I am a grown-up

I quit my job at the restaurant last week, for no reason that made any logical or financial sense. I hated it though. I'm glad I'm not the only hostess who took the job because she had proven herself incapable at any position requiring enthusiasm, commitment, mental presence and punctuality. And as stupid as it seems I also related to the part about how much time it takes to get ready for work. I'm not a slob, but any outfit that cannot be worn with sneakers makes me very tired, and takes a great expenditure of time and energy to devise. I take it back though, because my boss did call me a slob once, hence the stress.

However, I have become an adult. Due to a death in someone's family (not mine), I had my pick of an apartmentful of furniture, and I am pleased to announce that after a year of ascetic squalor I now own a bed, a couch, bookshelves, chairs, a lamp, pots and pans, a full set of dishware and a vacuum cleaner. The bed is the important one though, it had been almost a year on the floor.

I thought I had to leave New York, but now I think I can stay. I just have trouble commiting to objects that might offer comfort, security and a home-like atmosphere although it is actually just about being really poor and having trouble determining what the essentials are. It seems sometimes like trying to make a homey-type place for yourself is impossible if you are doing it alone, it's something of an oxymoron. I was not willing to accept solitude as the outcome of entropy, that as every reinvention in a lifetime inevitably degrades to disorder it is to this point that one arrives. Some people are very okay with that, but it feels unnatural to me. I wouldn't resort to channels of Internet voyeurism if I was happy knowing that nobody gives a fuck.

Not that it isn't self-imposed most of the time but it wasn't a maneira de ser I wanted to establish, one might say, by buying heavy domestic objects like beds and sofas. Now it is established, through furniture I seem to have chosen something I really didn't want. But it just is. Going to college and becoming really insecure just happened. I thought that it was just the nature of a stifling environment, that leaving would bring me back to a place where I used to be, where friends as good as family came easy and often. Maybe if I went back to the Midwest. But as of Saturday, in making the decision to domesticate instead of remaining uncomfortably feral, the status quo was elected and confirmed. It is no longer a happenstance that I am entitled to complain about.

Whatever. Have you bought tickets to my play yet? www.smarttix.com, in The American Living Room Festival: The Nostalgic Recollections of Raymond Boggs. I went to a rehearsal today. The actors are good, as well as good-looking.