Starting again, a little past square one.

“as for me, i’m as changed as a girl can be

can’t you see
that i’ve flown to the edges of the earth and home i’ve flown
from your chair i can tell you can tell it from there that i may have been everywhere
but i’m back, back to the starting square”

-Lucy Wainwright, “starting square”

The number of blog posts I’ve started and then hung up for weeks (and months) is inordinately high, and I find with every new post I start that I am further and further from something coherent as some unplaced anxiety develops from the pressure of being home and having to, once again, start life from scratch. Granted, “scratch” today means something more substantive than what I was working with last June, but after three months of galavanting and effectively putting working life on hold, I am back home with somewhere around $4,000 fewer dollars than when I left in July, and nowhere closer to a job.

I am also… back home. After all that fuss about home, I am surprisingly anxious about escaping the dreariness of Lake Placid weather and the depressing life I see in its bars (oh well, perhaps my response isn’t surprising at all). I came across the above quoted Lucy Wainwright song by following a link to another one of her songs, “October”, which was posted on an email thread about the month we’re currently ensconsed in (or so says the calendar).

October. The reason I came home early. Of course, I forgot that leaving Thailand in the middle of October and slowly making my way home from there wouldn’t get me back to Lake Placid for another ten days, leaving me with only a week or so of Lake Placid October to revel in.

And then, I arrived home ready to tackle that one full week of pumpkins head on, only to realize that Lake Placid seems to think that November has already come, ten days early. However, others have told me that were I here in the beginning of October I would have found that what I was really looking for was September, which provided the North Country with the crisp autumn weather I was dreaming of a month early (as well as a spectacular, barn-heaving hurricane to break things up in the middle).

So I missed October, boo hoo. But I cannot say that’s the biggest burden my tense shoulders are currently bearing. No, as I’ve mentioned before—the need to solidify my still very loose “plans” has me hyperventilating with a growing awareness of all the competing forces facing me right now. Namely, how can I escape Lake Placid asap while still making sure that everything is organized and settled where I’m headed next? Furthermore, it takes time to think about why I’m making the decisions I’m making, and what I feel if I successfully separate all of the factors playing into my decision (entirely impossible, but I’ve got to at least give it a real fighting shot). And time, at this point, is something I feel I cannot afford, particularly if it is spent in Lake Placid, NY.

This post is not an apology to the obstinately dedicated few still reading my blog for my long vacance of a few weeks (I'm sorry, but what word is better than obstinate to describe this un-prodded dedication??). I wrote that post yesterday but it needs some oomph’ing before I can post it. Formulating my thoughts on how to close this “travel” blog takes time—it is hard to distinguish writing for myself from writing for the few people still reading. At the end of the day, this blog is propelled almost entirely by a graphomanic obsession with exposing my thoughts to an unknown readership; however, knowledge that my readers are not unknown makes it a bit challenging to that whole “writing for me” thing. Yet for some reason I am stubbornly clinging to the idea that I must write a closing post that is for me, and (to the best of my subjective heart’s ability), only me. Therefore, expect a most personal closing to come, and to those of you still interested—please excuse me for leaving you (at least explicitly) out of the post.