it sure takes its precious time, but it’s got rights and so have i

i once noticed that when my life got to its most interesting, i never made any attempt to chronicle it until sometimes months later. i've been journaling on and off since i was about 9, and there are any number of entries over the years that have begun with me saying, "i'm sorry i took so long to write, i have so much to catch you up on!"

i reckon it has something to do with living in the moment, not wanting to hop back to the sidelines and observe, but rather be the story itself. possibly also, at least recently, because i'm also into week five of "the artist's way," so i have in fact been chronicling my every move with a mandatory three pages of freeform writing a morning (the morning pages, god bless their cotton socks). but no one else will ever read these pages, unless i step in front of a bus tomorrow and someone snoops while packing up my belongings.

so for the record, if i do step in front of a bus tomorrow, and you're the person folding up all of my h&m button down camp shirts and stuffing them in the space bags i brought, i will haunt the living shit out of you if you start reading my morning pages. but do please return the actual "artist's way" book to the public library, it's already overdue and i don't want anymore fines.

all this to say, a lot has been happening since i last wrote my treatise on unhealthy relationships. i reckon that was rather cathartic in a way, and i found that the theme of healthy relationships--with myself and other people--nabbed a bit of the spotlight as of late. ah well, let's be honest, it's been a main character in my neuroses--obsessions, whatever word you want to use--for years. but as i sat on my bed one friday afternoon, with spread cheese, salami, and crackers scattered before me, each labeled with feelings to be eaten, i think i actually cried out, "okay! i have had ENOUGH of this!" and i dashed out of the house and insisted on more.

that's all very vague and requires a fair bit of backstory, so the blunt truth of it, which i think will sum it up nicely, is this: i think i'm done dating guys i don't actually like. i know, who is this person, and where did the old colin go? i don't know, but he's not here. check washington heights, i think he's pouring himself another drink and waiting for some asshole in his forties to call.

i haven't quite given "the artist's way" the credit its due, and i'd happily dedicate the next seven weeks of that process to singing its praises, as i can say quite assuredly that it has changed so much of my life. yes, it's initial intention was to rediscover myself as a writer, to take down the brick wall between me and my creativity, to be the artist i so unabashedly saw myself as when i was maybe twelve, when i was writing books, regardless of their quality, huge books worth of writing! the point was, "i want to be a writer again." but as chekhov said, "if you want to work on your art, work on your life."

let's not even bother rehashing my love of a good self-help tome, if only to say i do believe in it, and doing this twelve-week course is probably the most actively i've tried to reclaim some sense of myself. and truly, it has been work on my life. i think the artistic resuscitation is almost secondhand to the recovery this process offers for your self-esteem, your sense of wholeness, your ability to be honest and compassionate towards yourself as much as others, and really, to discover what you want to be doing in this life.

have i ever mentioned that, sometimes, i would ask the question "what am i doing in australia?" i don't know, i've been really sort of quiet about that in this blog, i know....but seriously, one morning, i was wrapping up my morning pages, and it seemed the answer--in reference to another aspect of my life than my artistic self, as in fact the morning pages are so rarely about my writing--just started to flow out. i'm going to let it marinate for a bit, but i think i've come up with a really good answer to the question.

the point of this all being, it's been a good couple weeks. i got a job--and then quit! and now i have another job that i'll be doing a trial shift at on friday. i thought this post, following the hiatus, would be about the job i got, as a waiter at an upscale french restaurant in the city, and the quirks of it all, but i found, as the week went on, that i just completely made no sense at this job. i think, if i wanted to make the sacrifice, i could have stayed, the money would have been good, but the hours were long, the pressure was high, and my gut was screaming, "honestly, i hate this idea!" so what did i do? i sat down one morning this week, for my pages, and wrote out my "dream job." i did a brief job search before leaving for work, got a couple phone numbers of jobs that sounded like what i was looking for, called one on my break that day, and was told to come in for the trial shift in a week. i don't think this was just luck. i think it's all a matter of putting out what you want in this life and then listening for the opportunities to receive it.

really, lately, there's just been this sense of "this wouldn't have happened if i hadn't come here," that sense of the why, why my heart was so insistent on traveling 10,000 miles away from home, why i had to leave new york despite everything going so well (eventually), why i had to wait until getting here, and getting settled for a month and a half, before finally starting "the artist's way." when things in your present life start falling into place, you realize more fully why things in your past maybe did not, or why they fell into the places they did.

with things going so well, let's see if i can avoid that crosstown bus.