feel free to not read this

With the cigarette burning in the back of my throat I have come to several conclusions. However these conclusions must be prefaced by:

That's a picture of one half of my studio. I will show you the other half tomorrow. It is less visually exciting, containing only a table and chairs.

And...

Yes, Mom. I'm sorry. I smoked a cigarette tonight. But I had to pace and think on my porch in the rain and the best way I thought I could accomplish that without looking like a crazy pacer on a porch at night in the rain (what would the neighbors think) was to smoke a cigarette. They're wonderful mind clearing devices. But it will probably not happen again because of threat of lung cancer and besides it was dumb of me what with this hacking cough and all.

Second, the conclusions were framed by the movie "The Brothers Bloom"--as so many conclusions in my life have been since I saw it--with the bookends of the books All the Pretty Horses by Cormac McArthy, which I finished yesterday having bought it for $1.50 the day before, and A Room With A View by E.M.Forster, which I will finish tonight and which I wish I were finishing right now.

But my conclusions (I am horribly misusing the word) are something like: What is the story we tell about ourselves and who are we within the many stories we blabber and dither on and around? There is a presence or an absence of courage in who we decide we are: victim, betrayer, betrothed, tragedy, victor, happy, cyclical, circular, dying, waiting, young, old, growing older.

The last few days have not necessarily been triumphant. Well, I've been sick. Most logic leaves me when I'm sick. And I'm alone. More rationalization departs. So combine them and I will endure, but I won't be productive or very hopeful. I'll make a lot of tea and be efficient about time. Habits run deep. I don't like how sickness and loneliness will do that to me every time, especially loneliness, and how I allow behaviors.

I don't finish many things and most of whatever I've started was started by accident and then, lacking courage, I don't finish what has been put in motion, or I finish in a way I never wanted to, more of a train wreck toward the end than a conscious effort. Never being satisfied with such a mode of existing, each new attempt was a way to vow off repetition of the old. Yet here I am, wallowing again.

So working our way back to the beginning: The Brothers Bloom, in which a character says (paraphrase), "I decided this wasn't a story about a sad girl, it was about a girl who could find beauty in any little thing." Over all, such a good attitude and still living within the bounds of honesty and reality and faithfulness to who and where one finds oneself. It's ridiculous to feel burnt out at 22 years old. It's probably the greatest boast in ignorance I could ever make, to say, weary, "I'm tired and the world isn't what it was going to be and neither am I." As though it's all made of stone, waiting to be eroded or built by Lord knows what hands.

What am I getting at?

I want to be happy in my job. I am all of three working days into it. I have to remember this. I do every twenty minutes or so. Mostly, I dwell on all the ways I'm not suited, or I don't want to exert, or bend, or work. So is this a story about someone who is tired or someone who needs to rest, who needs to allow time to pass under the bridges and around the days and trust that in a month it will have been a month and I will be farther and further along than I could ever understand right now? Probably.

In the meantime:

"It had to be a quality that could not change. No matter what. Long before morning I knew that what I was seeking to discover was a thing I'd always known. That all courage was a form of constancy." - Cormac McArthy