I'm sort of low today.

Various things, but mostly I am coming to terms with how I am perceived as an actual grown-up by other people. That sounds stupid in a way – I've been a working adult for years. But the exchange students we are parenting make me realize how I'm a generation ahead of them (David actually noted that the t-shirt he had on yesterday was from 1991, and I remarked that he got it the year one of the girls WAS BORN), and I'm seen in the same mental box in which they put their mothers, and I feel really sad about that. I don't know why, even. It is not like I want to be eighteen again – not at all. I guess it is just a difficult adjustment when one realizes there is a disconnect between how one sees herself and how others see her. Or when one must face the inevitable fact of aging. I may be a YOUTHFUL 34, but I'm still 34, and growing no younger.

I'm sad about David Foster Wallace.

I'm sad because I have been feeling more adrift on this blog than ever, noticing my change in approach and desire to writing – never mind my actual access problems. Then I read Ariel today, and the links she cites, and it all resonated around the entirety of what I'm feeling now – I'm older, and my posts are necessarily different, and my priorities have changed, and now what? 

[Maybe I just liked it better when this blog was me and some friends and I was able to be open and honest in ways I don't feel I am now. Like in the bluishorange post, I've been pondering starting a private LJ for some time now. I have never HIDDEN anything on this blog, but the degree of laying myself bare has changed. It changed when I met David and it was no longer just about MY life. It changed when his ex and her friends found it - not that I cared much, but it was then I first realized that maybe I had a minority audience that did not necessarily wish me well. It changed with the rise of Facebook. It changed when I was no longer able to write from work, I'll be honest. Rare are the nights I want to sit at the computer. Though tonight is one of those nights.

I look at my stats every day, so I know who is visiting. It makes me happy that there are friends (and strangers - I can't know who you are, but I can see when you return!) out there who care enough to check in on how I am doing! Ashbloemstraat seems more of a meeting point now, a place where we all come back together after wandering the mall with different friend groups, and maybe that's just fine. I don't mind having a diary that generally just tracks what is going on in my life; where David & I are on the family planning scale; what shoes I am wearing. But I am going to do some more pondering on what to do with the more deeply personal stuff. I feel BETTER when I write it out - I am, oftentimes to David's annoyance, a writer before a talker -  but I need, in my older age, a less public place to do it. Whether that means LJ or back to an actual PAPER JOURNAL (ZOMG!), we shall see. No big changes until we move, at any rate.]

I'm sad because I started running again this weekend after five months or so of not, and it hurt.

I'm sad that I've grown to dislike my grandparents' house: the house my grandmother passed away in; the last place I saw my grandfather alive. The place I ate every Thanksgiving and Christmas meal in until I was 18. I have said over and over that I am not sentimentally attached to the house, and honestly, I'm not. But now that I am letting it go, I can't deny that I'm thinking about these things again, and I'm sad they are so stained by the miserable experience of the past year and a half. And while these memories aren't enough to keep me here, they are enough to make me a little tearful that I couldn't make it work.

I'm sad I haven't knit anything in so long. I need to find a really fun project for the winter, and a couple babies to clothe, and then I'll feel a lot more excited. I certainly have YARN out the wazzoo, so this autumn should be better for it.

I'm sad because… honestly? I'm not convinced at all we're going to win this thing. I am keeping my expectations on the lowest setting I can manage, but I still think I'll weep come November.

Sigh.

To cheer me up, I'm looking for a Dutch tutor. Anyone know one in the Dallas area?