Hot Vax Summer. Not.

It's Saturday afternoon, the minutes interminable. My man is watching a Netflix series on the history of the Japanese Samurai, and I'm lonely and bored. I've completely forgotten how to entertain myself in this city that is pulsing back to life. The evidence is everywhere, the streets no longer empty, restaurants and stores no longer looking like stage sets for a ghost town, the sidewalks full of pedestrians and al fresco diners. But many people I know are still mostly indoors, the social habit reasserting itself by degrees. Three of my women friends and I had a Zoom call on Thursday night, because we haven't been able to organize ourselves enough for an in person gathering.

One can only stream so many episodes of a show, read for so many hours at a time, do only so many puzzles. Work is a reliable distraction; indeed it got me through most of last year, but I'm in a slow cycle right now, nothing feeling very urgent, no pressing deadlines yet, and I was the student in college who couldn't make herself get started on a paper until the due dates was breathing down my neck. Panic is a dependable motivator when paired with a work ethic instilled by parents who planted deep the message that you don't shirk your commitments. 

It was a scorcher of a week in terms of heat and humidity, definitely an invitation to stay indoors, and though it's cooler today, it gray and rainy, as gloomy as I feel. It doesn't help that the complex where I live is once again under massive construction, all the walkways being redone, all the grounds being relandscaped, all the brick facades and balconies being repointed. Fences are everywhere, blocking free movement around the once lovely campus, so that we scurry in and out of our buildings through mesh wire tunnels under scaffolds. It makes me want to scream every time I walk out my front door.

Of course I could clean out my closet or rearrange my drawers or paint a picture but I'm not in the mood for any of that. I'm not in the mood for much really. The only thing that really appeals to me right now is sitting down with friends I haven't seen in months, and catching up on everything or talking about nothing of great consequence, just mingling with easy and well-loved auras, something we might all be starving to do.  

Thanks for letting me vent, here. It helps to set down my disgruntlement. I've used up a whole half an hour doing it, and now it's almost dinner time so I can wander out to the kitchen and consult with the man about what we should do for the evening meal. After that I'll climb back into bed and read some more (The Final Revivial of Opal and Nev by Dawnie Walton—loving it!) or maybe watch a few more episodes of Younger (I recommend it for mindless, good-natured entertainment), and hopefully I'll fall asleep early and easily, my mind not galloping everywhere. 

Tomorrow will be busier. We're going upstate to a July Fourth barbecue. It's the birthday of my daughter's boyfriend, and his large extended family has an all-out, everyone's-invited cook out every year. They even did it last year, everyone in masks, though from the photos I saw, most people wore the things as chin straps or ear danglers. At least they were outdoors. This year, the man and I will join them. And then on Monday afternoon, I'm supposed to get together in the neighborhood with a dear friend and her radiant daughter, just because. Yay! Look Ma, I'm socializing!