Inara in my Car

Last night it was starting to happen again, that thing I do where I can't seem to find anything happy enough to smile about. I had just finished a long day at work, as a temp Technical Writer at a major company. My boss has been at a conference somewhere out of town all week, and I was kind of looking forward to a week of being able to get some work done without him giving me new stuff constantly. I was wrong. As it turns out, a constant influx of new crap to do apparently makes the days go by faster. Yesterday was a very long, very monotonous day of me being left alone to get whatever done that I needed. (I did make this blog, though, that was one good thing).

To top things off, my husband, who is a highschool teacher and the boys' varsity soccer coach, held practice until dark and then had to go work on a project for his master's program at someone's house. Because I've been at my desk all day alone with documents written by mechanics and chemical engineers (not the most grammatically informed people), my husband is usually my real human contact for the day.

So I'm driving to a restaurant around 8PM to meet him for pizza and feeling a bit down over the day. By no means am I expressly sad over one thing or another, but my general mood is just not up to what I need it to be to make it through another day practically alone before the weekend. I stick a CD in - All Rise , Inara George - because I had one of the songs from it playing in my head earlier. While I'm driving and listening, I'm trying to figure out how I'm going to write this blog when I can't even find something to be happy about in the moment. And soon, I don't want to think anymore. I just want to listen to Inara's soft, languid voice and let it carry me off.

It just took me not dwelling on what I thought my horribly non-interesting circumstances were, and paying attention to what was happening in the moment to pull me out. The music and the motion of driving my car down the licorice-colored road after dark became a space all my own. And after I realized I was warm and content inside that moment, I remembered the premise of the Pancake plan - to let myself be distracted by life.