Ennui

I'm bored.  Out-of-my-skull: bored.  And is it hyperbole to say, "I've never been this bored before?"  I probably have.  It's the now it's-always-Sunday-afternoon feeling.  It's that what's worked before, no longer is, and the next thing hasn't come in to fill the void, so, I'm in the void.  Ultimately, it's a good thing, a good place to be, but...I'm bored.

And I decided to go to the doctor last week, because I'd been having throat pain (for a while), and I sorta' figured it was the thing I'd had four years ago, but wanted to rule out something more serious.  At the last minute, she decided to have her assistant run a strep test, and it came back positive, surprisingly; I don't feel all that bad.  Anyway, just have three more days of antibiotics left, but I took the day after off of work, in the event I was contagious, and that's when I realized how bored I was, so I went back to work the next day.  But seriously, what did I do before to occupy myself?  I've been trying to cut back on using the internet, my computer, and that's part of it, how much that had been filling my waking hours.

On the sick day, I finally finished uploading my trip photos (almost 4,000 and a very slow process), well, all the ones off of the first card.  Went out for a walk to see if the headache was actually from caffeine withdrawal, since it was already afternoon.  Ended up at the lake, spotted the giant orange fish near the shore, and was reminded that it was carp-spawning season, though they were just cruising around at that point.  A thought about released goldfish crossed my mind, and then an older man walked up to me mentioning something about koi, and we got into a long conversation about local wildlife, and then, tropical biology, bats and birds and that sorta' thing.  His wife works at the zoo, and they've traveled a lot in Central and South America, into the jungles and the cloud forests.  Ended up walking the whole lake, even though I'd originally planned on turning around earlier: I don't often meet someone that is interested in that.  (I'd spent time in a cloud forest in college, studying natural history/rain-forest ecology.)

And then I did eight hours of gardening on Saturday, and consequently slept most of Sunday, because I'm still rather exhausted.  I was awake for almost 40 hours trying to get home (was planning on sleeping during the 9-hour bus ride, but had a creepy dude sit next to me, so that didn't happen), and then the first week I was back, I had a bunch of life stuff to catch up on: an overgrown garden, volunteer commitments, choir rehearsal for a performance, a bake sale, the actual performance, the other rehearsal (which has an upcoming performance, as well), plus jet lag, etc., etc., and I can fill the time, but in a way, it's noise, and underneath the noise, is a restlessness, and what feels like boredom.  I don't know what should be there.  And I feel incapable of paying attention, or making any major decisions.  It's not the right time.  Something happened, something changed in my mind, in my view of myself, while I was travelling, and I'm only starting to catch glimpses of that, to begin to comprehend it.

And I've been feeling a little anxious that I have nothing new going on this year...I mean the travel (a super-privileged thing to have been able to do), the singing at Folklife, the theatre-workshop are all a deepening of things I've already done, nothing wrong with that...but life is short, and I'm more than half-way through mine: what could I be doing?  What do I want to be doing?  Why is depth not enough?

So many people I spoke with while traveling talking about having a mid-life crisis, or preemptively avoiding one, ("I'll be turning 40 next week." "I'm 50.")  And I guess I'm feeling a late one, now that I've gotten back home into the demands of every day life...and I suppose that's how it should be.

When you no longer feel the need to please everyone else, follow someone else's rules, to quell someone else's fears of the world, what do you choose?