love's the only alchemy

I think that every year in recent times I have been thinking, as one year passes into another, that I am tired. I try to make resolutions, but they tend not to go very well. I hope for every year to be better than the one before it: and in many ways this turns out to be true -- if it's not better, it's deeper, higher -- and yet every better year ends up bearing with it an equal proportion of worseness. This was the year that Kyra stayed with me for a week and we watched Order of the Phoenix late at night on my rooftop, that I spent my birthday in the city falling in love with the skeletons of houses, that I saw Abigail Washburn & the Sparrow Quartet play two magical shows, and Patty Griffin & Emmylou Harris & Shawn Colvin & Buddy Miller in a grand hall in Pittsburgh, that my hair stopped being its natural colour possibly forever, that I stayed home alone for several days and skywatched and lit candles and had a lot of bacon, that Alessandra and I (and sometimes Caroline, or Sarah, or Hannah, or Victoria) and I jammed up on her narrow bed in the cold and Watched Things and fell in love with various fictional people and learned "Once More, With Feeling" and Dr Horrible's Sing-Along Blog by heart -- and then Jonathan moved here and we watched Doctor Who and had NaNo parties and there was music, and I came back to the weird neo-traditional folk that seems to be my musical destiny. And ... I played my first gig. Sort of. And moved into a lovely house, after a great deal of angst. And acquired a job, though I wouldn't put that on a list of beautiful things of which this year was made. And I wrote 50,0016 words in a month, almost entirely by accident.

But of course for all of this I had horrifying new depressive lows, spent half the move sobbing in exhaustion, and all sorts of things went wrong and tangley and horrible and I am still sorting them out. I feel closer and further from humanity at large and fiercely, cynically rebellious against capitalism, and I still don't know what I'm doing. Anywhere.

Instead of making resolutions, which tend to be do more be more and stop eating so blasted much when you're depressed, I have to ask myself: what do I want this year? Well: I want to be alive. I want to be alive every minute. I want to be healthy clean through and finished with abandoning projects as soon as I start them because they're too exhausting to finish. I want to stop being defeated, especially by myself. I want to go to college. I want to hear more live music. I want to work a job that I love. I want to have a better idea of what on earth my novel is about. I want to be a better person in relation to other people. I'd also like to buy more books. In hardcover. And experiment with making ice cream. And buy a laptop. And do things myself, instead of hoping that other people will make them happen. (How I wish I had the resolve to make this last an actual resolution!)

Today: I slept in, but not too much, and spent all morning reading fairly intensely, and eating things, like cereal and chocolate pie, and I went to see Dr DiGilarmo, and acquired candy, and lit up the candelabra and listened to The Baroness straight through, as a kind of farewell, and there's a little thin curve of milky moon out the window, over the church spires and beyond the one stark tree, with a little spark of a star below it, and the sky's blue as the deep parts of the ocean. Soon: I am going to welcome the next year over the threshold with friends and foodstuffs and probably games of poker. Now: Mum and I are making calzones.