Posted November 16th, 2003 by Michelle

Friday, November 14 2003

It’s getting near ten o’clock, minutes till my bedtime, and after a lovely dinner with Dad and Carole and some friends visiting from New York, I’m left with two oddly conflicting feelings: I’m at peace here, and I miss New York.

I sleep through the night here, perhaps because I only get about six to seven hours at a time. This last month in New York, I was sleeping ten hours a night. Man, that rocked. But I also spent hours staring at the ceiling, or reading, or annoying my cat when the world around me silently slumbered. Here, I’m asleep by 11, up at 6:30, soundly out for the entire night. I’ve not had insomnia once.

And my life is peaceful. It is not stressful, but lately it has been full, and I’m not worried about keeping the roof over my head, and I paid all of my New York closing bills without once putting my head in my hands. I have a couple of friends who make me laugh, and who want to do cool fun stuff with me. I have the adults sleeping above me who have done nothing but welcome and support me.

But the Peace Corps called today, and want to know if I still want my position. I thought I had given it up long ago. I never called them, never wanted to actually say “no”. I miss my brothers, and my sisters. I miss Chopin. The dog. Today I leaned down to talk to Dolce, sweet, sweet Dolce, my stepmom’s dog, who looked back at me with perfectly blank eyes. She’s the funniest and sweetest dog you’ll meet, a constant source of personality and entertainment. But Chopin would meet your eye and let you know what he thought of you. His kisses were rare and treasured. He hates bicyclists and loves a good spot on the floor, as long as it’s near Tessa.

Only about 5% of me nags at my lack of acting and singing. Most of the time. If I actively think about it, it grows to over 50% of me, but then again, I haven’t been in a real show since just after 9/11. One of the things I want to do here is to get back into shape, maybe start dancing again, and become a viable actor once more. But is that what I really want? What exactly do I want? Do I really want to be happy here? I’m kinda happy here. I’ll admit it. Happier… happier than I’ve been. I don’t know for how long, how long this will be enough but I want to start creating more as soon as I feel ready.

I’ve started and stopped new book ideas a couple of times. I seem to be doing more short-term writing, but I know as soon as I find my new book I’ll fall into it. My old book idea was just the story of a weekend in my life, and I finally realized that the facts of the story were getting in the way of my tale. So I start anew, eventually, eventually.

Steve said that he thought my last blog entry was a little racy (not his word). He said that there were lines to read between, with my stories of the men I’m meeting out here. However, he’s wrong. There is exactly nothing between those lines. I’ve not been intimate with anyone out here. There are no steamy stories to tell. Geeze, I’ve detailed issues with many of the unmentionable parts of my body on this here blog, and if something happened to me that was worth writing about, you can be damn sure you’d read about it right here!

Or, at least, the PG version…