review

i love three day weekends. there is something so enjoyable about being out during business hours on a weekday. after tomorrow, i can be out during business hours every day! i hope i can learn how to enjoy it without becoming bored too quickly. i've always had to be occupied with something or i would start thinking too much. i'd like to try to just enjoy some time off without having to have plans or goals for it.

today i had some coffee and went over my journal entries. i started keeping a journal when i first got here so that i could keep track of all that happened while working away from home. it took me a while, but i read all my entries for november. it's kind of amazing to see how i progressed from excitement to anxiety and frustration, in overall terms, and sometimes from day to day. the first two weeks of november, i was in pretty good spirits, but as my birthday approached, i started writing more and more about how i didn't want to work, how i didn't know what i was doing, all of the usual stuff that seems to incapacitate me this time of year. this culminated in alternating days of hope and anxiety for the last week of november. i didn't even make it into my december entries, but it was kind of a wreck as i remember. actually, i didn't start to come out of it until i started writing this.

having read those entries, it's kind of nice to know that, despite feeling pretty bad some of those days, i'm still here and in good shape more or less. not only that, it's nice to know that i had some pretty good moments in the midst of all my worrying and that i had the support of my friends throughout. i wrote a good entry about how my old bandmates called and sang happy birthday to me even though it was on the wrong day. they were crushed when i told them, but they called again the following week.

i think if i had not kept track, it would be easy to only remember those weeks as a gradual descent instead of seeing that it was really more like the random walk of a drunk who eventually finds his way home.