And here again.

It has been a couple of weeks since I posted anything real here besides the links to photos. Something about being in Ottawa leaves me disinclined towards anything introspective or even analytic. Perhaps it’s that I’m taken up a great deal of the time, whereas my time in Vancouver finds me with at least some small moment of daydreaming when I sit in front of my workaday machine. Which is to say, more simply, that I have more time to slack when I’m at home than when I’m away.

So I am home again as of Saturday night, which found me on a date almost as soon as I arrived. This gave way to Sunday morning when I met Julia and Judah for breakfast on their way to Amsterdam and then to laundry, a nap and 3 phone calls from Darren (yes, he’s fine and he’s back at Inverness if you want to write him). And today of course it’s the office, tomorrow I’ve got to go speak in front of people about bargaining and then meetings and more meetings. Email and more email. Demands and more demands. Plus a lunch date, plus a meeting with an old friend for drinks. And then it’s the weekend again and Anna will arrive for a few days.

My schedule seems ridiculous, I know, but really when my daytimer is full I feel a lot less anxiety about my place in the world. Having days and months scheduled in advance proves on some level that people “need” or “want” me. It’s really a schedule based on insecurity that keeps me the motivated and well-adjusted person I appear to be. (And no, it’s not loneliness I fear, I am rarely lonely – though I’m sure it comes from being an outcast in my youth – it feels so much better to be in than out.)

My new role here starts sometime at the beginning of July, as soon as we negotiate the classification level and I start the hiring process here to backfill some of my work (I’m going to be looking for a bottom-level web person if anyone out there is interested – pay is decent, benefits are good).

Oh yeah, and because July and August are almost like months off (no traveling) I’m enrolling in a French-intensive for at least one of them so I can kickstart my language classes again for the fall – I am feeling the political pressure on me to at least try even though I have little facility for languages. French speakers out there? I’ll be looking to you for help.