I do not know where my head is at these days. I also don't know where the game is. But wherever the game is, my head is not in it. I had about six months straight of weird energy out of nowhere: I ate healthily and minimally, joined a club and worked out almost every day, walked two miles home for fun on a regular basis, went new places and tried new things, made wacky plans, started reading voluminously again after a couple of years of lacking the energy or focus, started a new hobby, reorganized my house and my life, bought new clothes, and generally got things in order.

Now that energy has deserted me, and I feel like I'm flailing through soup most days. If it's depression, it's a very mild version. I don't hate myself and feel like everything is worthless and awful, I'm just tramping through routines without any taste for them, or any will to change. I crave sugar half the time, and want to sleep the other half. I'm staying home nights, and not getting anything done when I do.

And I'm not finishing things. I've started half a dozen minor posts here and not actually completed any of them, even though some of them only needed to be a couple of lines long. Others were stories at the time, but now could be reduced to only a couple lines long, because they don't matter any more. Here are some of them:

• On July 3, Cass and I went downtown with chairs and sat on the Adler promontory and watched the fireworks about two feet from the steep drop-off into the harbor in back of the Shedd Aquarium. The fireworks were awesome, but I think better yet was that it was a perfect night, and we just sat and talked for hours, something we don't generally do enough. Around 10:30 a weird bird I'd never seen before started circling the area, coming to hang out within a few feet of us, then flying up and down the harbor, occasionally fishing. It looked like a penguin-seagull hybrid. According to my bird books, it really seems like it was a thick-billed murre, which I'd never heard of before. But if so, it was a zoo escapee or it was really lost, because those are Newfie birds that just don't get to Chicago. Still, everything I've read about murres emphasize their penguin heads and diving style, and everything else that looks remotely similar in the books has a bright orange or yellow beak. The books say there wouldn't be a murre in our area, but as my mom's fond of saying, animals don't always bother to read the guidebooks about them.
  
  
• I spent an enjoyable evening recently playing this ridiculously adorable little online shooter, which takes the currently hot idea of achievements and upgrades to its logical extent — you have to earn points to upgrade everything about the game, including the title screen, the save system, the achievements system, the sound, the graphics, and even the copyright info. The actual game, once upgraded, turns out to be no big whoop, but the actual purchasing of the game components with game points is surprisingly fun.
  
  
• I hate one of our local librarians, a cranky, nosy, obstructionist lady who goes out of her way to put bureaucratic barriers in people's way, and only shows signs of cheer when she's telling a kid she can't check out books because she doesn't have documented proof that the uncle who signed off on her library card is her legal guardian, or telling someone with a question that she couldn't possibly take time to answer him because she's far too busy with other people. She seems to hate people, her job, and the world, she's about as nasty to everyone as she can get away with, and she's criminally slow. Here's the bizarro thing: I've discovered that the ruder I am to her, the nicer she is to me. When I got pissed at her over the denying-a-child-a-card thing and spent our whole transaction glaring at her, she wanted to chat about my books. If I approach her civilly and try to talk to her while checking things out, she glares or sniffs or pretends I'm not talking, but if I glare through her and answer her questions with irritated grunts and never make eye contact, she always chats me up. It's the weirdest thing.
  
  
• Most days, I take the last express train south. And most days, I wish I hadn't, because there's always the same driver, a heavily accented woman who insists on supplementing all the pre-recorded announcements with her own, which are repetitive and piercingly, painfully loud. I cringe every time she speaks. I don't know if she just makes a point of cranking the PA all the way up, or the speakers are just really powerful on this train, but every time she talks, it hurts, and I want to find her and hit her until the hurting stops. LADY WE CAN SEE IT'S A PURPLE LINE TRAIN YOU DO NOT NEED TO ANNOUNCE IT TWICE AT EVERY SINGLE GODDAMN STOP.

So yeah, nothing too exciting going through my not-in-the-game head. I keep wondering if I should try something dramatic and different to get myself out of my rut, but I've been on a lot of vacations lately and have had a lot of fun and shouldn't be rutty at all, so maybe I just need a really long nap to refill my energy reserves. Say, three or four days in bed.

I'm-a feelin': drained

Hee hee, Sense And Sensibility And Sea Monsters. Just announced. I did a full write-up with press-release excerpts and a link to the book trailer (man, I hate book trailers, but this one's kinda fun) for the AVC site, so I won't reproduce it all here. And I still haven't even read Pride And Prejudice And Zombies. But I'm already wondering what the next one will be. Emma And Mummies?

I'm-a feelin': pleased