My thoughts this week have been dark ones. My frustration with suddenly losing my job has been compounded with my frustration about my poor health since late November / early December.

It's pointless to rehash things that cannot be undone or changed. But I have spent a lot of time, especially in this past week, mulling over some things. We have a euphemism here in the States that we call "a moment of clarity."

Mine, I think, came in the midst of a 101-degree fever while lying in a hospital room. It consisted of a very simple thought that has stayed in my waking hours and my dreams ever since that moment:"If you do not find the courage to change your life, you will die before your thirty-fifth birthday."

I've only mentioned this to one person so far. It troubled me enough that I held it to myself for a while, trying to understand, trying not to let on to other people that something had happened that both confused and frightened me.

Stare at the clock in the left hand corner of my screen. 3:25.
Stare at Photoshop. Try to coax out ideas that won't come.
Stare at clock in left-hand corner of screen. 3:50.
Continue staring. 3:51.

Open Illustrator. Actually listen to lyrics coming through headphones. Wonder how Paula Cole got so damn weird. Realize that you're opening a program but don't know what good you can do with it when it opens.

3:52.This is what it feels like to be totally overwhelmed. This is what it's like after you've been here for seven hours, having only stopped for five minutes to eat a burger. This is what it's like to have come in, worked all day, and done nothing but fall further behind than where you were at the end of the day before.

Thus, the journal entry. It would be delusional of me to think that the next ten minutes I give up to organize my thoughts would have any chance of me getting caught up on this day.

Funny; this is the fifth time I've deleted a paragraph and started over. It's not that I don't have anything to say tonight. It's that my mind is tired and whirling and thinking about many different things at once.

Talk about interesting—I just emailed my mother with a slightly condensed version of the events of the past ten days. I've had this urge to sing the events in order, in the style of "We Didn't Start The Fire."

Rather appropriate, given that a burning car was involved. Well, if nothing else, a nasty bout of stomach flu would explain to my mother why I haven't written her yet this week.

Terry arrived at the airport last night. Pictures will be posted as soon as I can find a business that does one-hour APS film developing. I've got a couple of good pictures from the airport that deserve to see the light of day.

We've pretty much got this picking-up-friends-at-the-airport thing down pat. On Monday, when Kat arrived, we met her with a huge bundle of balloons (including a Powerpuff Girl balloon that was just exquisite in its appropriateness). For Terry, we showed up with four huge signs and a cheering crowd of six people.

I finished Look to Windward tonight. I wish I knew exactly why Iain Banks' Culture novels aren't being published in the States. They're thoughtful works with a lot of depth—something that I think is lacking from everyday fiction in the States now.