I do participate; I don't participate. I want you close and then far. Try to keep up.

Some field notes:

In the category of small catastrophes: a sense of urgency that gets stretched out and weakened by too much time. It is better to do first, think later.

Maybe it is the moon, after all.

There are days when I feel like I don't *do* anything; everything feels like some form of distraction from the thing, unknown, that I am supposed to be doing. As though I am in a waiting room, reading a little bit of Us Weekly and then a little bit of National Geographic, ignoring the book I brought with me, texting someone, restless and a bit afraid to hear my name be called. But then there are days, that don't look any different at the outset, where everything feels exactly right. I make my bed and think "perfect," and I send a text message that seems perfect, also.

I am interested in conducting a prolonged, contemplative study of why, given similar stimuli, similar circumstances, my feelings toward the substance of my days can vary so widely.

Example of Sadness: Dunkin' Donuts

I don't want to talk about why I was in Dunkin' Donuts. But while there I saw an old woman and an old man sitting across from one another, each drinking a small coffee. They were sitting by the window. A small square of wax paper was between them on the table. They did not look at one another. They did not speak. I caught the old man's eye and he gave me a hard, lonely look.

Example of Sadness: Raspberry Jam

We were eating breakfast and talking about resolutions. We were saying our own resolutions, and then someone made a resolution for someone else, and then several of us made resolutions for others, and then it was like we were just telling each other what to do, and what we do wrong, and so the conversation--trite, innocent--became this cross-hatched intervention, this vehicle for criticism veiled thinly by New Year's protocol. My mouth felt gauzy and my face felt like it was vibrating between good humor and hostility. The night before we had played Taboo and maybe were still feeling confined by words we could not say. Someone recalled the game of Taboo and said something about how a buzzer would "come in handy" in real-life situations. Briefly we all contemplated this, the implications of the real-life buzzer, life as a board game, etc. A few more pointed, heated things were said about how one of us refuses too much, how another of us is too judgmental, how one person is constantly misunderstanding the other and walking out of the room. One person walked out of the room. Another person absently licked jam off the side of a knife.

Example of Sadness: ATM

Today I sat in my car behind another car, at a drive-up ATM. The woman ahead of me had not gotten close enough to the ATM, so she had her door partially open and was sort of curled around it, leaning out and pushing buttons. Her window was halfway down, too, so I gathered that she had first assumed she was within arm's reach of the ATM, and when she realized she was not, she opened her door but was too close for it to open all the way. It was a very sad sight, the saddest thing, I decided, that had happened to me all day. I watched with a lot of interest. I imagined that she was me and that I was watching myself, thwarted at every turn by this giant, beeping machine. This is usually how things are translated into 'sadness' in my mind--I insert myself, gluttonously, and the sadness becomes a narrative, a reverie, so absorbing that there is no real 'relief' when it is 'over' because it has already gotten inside, permeated whatever reality I'm in--in this case, a busy shopping center, in my car, from where I could hear the beeps of the buttons as the woman pushed them. Why are they so loud, those Bank of America buttons? They are really loud. They are proud American buttons, blaring out freedom and democracy. The woman was taking a long time. I imagined that the ATM was telling her she had insufficient funds. Interminable sadness for this woman. When she drove away and it was my turn, I made my car get so close to the ATM that my side mirror almost touched it.

Time

I was emailing with my friend recently, and we were saying that there is never enough time. Even a whole day with no obligations doesn't seem to be enough time. Time for what, it doesn't matter. Brushing my teeth, editing a story--I do everything with a feeling of defeat, a sense that 'after this, there is something else,' a knowledge that I will never 'finish' or worse, 'start.' But the puzzling thing is--and the reason why I keep dwelling on this condition--often, I do absolutely nothing. I sit in a state of utter nothingness, staring at my computer or refreshing my email or noticing the dust on my desk. I am completely idle. Idle and suffocated by the time that is passing, by the time encroaching on my idleness. I have come to a few conclusions:

1. I want unlimited time to be idle. But more importantly
2. I want the construct of 'time' not to exist.
3. The existence of time creates deep despair because
4. I am a materialist, obsessed with 'having,' and my inability to 'keep' or 'hold' time catalyzes an interminable effort to hoard it, to do things in the least possible increments of time so that in the end I will have a 'backlog,' an 'overstock,' an abundance of time
5. with which I can 'do whatever I want,' read novels or write stories or other things I would categorize as 'productive' or 'enriching' but
6. this usually ends up meaning 'time to idle without feeling guilt or angst.'
7. But I always feel vague guilt, and self-loathing for not 'doing more' with the time I am allotted, and not 'doing more' in order to allot myself 'more time.'

There will probably be more conclusions. I suddenly feel very nervous and yes, very hurried.