one single, ridiculous thing.

It’s a tornado in my head right now, and it’s brutally cold outside, and everything inside of me feels like its floating, like I’m jumping the second the elevator goes down. I can’t settle. I can’t sit still. I can’t start. I can’t blink.

So here is one single, ridiculous thing on my mind:

what will I have for dinner tomorrow night?

I love quiet Fridays, and honestly, I don’t much mind spending them alone when I get the chance. It feels so good in my little introvert brain to be able to take a breath, to see the weekend stretching in front of me, to mark the passage of time. I need a lot of space and time (sometimes too much, I think) to be able to find my center, to get everything aligned again.

J and I took a nice meandering walk last weekend with the purpose of dropping my bike at the shop to get the derailers adjusted (I talk like I know bike things). After dropping it off, we walked down to a doughnut shop to buy two extremely overpriced doughnuts (but nutella + bacon + doughnut = good). Then we lamented the fact that a tiny $3 doughnut doesn’t even barely start to fill the breakfast hole, so we walked to the market and wound up with two empanadas. Finally, when my bike was finished, we picked it up and walked slowly home.

Those are my favorite days with him, the slow ones without a plan, the space to just talk and talk. I take it as a good sign that after four years, he’s still my favorite person to talk to.

As we were walking, we started to talk about meditation. It hasn’t been a thing for either of us, him slightly scarred by a Buddhist roommate, and me slightly scarred by a very awkward meditation class offered at my last job. But he had read that the practice of open monitoring meditation (which I think is this?) can have a powerful effect on our ability to be creative. So we talked about trying it together.
Of course, that was last weekend and I haven’t really seen him (at least awake) since then, and probably won’t until sometime in the middle of next week. Sometimes there are just those weeks when work does a number on life. When one of us works early and the other works late (so late!) it can start to feel more like living alone.

Which brings me back around to tomorrow night. Should I meditate? Or should I make and eat an entire pan of buffalo chicken dip? Tough decisions.