The First Day In Several Days That I Didn’t Cry For One Reason Or Another
I’ve noticed something about myself and crying lately. It’s getting harder and harder to draw the line between crying out of happiness and crying out of sadness. I don’t think I ever cried out of happiness until a few months ago. It was amazing. And it wasn’t that there was no sadness in it. It was that the sadness at losing something was completely overwhelmed by the gratitude at having experienced it at all. I’m sure there are lots of different ways to cry out of happiness, but that’s one.


Also, because I’ve fallen behind, the past two days have been:

The Day That I Felt, For Lack Of A Better Word, Blessed
I don't quite know how to talk about this idea. There are moments, and there have been an increasing number of them lately, when I feel sort of connected to everything, like some part of me is empty and everything I see or hear can just wash through me. The best thing to do in these kinds of moments is walk around and look at people. There are a million things that will strike me a funny or beautiful or fascinating, just sitting there on people’s faces. And I just feel overwhelmingly happy about it. The hard part is that I’ll look into all of these pairs of eyes and hardly anybody will look back at me and I’ll wish that they would, that there could be some moment of recognition where I knew that they saw what I saw, that they were amused too. I’ll keep looking. Sometimes they happen.


The Day That Albert Found Me
This weekend, you must understand, was both very good and very hard. Two friends came to the city and we went out drinking Saturday night and had brunch Sunday morning and sat in a bookstore and thought about how great it would be to live all together in a brownstone down the street. It was really really nice. And then they had to leave. And I became acutely aware how much I miss living with people that I love and being able to come home and feel like it's really home. I haven't felt that since probably May of last year. So, in this bookstore, post-brunch, I was pretty sad and just trying to keep it together, and not doing so well. And then I turned a corner and there's Albert. Albert is a slightly smaller-than-life-size wooden man holding a stack of books that is actually a little cabinet with shelves inside. I know because we have an Albert at my mom's house, just outside my bedroom door. I don't think they call him Albert at the bookstore, but I did. It was involuntary. I said, "Hi Albert!" And it was just a little tiny bit like home, just for a second.