May 3, 2010
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sweet spot
Every so often, I hit a sweet spot in life, where everything just falls into place and even annoying or frustrating things don’t bug me as much, and all the good things just take over. There’s no reason for the sweet spots — it isn’t necessarily that my life is actually any better than at other times, but it just feels better, and once that feeling kicks in, then each new good thing that gets dealt out is that much more amazing, and any bad things just fade into the background. It’s as if the whole world is burning with a secret fire, and I’m the only one who can feel its warmth and see the glow.
I’m in one of those sweet spots right now, and I’m really trying to revel in it while it lasts. Most of the things I haven’t been liking as much about my life are still true — I’m still not living quite where I would want to live, geographically, and my work still sometimes spins out of control and gets a little out of control, and my friends are still living all over the place, but even so, just for now, in this little bubble of time, everything seems right, and it seems like the entire universe is on my side.
I haven’t unpacked 90% of my stuff, and I keep having to make arrangements with the landlord to fix things in the house I moved into, but I love the house.
My wrists and arms hurt every day, I have fewer vacation days than I did in Europe, and I sometimes feel like I don’t have enough time for all the work I am supposed to do, but I love my job. They flew our entire department, top to bottom, to New York last week, and we spent days just hanging out, going out, and eating out. Work events can be dreadful, but not with this group of people.
My dog’s butt is balding, he farts a lot, and he is old and cranky, but he makes me happy.
Superman hasn’t moved in yet, and until he does move in, I’m paying a small fortune every month for rent and utilities, but we’re doing great. In the last week, we went to New York and Boston, I met his parents for the first time, and he met a ton of my old friends. It went really well.
I’m still not digging this “living deep in suburbia” thing, but I’ve settled into a little group of friends here, I still have my circle of friends scattered around the world, and I’ve just seen lots of good friends and re-established contact with a lot of old friends.
Looking further back, if I was in any danger of forgetting good things from the past, my free days in New York and my weekend in Boston would have fixed that. I got to do everything I loved (including singing the Brahms Requiem, which I haven’t done since singing it in Lincoln Center freshman year of college) and see many people who represent a lot of special times in my life. It was pretty much a perfect week, so perfect that I actually cried (a tiny bit) a few times, because everything was just so breathtakingly great.
I don’t know how long this sweet spot will last — sometimes they come and go within a month, and sometimes they last for a year — but these are the times that I live for.
