mccarthyism

Much too busy and distracted. It’s a time of life for doing, not much for thinking, unless you’re willing to stay up pretty late at night. I’m working a lot at the school and roasting coffee, and also trying to make time to write for a magazine called Christ and Pop Culture. I’m supposed to write them a feature every two weeks but I am usually late. They’ve been very gracious. I’m learning how very little I have to say, and how hard it is, impossible really, to say it well. The world is full of much brighter and more interested people than me. I am disinterested most of the time.

Mary sits up now and smiles nearly all the time. I like to sit on the couch and hold her, in the evenings after work, and try to make everything else fall away for a few minutes. But of course the house is messy and there are always things to do.

Still wondering very much what I’ll be doing a year, five years from now. I’m full of self-doubt. A kind of disinterested numbness sets in much of the time. It’s easy to say the right things but it’s not so easy to believe them as I would have thought a few years ago. Snow drifts in the yard; the viper is coiled in the garden. I am twenty-seven years old.

::Monday, January 6::

Temperatures are minus 15 today but bright and clear and happy. Deep white snowdrifts, craggy branches against the still blue sky, ice crystals on the windows. School is called off so I roast at Newport this morning, and in the afternoon I sit on the couch and read some Walker Percy while Jenni works in the kitchen and the children sleep. Happy to do that and happy to listen to a mix Matt made, Kathleen Edwards, Magnetic Fields, Eno, Nick Drake. Tillman sings “Let me put you under both my wings” and Aiden wakes up sleepy and mussed and sits next to me on the couch wrapped in his blanket. The sky fades to white and blue shadows move across the yard.