Just kidding, sort of! Haha! No, in reality, here's what I'm doing, as opposed to the unreality that a lot of my friends seem to exist in, which is to say that they're imaginary.

I was hired as a temp to work at the University of Colorado foundation, so I've been back up in Boulder for a little over a month now, working. I still live in Denver with the great Jason, and the commute isn't as bad as you'd think. I just got assigned to another project, due to my impeccable punctuality, punctuation, and preciousness. It looks like I'll be here another month at least, and I've been offered a full-time position here as well. I don't know what I'll do.

Right now an Excel list is compiling the fruits of my labor, and then I'll have a sexy little number to drop on my supervisor's desk. She's an interesting one: when I first came here, I thought she might be like one of those ladies in the office who has an impossibly-cheery attitude and wears sweaters with cats on them, but I was very wrong. She's great. Actually, that's a lot of the reason that I'm staying here. While it's an office, everyone here is darn nice.

Still, it's an office. Some days I wake up, and there's something different. My deepest human impulses are stirring, and for what? Is there a fire somewhere? Did I sleep through my alarm?! No, none of that. The air is calmer, the day brighter, because I realize something:

Today is casual day at work.

Yeah, I get the white-collar limp excitement of waking up on Friday and bounding out of bed with the promise that I'll be able to wear jeans to work. Suddenly, overnight, I turned 38 years old, I guess.

I miss Annie and I miss people I haven't spoken to in a while and I miss my dog and I miss a lot of things. Lately, I've been listening to a series of college lectures on existentialism. I do this while on the elliptical machine or somesuch at the gym, where I can get lost in repetition and listen to interesting facts on Satre, Camut, Hume, and other famous philosophers. Existentialism will never be an out-of-style thought process, and right now (at least in my life), it's more important than ever. It's the quarter-life crisis of a purpose of direction. To excerpt a recent email regarding the idea of "better times" that people speak of, and what seems like the constant transition into a new person, or at least new circumstances surrounding you:

"Is this a perpetual feeling? As if we somehow form some definitive definition of ourselves at point X (which, considering we're relatively young, must be a relatively young opinion), and then spend the rest of our lives waving goodbye to it, as if to the loved one at the train platform while we're just surrounded with the expanding distance, and the chugchugchug of the engine and the clack of the tracks, and all we can do is wistfully look out the window and think "I wish I could have spent more time with you."
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But that's no way to think, is it? Thomas Jefferson spoke of the idea of the future more exciting than anything in the past, and while good ol' Norlin Library has the quote "He who knows only his own generation remains forever a child" (Was that quote always in the masculine?), I tend to agree. No matter how good or bad things were, the fact is that the future hasn't been written yet (or maybe it has, but fate is a whole different entry). That open-endedness is whatever you want it to be, I suppose.

I think my diary entries are long past entertaining, where I would be happy and hopped-up on coffee. I just type this under cubicle lights now. Then again, I've been pretty goddamned depressed lately. It's not hopelessness, but perhaps an exasperation, or sadness, or a mix. I can't wait to get the hell out of it. That's what I'm working on.