TBD...

I took the day off today. I didn't know what to do with myself. Work is easy. Leisure is hard because leisure is optional. I decided I would go see a girlfriend in NYC this weekend to give some structure to this time off, give me a task to concentrate on and a sense of urgency about laundry. This girlfriend maintains a pace of living I don't understand or relate to on any level. She has plans for the start of this long weekend that already take place in 2 states. While I understand New York and New Jersey aren't the same as New York and Nebraska, the itinerary is dynamic, ambitious, and chaotic to me. It's her pace of social activity that made me curious about her motives when we were in the preliminary stages of our friendship. She always seemed to have more than enough things to do and people to do them with and I a: wondered where I fit into all of that and why she even wanted one more friend and b: didn't really want the challenge of trying to fit in to all of that. I resisted in ways that in light of what a good friend she is to me now, I cringe at. But for better or worse (for her), she has me for a friend now. So when she told me on what I thought was an otherwise unstructured day during my planned visit that she and her husband are going to the US Open and asked me if I wanted her to buy me a ticket, I was inclined to just visit another weekend. If I was there and they suggested the same thing, I would probably be fine. As it stands, I think I will just plan to leave before they need to head out for the Open. I love her because I can tell her I have no interest in watching tennis and she will love that I have the nerve to tell her that. It's not really nerve. It's the honesty in our relationship that allows her to make it clear she has no interest in the Amish even though my soul twin (and mutual friend) wants desperately to make a weekend of all things rural Pennsylvania.

I wonder why she schedules so heavily and she probably wonders why it is so hard for me to commit to something as simple as coming up to visit. I have to think that for people like her and my best friend my reluctance to commit to things annoys them greatly and maybe even hurts their feelings from time to time. I don't know why I feel this way, why it is so stressful to commit, to plan, but it is. It just is. I make very few commitments, even to myself. It's difficult for me to make a hair appointment. I've been thinking about a massage appointment all day. Didn't call. It's hard to commit to even watching a movie. Most things get done eventually but I'm much better at spontaneous decisions and I've never really had a strong desire to plan fun things to do. I devote a lot of energy to just getting myself somewhere. Once I'm there, I evaluate my entertainment options. Usually I'm just giddy to have actually escaped the trajectory of my home orbit. The only thing I know about this evening is I will feed and walk Baloo. The rest is TBD and trying not to think about my appointment with the trainer tomorrow morning. Wish we had waited till Saturday to confirm the time.

The whole aimless day, thinking about work and knowing I have plenty to do there coupled with my internal frustration at not being able to enjoy time off or plan to be away so I can enjoy time off got me wondering again why I do things the way I do even though they often lead to discontent (and really long run-on sentences). I hate to disappoint people. Over the years it just became easier to promise them nothing. I am a now person. I make appointments with my trainer no more than 2 days in advance and more often than not, mere hours before our session. I was shopping with a coupon that expired at midnight on Sunday and I couldn't figure out if I really wanted the pants until 11:55. I was typing my credit card information like the wind trying to get the purchase in under the wire. I had been browsing the site and filling my shopping cart since 9 pm that night. I usually cancel appointments that I make more than a week in advance because something almost always comes up that trumps it. When I call, I know I have the time and do my darndest to sneak into a cancellation. Tues at 1:45 three weeks from now, I have no idea what I might be doing but I'll bet having that time spoken for will put a wrinkle in something.

Part of my world view accepts there is very little I can do to actually make things happen. I can put things out there with my purest intentions (for good or bad), but what happens next is completely out of my control. I think this philosophy is tangentially related to my resistance to planning things in that everything feels more out of my control when I plan ahead. I have no idea what will be going on in October so when I plan I give the universe something to fuck with. To fill with conflicting obligations, with stresses that compound as the time draws near. I have to try to mitigate all the life in-between the time I made a plan and the life that followed. When I do something now there's less time to consider the decision and all the ways it may conflict with yet unrealized future plans.

All the dense chewy explanatory prose aside, at the end of the day, I don't make plans because I don't want to. I want to do things, I enjoy them when I do. But I'm always miserable long before I feel good and I let that drive my behavior. Call it lack of discipline, call it uptight, call it you-are-lucky-to-have-any-friends, everyone I love knows this about me. I want to be better for me and for them but this is what we're working with right now. Maybe this quirk is fundamental Ava and unlikely to change. Maybe my would-be partner in crime will be the yin to my yang and we'll see the world and all my friends. Maybe I'll have my baby and write my book as Lodo suggested and though I'll have more reasons not to plan, I'll do it anyway because I'll want my child to feel a season is incomplete without a getaway of some sort. I guess we will see...