January

Has it really been over a week since I wrote last? I feel a little disconnected lately. Floaty, like I am here but not really. I will be doing the dishes, but looking out the window instead of down to the task at hand. Looking out at the new snow, which falls fresh every night, it seems, and which is deceptively beautiful to gaze at, with no suggestion in its sparkling, crystalline blankets of the slushy puddles it will leave on the floor and the chapped ankles from where it will sneak in between your boots and your jeans.

I'm also doing things in excess lately, I notice. Drinking too much coffee, so that I feel a constant, jittery unease in the pit of my stomach. Eating too much chocolate (see previous post) and even dipping into Jim's beers, for which I rarely feel any desire. I've even been somewhat overzealous in exercise, mindlessly doing leg presses until the screen on the Nautilus machine warns me that I've completed the maximum number of reps and should either stop or lower the weight (which is embarrassingly low to begin with, so this is more an example of my compulsiveness than of my fitness.)

I seem to be wallowing in some sort of melancholy, or perhaps more succinctly, some sort of disinterest in the dailiness of life, the dishes and the laundry and the errands by which I generally mark my time. Instead, I keep rereading Anita Shreve books- Where or When, The Last Time They Met- which are perhaps unwise choices when one is feeling a little off, as they tend to be pensive and sad and on the theme of impossible love. Jim found an old Sarah McLachlan CD of mine when he was cleaning out his desk last week, and I've been listening to it almost daily, as some sort of soundtrack. Also, most alarmingly, I seem not to care much about dusting lately, which heretofore has been my favorite chore, though I suppose this could likely be attributed to an inevitable resignation to the constant presence of dust in our lives at this stage of remodeling.

It is somewhat depressing to realize how easily I am felled by such a common and cliched affliction as the winter blues.

Also, incidentally, flaky winter skin. Le sigh.