Disgruntled*

I walked in tonight to the smell of lentil soup in the crockpot (that is, the actual smell of dinner ready, mmm…) and a box from Amazon. I’ve been on a bit of a book-buying binge lately, which, in retrospect, seems alarmingly rash and frivolous, like the shoes I almost bought online this morning when I was bored and out of humor, and I had to remind myself as I looked at the stack of clean, new books that I had been editing lists and scrutinizing titles for over a month in order to find just what I wanted. So now I have a pretty pile of fresh-smelling fiction (Morningside Heights, The Time Traveler’s Wife, Oscar and Lucinda, and One Hundred Years of Solitude), a crisp non-fiction hardback (Animal, Vegetable, Miracle), and two scary-looking books on web design (for school, thank heavens) sitting neatly on the beautiful pedestal table in our living room.

And now if only I could find the time to go along with the titles.

Today is a good day to come to home to dinner in the crockpot. Don’t get me wrong, it’s always a good day to come home to dinner in the crockpot, especially if there is also bread in the bread machine (alas for Phase One!). But today it’s particularly nice, having spent most of the day (until about 3:30 when I completely gave up on accomplishing anything of note) trying to recover from waking up on the wrong side of the bed this morning.

I arrived at work later than usual after having awoken to the horrible realization that it wasn’t Thursday like I thought, leaving at least two discarded skirts on the bed and a pile of unwashed breakfast dishes by the sink. There was an epidemic of wrong-sidedness at the office today, everyone on Team Simpson feeling the weight of February and a long and awkward legislative week.

February is so much worse than January. It’s a good thing it comes with chocolate.

When I was 23, I used to have these random days that had this faint whiff of discontent that I couldn’t quite put my finger on. Kind of quarter-life-crisis, John Mayer’s “Georgia” days, when for a few hours everything lost a little bit of its luster and seemed slightly less-than-satisfactory. Last month I heard “Georgia” on the radio again and realized that I hadn’t had a day of nebulous discontent for a while. These days, the source of disgruntledness is easy to pinpoint—the sheer boredom of having the same painful meetings with the same nameless people for the seventh year in a row, a complete and utter disinterest in theories of rhetoric my professor is trying to apply to document design, downright disgust with the idea of cooking dinner in an apron and heels on weeknights before collapsing in front of a Seinfeld rerun.

So by noon I decided that fresh air—and a little sweat—was required, and I pounded out some of my frustrations between the Washington Monument and the Capitol. It was a perfect day to be a tourist. If I were actually a tourist, I would have thought otherwise—it was cloudy and humid, and the severe thunderstorms threatened by the weather channel seemed imminent. But I thought the damp air was so delightful that I ran even more slowly than usual just to stay out in it a bit longer. I was so anxious to stay outside that I briefly but seriously considered stopping in at the orchid exhibit at the National Botanical Gardens. Wisely I did not, since my next meeting showed up early, but, for a few hours at least, the fresh air did the trick.

Wisely also I did not buy shoes on a disgruntled day.

*Disgruntled: the name of the form letter we send to constituents who have so many complaints about so many things that we cannot possibly begin to respond to all of them.