so little time to write...

Just realized that since I decided I was allowed not to write in this blog everyday I've become kind of lax. This is a shame, but also given everything I'm trying to keep up with in my life, understandable.  However, if I am attempting to keep a real-time record of all this transition, I should be writing more I suppose.

But I guess this much can be said: I'm busy now.  I went to a conference on Thursday night and Friday called BlogHer for women who blog and want to get published in book form.  I was hesitant about attending, but met an editor who was encouraging about my grandmother book (The Amazing True Imaginary Autobiography of Dick and Jani), so yet more reason to get back to that.

I am hoping once the first 5 week session of teaching is over this will be humanly possible - that and beginning to feel at least a little settled in my new-old-new city.  I still feel odd, but as I've only been here for 3 weeks, I suppose this makes sense.

I am loving watching the leaves change in the park outside my apartment building, I am sad to see some of the more obvious poverty on the subway, like the guy begging for money tonight who had no shoes, and others who have hoods over their heads not to be intimidating, but seemingly out of shame.  There was the big rat I saw on the sidewalk and some people who were hanging out looking like probable drug dealers.

Then there was all the amazing music on the subway platforms, men - mostly though not exclusively - on keyboards, drums, whatever...finding ways to play in the most unlikely places, seemingly content to do so.  Someone else singing.  All of the music good.

There is the strange feeling underneath all of my sadness and freakedoutedness that all is well and even a surge of happiness.  This is the precise opposite of how I would feel in London, which was even when I was happy underneath would be some sense of doom.  I don't think this was true the whole time I was there but for the last year or so it was.

On the other hand, I feel, especially when contemplating the horrendous issue of unaffordable health insurance, a nostalgia for Europe in general and the idea of a real social safety net and a way of life that is not so harsh - forever rewarding those who do well financially so generously while being so careless of those who do work that is perhaps not so well compensated or are struggling to find any work at all.

I am nonetheless glad to be here, but realized yesterday when I was looking at a bunch of people hanging out after a show at The Brick Theater in Williamsburg that I would never be Just American either.  I felt somehow apart, even as I was enjoying seeing and talking with old friends and meeting new folks.  I discovered living in the UK how American I was, but now, back home (I guess), I am somehow something else, a strange hybrid, and cannot sink back into my comfy American-ness.  Neither am I British or European.  I do not know what this makes me.  An ex-expat?

Maybe this sense of strangeness will vanish over time, it probably will, but right now I feel as I feared I might when journeying back - like I belong precisely nowhere.  And I don't mean by this that I will never feel at home again - well, I hope that's not what I mean - but I am somewhat amazed by the extent of the sense of alienation.  Perhaps it is simply me.  I don't know anymore.  I mean really - I don't know.

The weird corollary to this experience is that I have these amazing connections with individual people. Perhaps because I am in a kind of alienated bubble, when there is a connection it seems all the more vivid for that.  Today speaking with a woman I've met through mutual friends, I spoke for a long time about some projects and ideas, all of which emerged from sharing some pretty deep personal history.  That was truly exciting.

So too was the encouragement from/connection with even if brief the editor at the conference and another woman I met there who is my age and with whom I connected.

Something I do notice: I'm trying to do too damn much every day and have to find a way to simplify.  I am trying to start up so many things all at once and all that will happen if I keep doing this is: I will continue doing too damn much for a long, long time.  The illusion ever receding into the horizon of the simpler time...

A lovely woman at the conference Dominique Browning, who's written a book one the topic of Slow Love, said one of her principles, which I heartily endorse, is: mono-tasking.  I believe the whole computer/internet instant access thing has seriously impinged on our ability to do this, and I know for me definitely it has.

So here's to mono-tasking and taking the time to enjoy what I do have, where I do stand, the people I do have in my life and the air I do breathe.  Now.

Speaking of which: now I am quite tired though and must go to bed.