wednesday was the first day of everything, or: thank you, farris hassan

i'm in the manic state right now, stupidly optimistic, thrilled by the novelty. i got the apartment in seattle. it was one of those places that i wandered into and started immediately grinning. the other tenant is still living there so i wasn't able to review it as "mine"; instead i met with my landlord, an actor-director, in his apartment to pay him the deposit. all the units have bedrooms sequestered by tatami screens; his have been plastered over and painted blood red. he sat on a low couch under a window with a perfect view of the space needle; the grey afternoon light made it difficult to see anything other than cheekbones.
i left the building feeling like shit. shit about my choices, my marriage, the patterns i create, guilty, immature, delusional, living in the moment at the expense of 'practicality.' i lament the 'potential' most of all: all the things we could have done, should have done... but then i remember that we had three + years to meet said potential and never did. then i feel better- not better, but a bit more validated that i'm making the right decision.
after i left work on wednesday i drove around tacoma in the rain, waiting for the landlord to call me back... part of me hoped he wouldn't, so i could go back to my husband and my safe little life and laugh all this off as yet another "ooh boy, i got a little ahead of myself" episode. he called, i got off the phone and yelped with glee, and then stared at the rain, the suddenly wide-open world, and said 'fuck.' i am scared. i know i'll be fine, but i'm scared anyhow. i tend to push things out of my head for later, more stable perusal at times like these; whether this is detrimental remains to be seen. so i went to a concert. i was damp, dead-ass sober, and surrounded by a progressively inebriated crowd- including the forties couple in front of me, flagrantly licking and fondling one another when she wasn't waving her beer bottle around and miming the lyrics. it was a good time. as usual, i felt like an observer, but in a content, these-are-my-species sort of way.
on the front page of today's paper was a 16 year old from florida who flew to iraq without his family knowing. he was following the investigative reporting skills learned in high school journalism. i smiled widely as i read that. good for him. i didn't realize until just now that it rather illustrates the point of all this: optimism, naivete, action before reason: at least it leaves one with insights and experience, and that is never a bad thing. i would much rather fuck up and know that i tried.