desserts aren't always right

Recently, I cracked open two fortune cookies (and yes, I have weaned myself off daily horoscopes, but I still read fortune cookies), and they read:

1. Lucky is coming your way;
2. There is a prospect of a thrilling time ahead of you.

Depending on my mood, I could interpret this to mean that a semi dispatched from the local trucking chain Lucky Moon LLC will run me over as I jaywalk downtown. Or I could just be like, Hey, lucky. Welcome. Come on in. Nice to have you around. Sorry I've been so moody lately.

Lately there has been much reading, and a little writing, and many hours spent on the sunroom porch, flipping through photographs. It's been a slow few weeks, but some chewy ones. First, I'm coming up on a year in this town, and I still occasionally have mixed feelings toward it. For a few days, I'll be coasting along: taking a loopy walk downtown, eating conies at local place, hiding in the stacks of the library a few blocks west, running down to the river, driving out to the beach, cracking open a Bell's Oberon, feeling pretty good. Then the clouds will roll in and I'll find myself frustrated with everything: the location of campus in relation to downtown, the parade of homeless folk using our tree out front as a public toilet, the conversations overheard in line at the grocery store. These moods flip and flop enough for me to recognize that they are perhaps brought on not entirely by external events, but they're still disquieting.

I suspect that a good deal of that has to do with the fact that the B is here now, and as amazing and satisfying that is--as much as it gives a fullness to the days--that brings with it a fairly intense pressure. I am hyper-aware that he gave up something very good, career-wise, to join me here. I suppose that I am sort of anxiously waiting for him to announce his approval of this town. And he hasn't yet, because these things require time and settling in, but I have more hours in my days than ever to overthink this fact, and my response has been to take it out on this place.

That, and our shower is seriously falling apart piece by piece: first the handle, then the nozzle, then the ceiling overhead, and I tend to fill with murderous rage when my showers don't go as planned.

A gray cloud labeled The School Year has also been hanging around overhead. I thought that as the weeks of vacation stretched on, I'd feel better about some school-related things, but I still don't. As it stands, I can't do much about it now, so every few hours or so the cloud will hover overhead, and I just sort of reach up and swat it away.

Also around the corner is ten days in Wisconsin. Once upon a time, this trip was planned around a dear friend's wedding: the bridal shower this weekend, and then the next weekend a rented villa on the lake for a low-key bachelorette party. In the meantime, we'd spend the week running around Green Bay. This is still the plan, and tomorrow I'll board the ferry in Muskegon, but this weekend has, in the last week or so, taken on an entirely different weight.

My father gets married in two days. The marriage isn't unexpected, but the timing is very much so, and it means that while I'll be sitting next to middle-aged women and balancing a paper plate of chicken salad and grapes on my lap, I will also be thinking about a very different sort of wedding, in a different time zone. This is confusing, and hard. I would like to be in two places at once, supporting two different groups of people, but it is not to be.

There is much more to say and sift and sort on this topic. I'm not ready, and this isn't the place. But I mention it here because if I have seemed quiet lately, or snappy, or maybe placing too many phone calls one night and then not answering the phone the next, this is why.

In the meantime, I will be standing outside on the ferry deck and smelling the lake. I will be celebrating two marriages. I will be sitting on a plastic chaise lounge, eating a few of these. I will be raising a few toasts, and trying to remember that when the big things start to get a little crazy, focusing on the smaller things can help. Perhaps the cookies are right: a thrilling time may be ahead of me, and with it some lucky. Or perhaps they are just cookies; desserts aren't always right. Perhaps life will just march on, and things will find their way on their own. As they so often do.