Right now there’s a tiny thought bubble over my head with an Eiffel Tower inside it that has exclamation points after it. Have any of you played “The Sims” games before? Well, it’s a wonderfully simulated addiction. The game infuses a person’s real life wants and needs, with the gamerly anticipation of growing old, meeting the right person, acquiring skills, gaining education and eventually even untimely deaths via kitchen fires- etc.

I wish my life were more like this. You can speed it up sometimes when the game is boring, your alternate characters can play on auto-pilot, you can read the newspaper and have a job to go to the next morning that pays over $200 a day, ah. Make believe is so refreshing. Meanwhile, in the real world I am submitting to Journals, reading about literary theories, and studying nonfiction like my life depends on it. Because it does. I was rummaging through some old pictures today and saw that I looked happier with my superficially fake friends, plastic parties, and I was. I was  much happier when I was less goal oriented. It was less pressure. I had mastered the art of letting go– not because I didn’t care, but because I didn’t know any better.

I’d like to not know any better, now. Time has a way of making a person want, and in my case need so much more—all at once. Steve Bull said in a quote once that

“Nerves and butterflies are fine – they’re a physical sign that you’re mentally ready and eager.  You have to get the butterflies to fly in formation, that’s the trick.”

I have so many butterflies they all go every which-a-way—and then there’s this silence. One by one I attempt to summon them all down and just as they’re all beginning to relax into this dreamerly state of my imagination… a big burgundy eagle with a purple beak and red eyes swarms down and collapses all meditation then squawks off. This is just where I am right now. I am constantly making leaps through the corridors, beckoning my pillowtop mattress be not too comfortable to let me about along my day merrily, and hoping– fingers crossed– for a breakthrough.

O, and it was Dale Carnegie that said “If you can’t sleep, then get up and do something instead of lying there worrying.  It’s the worry that gets you, not the lack of sleep.”

And then I heard from an editor today. It wasn’t a yes, yet, but it definitely wasn’t a “no.” Immediately Paris popped into my thought bubble again. Anyone feel like loaning me a vacation?