Unseasonably hot.

It's been three days since the Microsoft project ended, and I'm still adjusting to the surge of unstructured time—of choice, but not choice. I'm sad that the work is done. The last day, Tuesday, I didn't want to go home because I knew that at home waited the long days of not doing much but doing as much as possible to propel this life forward with purposive strokes that seem, always, a little weaker or more awkward than I imagine they should be. I liked the obligation of working and I liked the work attached to it. Although the writing was demanding and the language, by language standards, boring, it was writing and it required creativity.

Beyond that, the project was an amazing endurance-building exercise. For almost every day of an entire month each writer wrote two well-structured 1500-word (avg) documents that were detailed yet concise and edited each to a publishable quality. This was no small task, and it required some quick learning. After a month of doing this, I write faster.

Tuesday night at home in an unfamiliar house wondering if all these things are my things, and having these surreal moments gazing at furnishings and recognizing their former meanings while also noticing each currently has none (whose are these?). I tidied up the place, taking advantage of vestigial productive energy, to get it ready for living in again. Then I went to bed.

Wednesday morning I got up early and drove to Vancouver. Short trips to the city have become quick fixes of the foreign-exotic, although the way I conceptualize Vancouver has evolved considerably in the two years since Pam and I visited. In my mind, the city appears larger and more organized—whole. I can navigate well enough to pull occasional hijinks and I know that wherever I go I'll find my way back again. I have a favorite place to park downtown and stores I like to visit, but I try to do something new each time I go.

The drive north went fast. I kept my finger pressed against the radio's seek button nearly the entire ride, enjoying 80's hits and newer, plastic pop. I didn't wait at the border and 91 across the Fraser was clear. I took a wrong turn onto Knight street and discovered another way into town and to Commercial Drive, which several people have said to check out. So I did, by car, driving around and through it and learning how it connected to other places—how the neighborhood looks different than other areas, a little seasoned compared to the other Vancouver neighborhoods I have seen. Commercial Drive itself looked like an interesting walk, little stores stuffed tightly end-to-end. But I had other things to see, including Banyen Books, which is at the west end of Broadway from Commercial Drive, past the pocket of sports stores and the fashionable Granville area, nearer to UBC.

Banyen Books is a large new-age bookstore I'd heard good things about. I picked up a book by James Hollis, a Jungian psychologist whose writing I particularly like. He writes about the human condition intellectually, philosophically, drawing upon whichever philosophers or poets (Rilke) best illustrate the ideas he wishes to convey. Hollis writes as one of us and not someone who can fix us. He questions the fixing, instead focusing on solitude and reflection as a means to bring the struggles to consciousness so that they can be lived. I also bought a book on Jungian dream analysis—I love that stuff!—and a book of Rumi's poems.

Let the lover be disgraceful, crazy,
absentminded. Someone sober
will worry about things going badly.
Let the lover be.

Afterward I parked in my favorite spot downtown. I ate in one of the numerous delis and had, to my complete surprise, a fabulous veggie baguette, which fortified a lengthy encounter with the saavy saleswoman at AWEAR. She keenly noticed the clothes I liked best and focused her sales efforts only on those items. She was successful at every turn and I left that store absolutely elated, despite the enormous figure applied to my card, bearing a new skirt, shirt, and kickass trench coat, as well as a shirt for Andrew—all black, every item, not on purpose, but because this season (and the past several) it's been a choice of black or beige, white, or pink and I don't wear any of the latter three colors, ever.

I'd had so much fun I actually started to worry that something would go wrong on the way home—a car accident, maybe—but nothing did, not even during our short mid-week bike ride later that evening. It was an excellent day, all activities occurred and meshed seamlessly. You think you can't have a day like that—some might tell you that thinking you can't says something about the life you've led, and I guess that's true, which makes it all the more victorious when it happens: there is no other shoe to drop.