busy morning inside my head

A good friend just wrote to tell me she's engaged. To some degree, it always stings when my close friends couple up for good, because it means there will be less attention for me, but I'm getting used to that as I get older. Somehow, this particular friend's news feels more like a punch in the stomach. Part of it is that her fiance is someone I don't know and am not sure I would be friends with--because we're similar in some ways and dissimilar in some bigger ways, and I am an envious prick. And I think part of it is also that I liked having the ability to occasionally entertain the fantasy of getting together with this friend; over the ten years we've known each other, there has always been some mutual attraction that made our friendship slightly titillating. Never an actionable attraction, at least on my side, but always present and buoying. And now it won't feel that way when I'm around her, because she'll have committed to someone else, and there won't be the same sort of vague potential to swim around in.

That lost potential makes me panicky. As I spent my fourth consecutive Friday night at home watching Internet TV last night--in the case of this particular Friday night, to eat garlic, sleep early and stave off a cold--I wondered if I was on the path to becoming my roommate, the doughy, solitary 34 year-old who rolls around in her desk chair above me, swallows most of our internet bandwith downloading movies and leaves the house only to fetch more frozen meals. I feel like my life might be escaping me.

In less existential news, I had a dream that I played an accordian-like instrument whose keys-side was connected to the base by ten lengths of magnetic tape--like audio cassette tape, but wider. The instrument was adjustable to your armspan by turning a dial to wind in the tape, and I had unwound it too far, and one of the lengths of tape had fallen out of its wheel, and I struggled and struggled to reconnect it with the hole (under which there was affixed a picture of the lead singer from Yo La Tengo), but was unable to. I felt sad but hopeful that someone would soon help me. Cool instrument, though--like a mixture of an accordian and a typewriter.

Now, more garlic. Vampires, stand clear.