Draw in, close down, wake up?

<note> Writ­ten late last night, pos­ted, then removed due to sud­den feel­ings of acute embar­rass­ment. When did I start get­ting embar­rassed about what I write here, par­tic­u­larly when this site has been going for nearly three years? Pos­ted now due to even more acute feel­ings of embar­rass­ment about being embar­rassed. </note>

This after­noon, many people in the office turned to look at the dark­en­ing grey skies and the rain spit­ting on the win­dows. They took in the autum­nal scene out­side and, as their eyes returned to their mon­it­ors and their fin­gers resumed tap­ping at key­boards, I could have sworn that I heard a col­lect­ive sigh float up towards the tiled ceiling.

Not me, though. True, I didn’t like what I saw out­side but, at the same time, I could cope with it. Autumn. Shorter days. Longer nights. I know my moods miss the exten­ded day­light hours, but some­how autumn is much more me. We’re suited to each other.

Maybe it’s because I just wasn’t there today. Phys­ic­ally, I was at my desk. Men­tally, how­ever, your guess is as good as mine. I would love to know where my mind goes when it just wanders off some­where of its own accord, absent without leave. I some­times won­der if that know­ledge would enlighten me, make things clearer. Prob­ably not.

Sur­roun­ded by com­mu­nic­a­tion. Today’s most repet­it­ive action was the use of Alt and Tab to flick between email, web­mail, and instant mes­saging — plus three Note­pad files into which I was haphaz­ardly throw­ing the usual lines of overly thought­ful non­sense that rattle round my brain. Give me a PC and a copy of Note­pad on my desert island, and I’m sure that would be all I’d need to keep me occupied.

Amaz­ingly, on one or two occa­sions I even man­aged to open Homes­ite and edit a little HTML. Pro­ductiv­ity is my middle name.

An after­noon of wast­ing words. I’m begin­ning to think that if you waste enough of them, even­tu­ally you might find the ones that mean some­thing, the words that are going to stick around.

I can’t escape this feel­ing that I’m wait­ing for some­thing to hap­pen — not that I know what that ‘some­thing’ is, of course, because that would be far too simple and straight­for­ward. Are you wait­ing for some­thing to hap­pen too? Or is it just me?