palace of winds

My dad got the job! I’m fantastically excited for him. He finds out today, I believe, when he starts; next Monday or Wednesday, likely. It sounds like a fairly perfect position for him (though of course you don’t find out a lot of the important things until you’ve been in it for a little while).

Yesterday evening Mel and Alex dropped by on account of a smoking car, so we all hung out and had Subway and watched House and SVU. Well, Alex had milk and slept through the shows, but that’s an infant for you. He gets lint between his fingers. It’s weird thinking what must be different about baby body chemistry that he’s a little lint factory. His skin is much smoother and softer and well-moistured than an adult’s, which I suppose is it. Lint probably takes one look at the unfriendly dry valleys between my fingers and says No way, man. We’re outta here.

Last night I dreamt that he and I were getting married. I don’t recall why — it was an arrangement of some sort, a casual affair between friends. I suppose it’s because I’ve been thinking about him lately. It sort of goes in cycles. I don’t miss him, which sounds awful. But I do miss the idea of him sometimes. Someone who wants to spend all day wandering through museums with me, all interlinked arms and crackpot theories and brief, stolen kisses. Being so swept that goodbyes become forever affairs in doorways. Hugs that never ever end.

And it’s all very nice to think of, but I don’t need it, and most of the time I don’t particularly want to bother with it either. I can as easily imagine myself without someone as with, long-term. I like the me-ness of now. It’s like — there’s a space in my life for someone else, but it’s little. It’s a small space, and I think it could grow to fit the right person, but it’s not a hole or anything. There’s nothing missing.

Ditto on the child front. I don’t know that I’ll ever want one. I can’t even decide right now if I want a pet; much of the time I don’t. I think about it sometimes, about how it might be much nicer to come home to a cat or a waiting dog than to an empty apartment, but then I think about all the messy parts. I think about all the chewing and urinating and shitting and vomitting and hair and stink. That’s kind of awful too. That the idea of having to deal with hair all over my clothes for the rest of my life is enough to make me think twice.

It is what it is, I guess, at least for today. Ah OCD.