m sure that if I were on a perpetual 3-day weekend I would get bored (really?) and have to come up with a project to break the lovely leisure, but right now I am so excited to have a stack of books, a Tempurpedic mattress and plenty of Prosecco. I will take a walk on the beach and love every sandy moment. I’ll give my hair a deep moisturizing treatment and shave my legs. Ideally, there would be a thunderstorm, but if we don’t get one, I’ll turn on the White Noise app on my iPhone and pretend it’s raining outside while I’m reading inside.  I’ll make up another bag of clothes I don’t wear but am saving for when I’m a bag lady during the 2nd Great Depression and give them away. Goodbye, cheesy black lace Libertine skirt I bought at Target! What was I thinking? Next weekend I’m traveling to take this workshop and will need to haul out my introvert side, so this weekend is all for being a happy hermit. After years of wishing I could be more like my high-alert friends, I’ve finally learned that I need to balance being around people and trying new experiences with periods of being quiet and alone and recharging what has been depleted.

Screening is too easy, and I don’t mean just screening calls. It’s screening the unspoken messages that you aren’t good enough or cool enough or just enough. My doctor, who I love and who is so incredibly human and humane and innovative, always asks me if I’m seeing “someone.” I’m glad he does, because he’s just keeping tabs on my social life to make sure that I  have one, that I’m not isolated or hermiting. How many docs bother? But when other people ask me that and the answer is “no,” I always feel somehow that it’s my fault. Why don’t I meet any men, why aren’t I on match.com, what’s wrong with me?  So I’m trying to look at it from a different point of view: How great it is that my friends and acquaintances believe I’m capable of attracting a “someone.” So many things in life benefit from standing on the other side of the window and looking outside in, instead of always from the inside out.

I’ve been thinking really hard lately about greening, about trying to resensitize myself to the world around me, to somehow get back to a five-year-old’s matter-of-fact oneness with it. Of course, I can’t ignore the layers of experience that have built up around my soul since I was five, that have muffled the message of the beautiful old world, but there are certain objects, colors, sounds, words that call them up still. The green leaves of the basil plant on my porch remind me of the big, velvety green leaves of the tobacco plants that hung from the rafters of my grandfather’s barn. A poem like The Healing Time by Pesha Gertler that breaks through the carapace formed by being one of the living wounded (aren’t we all?!) to make me cry. Coming across a paper garland on Etsy made out of pages of a book I first read in front of the fireplace in my grandmother’s bedroom, which also functioned as living/sitting/center of the world room in her house. Remembering that aside from stabbing my playmate in the scalp with a No. 2 pencil I was a dreamy, quiet kid who had a rockin’ interior life and vivid imagination. That I loved cutting and pasting more than anything, and whenever I can do it now, I regain fragments of that state of mind. Scissors, please.

I don’t know if this message was a response to a boarded up store in the neighborhood where I work or just a cry from the heart.  If the latter, I get it. There are so many things I’d like to undo:

I wish I’d been a better daughter.

I shouldn’t have thrown that Irish coffee at an old boyfriend in the middle of the street one night.

Being self-conscious instead of self-confident.

Saying yes when my brain shouted no — only about a million times.

What’s his name — wow, undo it.

Sitting on my bum so many years instead of exercising.

Withholding love, trust, a simple hug in order to maintain a resentment or a wall.

I don’t know anyone who doesn’t have to fall down and get dirty and get up and do something different they’d want to undo later. Over and over. And when you start undoing, where does it end? So many good things connected to so many regrettable things — if you start to unravel one, the others come loose, too.  So no undoing, but maybe just understanding.

This week I took a step outside my comfort zone (which is always set at about 80 degrees) by submitting an essay to a writing competition run by a national magazine. Regardless of the fact that I started my own local magazine, I still break out in a sweat to think of sending my work out to a larger venue. After all, isn’t that why I started my own publication — to avoid rejection? I always accept anything I submit to myself!  And then a friend emailed me the link to the competition with the message “Today’s the deadline–do it.”  My first reaction was that there was no way I could write 1500 words off the top of my head in an afternoon. But I feel like I’m saying “no” way too much lately. And I needed a challenge, so why not try? Why not try and not tell anyone in case I couldn’t pull it off? Why not try it, submit it and not tell anyone in case I didn’t win? But in the end it was such a win for me just to prove to myself I could do it that I felt like I was walking on air after I emailed it off to the magazine running the competition. I didn’t go on a safari, I didn’t run for office, I didn’t learn how to parasail. I just hit “Send” and that was huge for me. What is “daring” for you?

I read today that the moon is shrinking and that Barnes & Noble is up for sale. I know there are more urgent problems in the world (like Sarah Palin’s shrinking IQ and expanding ego being in charge of our future), but I just cannot handle a diminished moon and no shelves of books to lose myself in on a Sunday afternoon. We’ve  already lost handwritten letters, and printing out emails for posterity doesn’t have the same feel without the eccentric handwriting, different textures of paper, colorful stamps. I have a cigar box with a bundle of pale blue airmail love letters written by two different men from two different countries in a long-ago summer, and they still exude a bit of moonlight and wantonness when I come across them and open the lid. So I don’t want to think of the moon forever waning or sexting replacing love letters or books becoming museum exhibits — even though I’m the most gadget-crazy person I know. I still need the mystery of love and mysteries published on paper and a moon so full and ripe it renders me speechless with awe.

