They say idle hands are the devil's playground. Or something like that. Well, my hands have been idle as of late. Not really, I've been working 40 hours a week, but I feel that way. I started off my summer with a frenzy of action - Senior Week, graduation, moving home and searching for a job. Now that I've settled in to a routine, though, I feel as though I'm idling - stuck in neutral. Quite frankly, I've been in a funk.
I began the summer with the determination to read at least a book a week. For the first two weeks, I did exactly that. I rushed through Bright Lights, Big City in an exhilarating few days, and the next week, I had my heart broken by Kazuo Ishiguro's "Never Let Me Go." I am still processing my feelings towards that deep, heart-wrenching novel.
Once I finished Never Let Me Go, I began to neglect the stack of books that had sat beside my bed since I picked them all up at the library the day I got home back in May. Even though I'm working, I still find myself with free time on my hands, but I've been spending it with friends, or glued to Netflix (you guys, Mad Men will take up A LOT of your time, if you let it).
Even with all that's been going on, I've been feeling a little weird lately. I have been thinking about a lot of things. Deep things. And they're bothering me. I've been wondering about my future, how I relate to others (and how that's good and bad), where I see myself in 5, 10, 30 years, and what I need to do in order to get there. I've also been thinking about just what it is I want to be when I grow up. As a 22-year-old, while I am certainly a legal and basically a physical adult, that's about where my "adultness" stops. I know I have time to figure this all out, but it has still been bothering me lately. And not in a good way. I can't get it out of my head - my mind can't catch a break.
This morning, as I was driving down the highway, the solution hit me in the form of the song lyrics that I've used to title this post. Even though I hadn't cracked a literary spine in over two weeks, I had been carrying around a book with me. For comfort, I suppose. Over my lunch break, I pulled it out of my bag and sat in the warmth of the summer sun and delved in to "Naked Lunch" by William S. Burroughs. It's a book I have been meaning to read for a long time, for many different reasons. And there's no time like the present, right?
I only made it through the first eight pages on my short break, but I almost instantly felt better than I had for the past two weeks.
Perhaps it's because my mind had nowhere to escape to - Tangiers, grimy Manhattan streets, the English countryside - that it was so caught up in itself. Now that I have found a place for it to escape once more, I'm sure I will continue to feel more at rest. Certainly, I will still ponder my perplexing place in this world, but I am glad I have discovered the way to find reprieve from the daunting thoughts about past, present and future that plague
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