An Average Day

(For the benefit of the people who don’t catch me online much anymore, and for my own benefit.)

I set my alarm for 8AM but get up closer to 9. Stop at Trader Joe’s for fruit for breakfast and the next several days’ lunches (their Pad Thai is a favorite). Then the two-minute drive to work. We’ll skip work itself, right up until I finish the daily game of Mario Kart Double Dash with my friends/coworkers.

My vague plans to come home, work out, and work on sundry personal projects are preempted by murmurs of doing stuff with said friends. Maybe meet up with some other non-work friends, maybe not; the latter, this evening. Pizza and Japanese beer and “Dark City” on my friend’s projector. Not much more conversation than jokes and geek talk, but it dulls the shock of leaving the buzzing human hive of the office for my big, empty, silent apartment.

Once home I pour myself several sips of port, almost for lack of anything else; my kitchen is rarely stocked with anything more than wine, spirits, mineral water, and eggs. I turn on one light in my living room, near where I’ve set up my computer desk, and plant myself in front of my PowerBook. Read weblogs and news, browse this and that, think to myself I should be reading an actual book, and sing.

I sing a lot, whenever I can. Here I sing to fill the space. Recent apartment favorites include Radiohead’s “Big Ideas” and “True Love Waits”, The Decemberists, Arab Strap, The Smiths, I guess the same stuff I’ve been singing for at least a good year and a half. Of late I’ve been adding in The Appleseed Cast and odd songs I find on MP3 blogs. The neighbors do not complain. I do not know them. My ceilings are very high and my speakers are positioned against a wall shared only by my own bedroom.

Said bedroom is occupied only by two $10 triangular Ikea nighttables, a standing lamp, and my low black platform bed upon which rests an almost obscenely hard space age foam mattress from a future in which man has evolved beyond the need for comfort (I kid – I like a firm mattress). I try to not take my laptop to bed because the glow of the LCD throws off my circadian rhythms, my body rebelling against normal sleep under the assumption that Earth is now bathed in the light of an unforgiving, never-setting sun – or pair of suns – ala “Pitch Black.” Rather than endure such confusion I take a periodical to bed and enjoy hours of sleep blessedly free of any recognizable dreams.

And this is the routine I’ve settled into since moving here in August. It’s been fine, subconscious and unnoticed, until recently. But as the days grow short and gray and I slip into the seasonal curse I seem to have inherited, all my routines become suspect for making harder an already cripplingly difficult time. Having turned 21 about a month ago I reckon that I’ve now been living through this, whatever it is, every single Fall for the last seven or eight years of my life. If I can make it to the first sweet, warm, bright day of Spring without having given up on or walked away from my chosen responsibilities, well, it’ll be the first time in as long.

I fully expect to walk out into that Spring day unscathed. But I have many more days like this one to wake, and work, and play, and sing, and sleep through.

PS (Because the logical end is clearly the above sentence) This would be less scary if I wasn’t alone, but when I say that to myself I can hear a distant chorus of voices desperate to tell me that I’ll learn more doing it alone, that one has to be alone for such life changes to be profound. This Is How We Learn About Ourselves, the voices say. Fuck you, voices, I say: my apartment is too big for just me and I have nobody to cook for and nobody to sing for and nobody to keep warm at night.

Disgusted at my illogic and disregard, muttering acid comments about my recent relationship track record and shitty overly-romanticized song selections, the voices fade.