I was worried throughout October and November that I wouldn’t be able to save enough money to buy people gifts for the holidays but then, literally in the nick of time, I got that second job at the restaurant and received, on December 20^th, two full paychecks (one from the college, and my first one from the restaurant–which was ample but also apparently less than what I’ll normally be making) and so was able to do what needed doing: to zip over to Dadeland, to Target and Best Buy and Dick’s, and scratch the pertinent people off my list—but I found, in the process, that even though the college had gone into recess, and I had all of this ostensibly “free” time on my hands, I was also having to shop for the holidays, and go to holiday dinners, and catch up with friends who were in town for the holidays.

            I had time off, but I had no time to myself.

            And it’s been fun, it’s been fine, but I wanted to do a lot of holiday-themed stuff for the Project that there’s now no chance of doing. I wanted to squeeze in two more podcast episodes before the end of the year. At this point, I’ll be lucky to finish one. I wanted December to be the highest web-traffic month in the Project’s history; now, unless I unleash some Talmudic deluge of prose over the next 72 hours, that’s probably not gonna happen either.

            I realize, of course, that it’s more valuable to be spending this time with family than scribbling shit for my website.

            Obviously that’s true.

            But there’s a feverish, paranoid, workaholic writer in me who holds up a stern finger and adds, as a footnote, that it’s good for ONE week of the year.

            I can make light of it because I know that, big picture-wise, this loss of productivity isn’t such a big deal.

That being said: I’m genuinely upset about it. Like I’ll just be looking out the window, thinking, and then I say “fuck” outta nowhere and rub my forehead in an agitated way.

I’m stressed about not having enough time.

Which of course then makes me think about ageing and, since we’re now on the cusp of a new decade, I’m thinking about how easily those decades roll by, and about how the passing of each successive decade will be accompanied by a chorus of doors slamming shut, opportunities falling away, and so I’m feeling, way more urgently, this call to get shit done. To work.

            And this, in turn, is making me think about dating. Because it’s the holidays, which is I guess somewhat romantic, and fortunately this year has been so saturated with the company of friends and family that I haven’t really been able to bat an eye toward the idea of serious companionship (a far cry, thank Christ, from the mopey thoughts I was having last Christmas in the wake of that cataclysmic breakup with Rosie). But, while I don’t much think about it lately, people do tend to ask (especially now during the holidays) if I’m dating, and, as a result, romantic stuff does come to mind in a passive kinda way.

            But the way I’m thinking about it now, as we near the end of a holiday season in which social obligations have damaged my productivity, is like…would a relationship get in the way of my work?

            What I know I shouldn’t take seriously (but what I do still sometimes take seriously) is this drunk psychic at Tea & Poets who read my tarot the night Rosie and I broke up and told me that I was on the cusp of a serious romantic upheaval (which, ahdunno, mighta been obvious from my face) and but that this upheaval would end up being very good for my career.

Now, it’s not too hard to put that formula together: you’re gonna get dumped and you’re gonna work more to distract yourself from the pain. But when that relationship ended was when I started using the website as a diary, started doing all these personal posts, and that’s also when the website’s traffic skyrocketed.

            Ahdunno. I’m wary.

            Like if you were to ask me, Hey, wanna take a shot at a relationship?, the answer would be an anxious kinda, Sure?. Cuz I think I’m down for it, intellectually.

            But I also very seriously don’t want anyone getting in the way of my work.