Gloomy on a beautiful day...

If I leave now, I can catch my dear friend and her hubby at Whole Foods for breakfast. Which is undoubtedly what I should do.

But I'm so tired. This is my latest tweet: wondering if I'm in the wrong profession. the wrong city. the wrong house. Also, soaking a new Britta filter.

I want a job where I don't have to think really hard about whether or not I can afford a gym membership. I want a job where I don't have to measure out my vacations. (I want to be able to take time at Easter, in the summer.) I want long conversations, face to face. I want companionship.

I love this city, but can it give me that job (which is surely an academic one?) Am I this beholden to this town?

I have always said that geography and relationships are crucial to me. But what do you do when you feel that both are failing you? That the geography you love you are not able to enjoy. That the relationships you cultivate cannot support your need for long conversations?

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My mother is taking a class right now. It is on the needs of gifted and talented (GT) students. How their special needs are almost as needy as a child with autism, or another "special needs." It is interesting, as my mother talks about what she is learning, I am able to realize how lonely I was as a child. I finally was able to share with her how I longed for college, when in high school I sat at dinner and couldn't have conversation, because conversation had to encompass everyone and that included two toddlers. (Bird will forgive me. By the time I was fifteen, she was five and NOT a toddler, but as in her eyes I was the older sister, the additional parent figure, to me, she was the young one, removed from my life.)

All my friends are married, or getting married, or having babies, or had them. It takes a month and endless emails to arrange even one lunch date. Can I live on a diet of lunch dates?

When I was in my freshman year, by October, I thought, I have to transfer, I have to get out. I worked through and out of that, but by October the next year, I thought, I have to transfer, I have to get out. And by that time, I had enough stability to get out, to do what must be done. I wonder if now is that time again. Last year I went through a need to get out, to move on. It passed. But I wonder now if that time has not returned. And if in the stability of this year, having tried to make it work and seeing that it is not enough, what this city offers me, that it IS time to move on.

If I leave now, they will still be sitting there with breakfast, maybe. But I am ragged, and tears stain my face. Is now really the time to compose myself?

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Back to my mother's class. So there are "special needs" that a gifted and talented child/adult has. But what then of the myriad of needs? I am special by many ways: I have a bright and quick mind. (And I long for people to talk to.) I am a TCK grown up (and I long for people who understand what it is to have grown up traveling, not to have to explain myself always.) And I am a single woman, not sure if she will find a mate, if she wants to. (There is a dual special need there: for companionship in the singleness, but also for discussion of what it is to be single.)

So is there a balm in Gilead? Is there ever a way to have all one's needs met? (Outside of heaven, that is.) The answer comes back, a resounding no. But then how does one decide which needs are most important? What will continue to kill me slowly if I do not nurture it?

So, dear reader, what is it that is killing you slowly as this winter moves on, always snowing, never Christmas? Is it time to take an inventory and see if the pieces will form a whole puzzle, the sailboat that shines in the breeze? Or is it warped and missing too many pieces, water damaged from all the tossing to and fro?

Is there one thing that would stop the oozing out? Or do you have multiple oozing holes, each one crying out like that plant in the Little Shop of Horrors, "Feed me, Seymour, feed me!"

(Aren't I a cheery one this morning?)