Ill equipped

I'm not sure I'm entirely prepared to live in a town this small on my own. I mean, I have friends here, I suppose, but they're all new, and they're all colleagues. And they're all paired off. I have one single friend on the faculty, and he's my model for how to live in a small town; he goes for bike rides, he joins musical ensembles, he drives to less small towns that have coffee shops. But then, like a freakily surprising number of the faculty at Nowhere College, he's an alumnus of Nowhere College, so he's used to it. In Madison I was fine. I'd spend time on my own, I'd go for walks, I'd go sit by the lake and write. Maybe the difference is that in Madison I was almost guaranteed to run into a friend or two when I stepped out the door. Today I didn't teach, I did other work--yeah, I sometimes forget I have other work--and I stepped out of the house only once, toreplenish my caffeine supply. I'm still wearing my jammies and it's 9:30 pm. I'm thirty years old, I'm alone, and I'm unshowered. Woohoo.

I watched American Splendor tonight, and the life of Harvey Pekar, the perennially downtrodden nebbishy existential anti-hero file clerk, looked sort of brilliant and well-fulfilled.