I had drinks with my Tuesday friend (on Thursday) and learned that a mutual acquaintance whose talent and phenomenal success I’ve always envied has moved out of town. When you’ve spent a lot of subliminal creative energy being jealous of someone, it leaves a void when you don’t have that straw (wo)man to fight. I had to ask myself what she had represented in my life that was so thorny. Some career trajectory I’d missed, some talent I lacked, some spiritual certainty I’d never have? Envy is embarrassing because it makes you so small, even if no one but you knows about it. Of course I can use this as an opportunity to do soul searching or at least to face what I’ve felt and name it–but oh how mortifying, how human!

The heating/AC guy came today to check out my system and recommended I put more insulation in my attic. To cut back on my utility bills and help save the planet. But $1300 is a trip to London, and I think of my mom who was so practical all her life and never got farther from Kentucky than the East Coast ocean when she came to visit me. Even though she could have taken a trip to Ireland, which she longed to see all her life, she never dared. So she ended up safe and secure in assisted living but never got beyond her home town in so many ways, both geographical and emotional. I want to go back to Borough Market, visit the Dennis Severs house, wander the Tate, sit in a pub and write in my journal, but it feels so grasshopperish, which is my true nature. I have all bills on automatic pay, keep my house in good repair, recycle, pay my taxes, look for ways to economize, but oh how I long to hop off to London with new shoes on my Grasshopper feet instead of blowing insulation into my attic like a good little Ant. And at the same time, my shy, retiring Ant side is not unhappy to stay home in bed and read novels about England instead of actually buying the ticket, packing the bag and hopping a plane.

After reading the headlines on the cover of  the new issue of Oprah’s magazine, I can hardly catch my breath. There’s just not enough time to:

* Meditate and Lose Weight
* Clean Up a Mess of Debt
* Transform Your Look, Luck, Life
* Get a Great Job in 3 Steps
* Find Out What Wonders You Can Achieve

Between fulltime work, worrying about my family and counting points on Weight Watchers, I’m already pretty busy. But this month, Oprah is practically jumping out of the cover in her eagerness to give my life a makeover. I wish she would step back a pace or two from the camera. I know her enthusiasm is supposed to be “empowering,” but sometimes it feels a little Calvinistic. Perfect thyself! Make progress! Pull yourself up by your own underwear! With Oprah, there is always a new guru to follow, a new exercise plan, a new Aha! moment, a new thing to know for sure. There is no rest for the unimproved in the world of O. Of course I want to Grow, to become the best possible version of myself that I can be, but what if I’m always the KMart version of myself instead of the Neiman-Marcus Me? Part sow’s ear, part silk purse? A little lazy, a little selfish, a little prone to self-doubt. I know I will religiously read all “178 Inspiring Ways to Change Things Up” in this issue, and I’ll mean to try them, I really will. But most likely I’ll take a nap, skip spinning or read some Jane-Austeny novel instead of Eckhart Tolle. It’s what I know for sure about myself.

* Sometimes I don’t brush my teeth before bed, but I feel so guilty I get up in the middle of the night and do it.

* My recent bedtime reading has been books about death on K2, the second highest mountain in the Himalayas. Problem is that I’m so freaked out, I can’t get to sleep.

* I have to have white noise to drown out my overbusy brain at night. Still I often wake up and write a note to myself in the middle of the night which I can’t decipher in the morning. Still wondering what “buspry” means.

* I have a great fear of a giant Palmetto bug crawling on me in the night. I’ve lived in SC since 1985 and I’m still terrified of these Jurassic Park insects.

* I’m not a morning person, but I have a job that starts at 9am. Brutal, inhuman, demoralizing!

* When I took Ambien, I would get up and eat in the night, apparently still asleep. When I woke up one morning sprawled out in a pile of cracker crumbs and walnuts like the last one to leave a Roman orgy I knew I had to give it up.

* Now that I have a foundation under my Temperapedic mattress, I need a ladder to climb into bed. I feel like the girl in The Princess and The Pea, my second favorite fairy tale. My favorite is the gruesome and Grimm little tale of Little Red Riding Hood. No wonder, then, that I love grisly murder mysteries and true-life tragedies as bedtime stories.

* I’m not a cuddler and I feel bad about it. Coming home to my own bed and bedroom is always like a big sigh of luxury mixed with a little loneliness. I’d like to be a hugger, and I wish it came naturally to me to call someone “hon” or “babe,” but it just doesn’t. I guess I need to meet either an equally repressed man or one who is naturally demonstrative. But still, I really don’t want to call anyone “hon”.

* I spent five or so years living with the wrong lamp. I loved my handcarved hula girl but she was just so tall that I had to sit up out of the edge of sleep in order to turn the damn thing off and then I’d be wide awake again. I just gave her away and I miss her eccentricity.