The Christmas Card Debacle of 2007 is almost at an end. Putting the fresh labels on the painstakingly glued and stamped envelopes was truly satisfying. Leaving the misspellings and typos created by my predecessor on the fresh labels was also a rare treat. What a heady mixture of responsibility and unaccountability! O, an admin's life for me. Yo ho ho, indeed.

It occurs to me sporadically that my life is pretty good. Or rather, the individual ingredients that make up my life look good on a platter. Somehow, however, the sum of all these parts is less than satisfying. I have pretty constant anxiety and pretty predictable bouts of melancholia (so much more literary than depression). The source seems to be a constant low-grade certainty that I am not doing "the right thing". This thing changes all the time, but it is always not what I am doing. It's hard to keep perspective in this ever-shifting landscape of criticism. So, I keep reminding myself of the good things in life. Sometimes saying them out loud, writing them down, or just thinking about them lifts my mood.

In other news, today I experienced the white collar equivalent of banging one's head with a hammer to forget about the pain in one's thumb (or is it vice versa?). My regular job involves scanning all of the paper documents produced by the company, in order for them to attain paperlessness. Not only is the irony of this not lost on me, it fairly smothers me with its obviousness at every moment. But back to the hammer: today, instead of scanning, I collated, corrected, and compiled addresses for the company Christmas card list and hand-addressed over 50 envelopes. Upon completion of this task, I was actually relieved and even almost excited to scan some documents. I felt a sweet nostalgia about the scanning and performed the familiar motions with a sense of homecoming. Gotta love it.

I finally asked for help with my grad school essay. After a couple of frustrated and unproductive hours at the library yesterday, I emailed a rough draft to my adviser and a few friends. The relief was palpable. It felt so good to let go of my shame, resistance, and perfectionism! My adviser has already sent it back with some helpful comments, which I will act upon as soon as I get over my instinctive resistance to suggestions of any kind.

I found out that I'm not very good at Scrabble. But I am still playing it! This is another true victory of my mature life.

Tonight I have conferred well-being upon myself. I took a bath and am sitting in cozy pajamas, drinking a pot of tea. It was a stressful day, peppered with little pockets of goodness. Now I find myself with a rare few hours alone. I am not doing anything substantively different than I normally do, but the silence and certainty of being alone makes this a special time.

I am looking after my boss's daughter until next Wednesday. She will be out late at night almost every night, so I might have more moments like this one in the next few days. Balancing work, caring for H, and dealing with M feels like a lot. The internship is going to be obsolete for the next week and a half. I hope I will find/make time to complete a good draft of my grad school essay so I can at least get my recommenders squared away. The first deadline is a month from tomorrow and I have doubts as to whether I'll make it.

My thoughts are jumbled yet curiously static. It's difficult to write about my life and state of mind. I think I am withholding thoughts and feelings from myself in order to remain somewhat positive. There are lots of negatives right now, but I don't want to see them or catalogue them. Therapy would be a good place to take these issues and air them out. Right now, they'll remain musty in the corners of my mind.

Hmmm...time to post again. It's now November and I feel changeable, like the weather and the season. My psyche is alternately chilled and heated and I never know how best to suit it up.

I have a job now. It's pretty much unutterably awful, almost comic in its badness. If only the boss in the pink shirt with the white collar from Office Space would lean on my cubicle and ask me about my TPS report. Perhaps I will glean the beginnings of a satirical novel from this. However, I suspect I will only glean even more support for the idea of going to grad school. My applications have stalled and it's hard to know what this portends. I hope I will complete them. I hope some sort of latent ambition or drive or utter panic will give me the impetus to finish this process.

The internship is also hot and cold. I will meet with my boss this weekend to talk about what I'm (not) doing. I am certainly "doing" a lot of self-criticism and blame, so hopefully this meeting will help me put things in perspective. I have to remember all the changes I've been going through over the last months. And I have to share some of the weight of this with my boss, whose frenetic life often gets in the way of her ability to mentor.

Ongoing positives include riding the T, working at the various libraries in the area, daily communion with my roommate, savoring the bite in the air when it shows its teeth, FutureSex/LoveSounds, romance novels, the New Yorker, and frequent contact with Carleton and Mount Holyoke friends.

Maybe I should go to grad school for something other than Sociology. Shifting gears like that both tantalizes and terrifies me. Often I feel like the only thing I'm really good at is being Jenny Smith. Couldn't I just be employed at being me? Or read a bunch of stuff, synthesize it, write about it, but never define its category or discipline?

Another definite good: Johnny Cash singing "I Still Miss Someone" in Folsom Prison. Strangely, this song always makes me miss California.