A post I wrote in longhand while waiting for a train last night, typed in verbatim

As in I'm finally starting to get some. Equilibrium. Because I'm not, you know, "getting some", I mention before E has a chance to imply anything.

So, equilibrium. Funny to be feeling it on a day that started off so muggy I had to change out of the sweater I'd planned to wear and ended with me freezing in a light jacket I carried to work more as a talisman to ward off cold weather than as useful outerwear.

Today is also the day I forgot my book and ended up waiting an unusually long time for a train. My book of the moment is The Fortress of Solitude. Before that it was Choke, which led to the following conversation in another train station two weeks ago:

RANDOM GUY: I noticed your book.
ME (wary -- if you've read Choke you know why): Yeah?
RG: They're making a movie of it.
ME (relieved and interested, and yet I express myself with the same word): Yeah? Who did they cast?
RG: I don't know. Hopefully Ed Norton.

And at that point we parted ways, which is just as well since I think it should be one Chuck Palahniuk lead character to a customer but I doubt I could have found a polite way to say so. Also, I read the main character as blond. Baselessly, I think, but still.

I'm pissed that I don't have my book. Any book.

Anyway.

What else can I tell you about my life right now?

The part of coming to DC that felt like a natural adventure is over, and now any adventure will require some effort.

At best this means things have settled down enough for me to get back to writing. At worst it means I am already in a rut and my powers of observation have lost their new-city sharpness, dulled by all the things I know I can expect to see. So much automation so soon.

I'm also a little lonely, which is mostly my own damn fault because I haven't made the time to answer e-mail or go out much and instead I push my nose deep into books during those (normally) brief spaces on a train or waiting for one, or before I fall asleep.

I'm scraping together small intimacies, though. The twenty minute conversation about DC with the guy who sold me the new brown boots that replaced my ratty brown boots. The looks exchanged with the woman in front of me at the grocery store, both of us choosing to accept the painfully slow progress of the line with reluctant grace. Waiters who smile with their eyes and not just their mouths.

I will be able to come at my wandering, semi-alienated characters with new authority, and eventually I'll write a story chock full of That's How It Is and Because I Said So.

Here comes the train.

Okay, so now I'm sitting here in my cozy apartment typing away to the Go-Gos at their Go-Goiest, and all that seems a bit much. This pretty much belies the Equilibrium business, but of course we all know that in the real world Equilibrium is just a bad movie with Christian Bale. Oh, and Emily Watson. I love her.