i used to rule the world, seas would rise when i gave the word - now in the morning i sweep alone, sweep the streets i used to own

I was going to say that I'm pretty sure I just heard a gunshot, but that would just worry my parents, so please strike it from the record.

I had a great, laid-back day. I finally braved the Berkeley streets on foot in search of a cafe; I found one a few blocks from the house in the form of Mokka, which served up a great turkey and roasted pepper sandwich in a perfectly clean and friendly environment. I hung out there for a few hours and read the first half "Then We Came to the End" (more on that in a moment). While I was at the cafe, Emily (work Emily, not friend Emily) called to ask whether I've made any decisions about what I'm doing when I come back to work. This led directly to a couple of hours of meditative/contemplative Rock Band playing; not that strumming a plastic guitar will really help me make any decisions, but it did help me to focus my thoughts a little. I also tidied up around the house, ordered some takeout sushi (which turned out to be delicious, and I have leftovers for tomorrow), and then finished the book I was reading before turning my attention to the internet, the blog, and my impending bedtime.

If you haven't read "Then We Came to the End" (by Joshua Farris), I highly recommend it. It's the first fiction book I've read in quite some time, which is inexcusable considering that I've been gloriously unemployed for five months -- and it may have been the absolutely worst one to pick up when I'm going back to my job in less than three weeks. It deals with office life and is tragically funny, but is definitely not pure humor -- I think Farris hits exactly on the dynamics of a group of semi-strangers brought together in the office every day, the tendency to believe that you understand these people and the weird, shattering moments when you realize that you do not know them at all and will never know their motivations and their thoughts.

There's also an interlude in the middle that felt like a kick in the stomach, but that may have just been me; it's related to a storyline about the senior partner on the team, a single woman who may or may not have breast cancer. I was just thinking this morning that 98% of the time, I'm quite content with my single life, but today I really wanted someone who could scratch my back and relieve the remnants of yesterday's allergy test, since the weeds/grasses were tested right between the shoulder blades where I can't satisfactorily reach them. But obviously the story of a woman who has no one to turn to and nothing in her life but her job and a fancy highrise apartment touched a nerve, even if I'm 26 and far from that fate. So between the call from Emily and this section of the book, which I read just minutes after that conversation, I was in a contemplative mood all afternoon.

You would think that I would have figured something out on my break, but you would be wrong. All I know is that I want time to polish and then publish my book, but I also want to go back to work. The rest of it -- whether I ultimately want a career as a full-time author, whether I instead want to have a high-flying business career, whether I want to pursue the marriage/kids/white picket fence (does anyone still dream of white picket fences?), whether my own personal need for freedom and disinclination toward commitment is more important than compromising for love and happily ever after, whether I want to stay in California or move back to the midwest in the future -- all of that has been deferred yet again with the vague promise that I'll reconsider in a couple of years if this book thing doesn't work out.

But really, I'm okay with that. I just need to figure out what my job will be when I go back, and then get back to the business of polishing the second draft and sending it out to get some feedback. Now, though, I'm going to quit brooding and go to bed!