Is there anything that makes me feel more contented than getting out of the shower, putting on my old stupid Yan pants and my new dark green apron, and making chicken fried rice for dinner while I listen to one of my stupid albums? Oh, or even better, add a little martini with an olive. A little Hendricks, a splash of nice vermouth, bright green olive, shake hard enough that there are tiny little slivers of ice floating in the top of it like blissful icebergs when I take my first sip. 

I think we all have these little stories we like to tell ourselves about ourselves - a lot of them false. One of my favorite personal ones is that I'm a creature of simple pleasures. Cooking a meal, and doing it in an empty kitchen, in my quiet home, such as it is, is a kind of pure happiness to me, a way to re-order my head into a way that makes sense. But that's also a little bit dumb, isn't it? And there's not really a lot simple about a 40 dollar bottle of gin with olives that I'm so picky about that I buy them from a restaurant downtown, or all the hanging sparkling lights I want to turn on while I do it, or the fancy new apron I'm so proud of, or the extent of the food I've planned out.

I felt good when I started this post; less so now. I have this sense of waffling between being firmly okay, happy and pretty calm, and being completely insane. Or at least depressed and sort of anxious if not insane. Able to quickly grab onto something dark and start to spiral.

I had come in wanting to talk about such silly little things. I wanted to write about things I saw today, the weather, the birds. I was running up a big hill on my stupid 5 miler and I looked to my left and realized one of my crows was with me, in touching distance, just floating over my left shoulder. I've felt so bad at running so I was going slow. He just came along with me, barely flapping his wings, just coasting along parallel to me. I love it when they run with me. Of course, ultimately, inevitably, he veered into my path and landed in the way that they do when they want me to stop and give them treats. I stopped, sat down, and he moved around directly behind me into my shadow where I fed him pieces of old mozzarella until he flew off and I could finish my run.

Almost the weekend. The days are long, but the weeks fly by.