I woke up with something hard in my throat.

I'm hoping it's nothing. I hate being aware of my body. I hate when I swallow and feel something, which makes me swallow again to see if I feel it again, and so on, and before I know it I am thinking with considerable seriousness about the quality of my throat, whether it's any different than it was yesterday, and I start making excuses for it, blaming the dryness of the room or the position that I slept in, and all along a creeping certainty creeps closer, that *something is happening in my throat*, that if something were not happening, I would not be having this conversation with myself.

I've become rather terrified of illness.

The real test, though, of true sore throatness: do I want coffee. If I still want coffee, then I tend to think it's nothing serious. Because whenever the real sore throat comes, the thought of coffee makes me cry, and all I want are slippery beverages like Gatorade.

I think everything is going to be all right. I'm drinking a coffee the size of my head.

Just trying things out.

Sometimes a phrase gets stuck in my head and I have no idea what to do with it. I want to say it to everyone, in response to whatever they might say, and I want to say it unprovoked, and I want it to get stuck in everyone else's heads, so that we can all just kind of nod at one another and not speak and feel the exact same way about something, for once.

A blog is a good place to deposit those phrases. You can put them all big across the top, like I did, and feel a certain relief, like I do.

I did not use time wisely today. I loitered excessively online. Which I'm beginning to think really should never be talked about again, as it has become, I think, the most boring kind of cliche. It's the new "like brushing your teeth." Except it's not a simile. It's just a thing that everything does and then feels the need to confess. It's the new something something. "It's the new" is another cliche. Talking about cliches is cliche.

Speaking of which, why is everyone talking about hipsters lately? Yawn.

Happy First Birthday, Beatrice.

I can't believe that a whole year has passed. I'm happy and sad. We are going to eat a Carvel ice cream cake tonight and think about things. That's my main feeling, beyond the happy and sad: that I want to sit with Brian, as though we had all the time in the world, and think about things. Go over the past year as if it were a book with pages, turning each one slowly. I am filled with feelings and I just want to look at them.

Mexican Restaurant

There's a new restaurant in Crawford. It's called Mexican Restaurant. Also, the hot dog place advertises "laundry in rear." And the marquee outside the Pentecostal Church says "I Have Overcome The World." I want to do that, too.

I'm at a coffee shop grading papers.

The experience of grading papers creates a misery within me that I can't rightly express. It's a cliche among teachers, I know, but I swear that my misery is worse than anyone else's.

On the bright side, I'm watching a guy at a table near mine drink an enormous cup of coffee, eat one donut after another from a store-bought dozen that he brought with him, and work his way through a tall stack of GRE flashcards. I can see a light dusting of cinnamon sugar on his lips, which move every once in a while as he reads from the card. He also closes his eyes, it seems, when he's trying to remember something, before turning the card over to find out if he's right or wrong. His right foot goes tap tap tap.

I'm watching America's Ballroom Challenge on PBS.

I can't turn it off. It's just so creepy, like wax figures set to motion. I had this jewelry box as a child, white with painted-on pink buds. Open it and a tiny ballerina twirled 'round, one leg in an impossible position, her arms stretched infinitely upward. Her face was only half there, and her fingers were mere suggestions--thin painted lines along her clumsy but delicate, praying hands. These people on TV are like living versions of her. After they bow, I imagine them climbing back into their boxes, waiting in a state of good-natured plasticity until their next performance.

It's just not how I think of dance.

A friend of mine was Isadora Duncan a few years ago for Halloween. She wore a scarf wrapped around her neck, and at the end of it was a wheel that she'd made out of paper. One of the best costumes I've seen.

Today we celebrated my daughter's first birthday. Her actual birthday is this coming Tuesday. I'd made the invitations. I made cupcakes and frosted them to look like rosebuds. I made ginger molasses cookies. I made mulled hot cider. Apparently, I can make stuff. It's always a bit of a surprise to me. There were also cheese and crackers and radishes and butter and bread and olives and other things. It was nice. I wish we took more pictures. I am constantly wishing that we took more pictures.

Beatrice seemed to like her carrot stick more than the cupcake. I think she melted a little under all the attention. Later, when everyone left, she ate a cookie with gusto, and talked and talked. She sat in her high chair in the kitchen and Brian and I stood around, nibbling at things, doing that thing you do when parties are over, only this time she was there, doing it with us, chiming in, waving and pointing at things. Crazy. It was, we realized, the first time we had more than a few people over since she was born. I think she had a good time.

I'm thinking way too much about clothes and boots lately and am a little obsessed with skin care products and that stuff that you put on your cheekbones and under your brows. Highlighter?

I'm reading Aimee Bender's The Girl in the Flammable Skirt straight through for the first time. I'd read individual stories numerous times but never the whole collection. It's good. The kind of book that gives you great ideas, but then you realize that the ideas are mostly hers, and you're just approving of them vehemently. Or you think--why have I never before written a story about a librarian who one day has sex with countless men in the library? Surely it has occurred to me to write about that before? But it never did. But reading some of Bender's stories is for me on one hand a kind of creative deja-vu, and on the other, this crisp, quenching new experience.

A little fidgety, maybe prone to loud swallowing and leaving drink rings on your coffee table--

but back nonetheless. It's time. I haven't thought about this space but cursorily in ages, although I'm still reading blogs or at least glancing at them kind of a lot. And then I checked in on the multi-talented, multi-lovely Ellen Frances and saw my name linked and felt sort of sheepish, like to follow the link would be akin to looking at old yearbooks or something similarly uncomfortable and not-there-yet.

The last year has been eventful. I finished my book. I got my PhD. I had my baby amidst all of this, and had all of this amidst her. It was a time of wild output and inner, inward excavation and a sort of slumbering away from the world.

Now I have been put in the world again and everything is eminently rusted and creaky on one hand but on the other, the hinges are all different so maybe not, maybe this is just how they sound. I'm trying to find a home for the book and trying to write, and we're also trying to sell our home and trying to move (not far, just closer to town), so it feels a bit like I am either standing in one place and tap-dancing very quickly, or else covering too much ground with tiny, tiny steps. It is the kind of inertia that results from not-being-able-to-move-on-until. I'm trying to push on it, to make it not-so, and I'm wishing very fervently for one thing to tip and shift and galvanize the rest, repeating a line--"Something Beautiful is Going to Happen"--from one of my very favorite Sabrina poems, and I'm wondering every day if, despite how busy I look and even feel, I am actually quite utterly lazy. I think I am. I wish I could say that book #2 is tumbling outward, and that oh my, when baby naps it's like a desperate rush of creative necessity splattering violently onto the page, but it's not.

Now I will go to bed and think about things before falling asleep that will seem so feasible, so ripe for the doing, but tomorrow I bet I will not do them, because I will be doing other things.

I'm not melancholy, though it might sound that way. I'm happy and filled with longing.