January 15, 2008
Tuesday

It’s seven in the evening in Banner, Wyoming as I write this. It’s also 18 degrees and windy, with snow falling. The first residents to journey to Jentel since my group left have very likely finished the dinner that the staff prepares and leaves for them. They’ve made the getting-to-know-you small talk that ensues that first night among travelers who may have had a certain difficulty getting there, who are tired, a little concerned about how to balance solitude and society, worried maybe that they won’t accomplish what they went there to do, or even confident about the direction and progress of their work. I wish them well.

Tonight I looked at the pictures on Jentel’s site as well as the ones I took while I was there. I tried to remember, to feel again in my bones, the energy and the focus that I had there. It’s 31 degrees and only a little windy tonight, but I’m feeling hemmed in by winter, by lethargy, by a tenacious cold that I fought off for a week with zinc and orange juice and creative visualization (“say yes to yourself and find the inner strength to reach your goals; breathe yellow light”). The virus won sometime on Friday, and I’ve spent the last four days cycling through fuzzy thinking, anxiety, depression, and mild hallucinatory dreams (note to self: write in big letters on the refrigerator DO NOT TAKE ANYTHING WITH DEXTROMETHORPHAN. DO NOT EVEN BRING IT INTO THE HOUSE. IT HATES YOU).

I might have to alter the Blog 365 logo. Maybe Blog 357? As if these last eight days are the only ones this year when I’ll be too scattered or too sick or too empty of ideas to write something. The Blog 365 community has not energized me the way Holidailies always does. Maybe it’s what poet Linda Pastan called “all the vacancies of January,” a time when we are fa-la-la’ed out. I can replace it with Tiffini Electra’s idea of Blogging Without Obligation. “You should not have to apologize for lapses in posts,” she writes. “Just take a step back and enjoy life, not everything you do has to be ‘bloggable’.”

I haven’t done much this past week and a half but cough, wheeze, and worry. Tonight I’m sneezing, which I take as a sign that the germs I visualized as leaving have gotten the message. Maybe I’ll backdate my thoughts on fan behavior at basketball games (a local school district, not the one with the restrictive dress code, has instituted a new conduct code at sporting events that prohibits standing during the game), cell phone conversations during movies at the local octoplex, how Lynn’s finding someone in Lancaster to cut her hair means she’s one step closer to being really really gone, and what I learned about myself from Hillary’s tears.

Thank you for reading so much, so often. 

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margaretdeangelis [at] gmail [dot] com (replace the brackets with @ and a period)