The Dirt Field

I am eating a bowl of melted cheese held together by pasta. This is two days after I decided to focus on getting more lean and one day after I decided to eliminate starch from my diet. Clearly, both are going well.

My phone just alerted me that I am due in another meeting in 15 minutes, the third one of the day. Two meetings ago, I left abruptly at the beginning to get a cup of coffee from the kitchen. I don’t drink straight coffee (devout latte addict here), but I needed something to cut through the fog in my head. This coffee was so strong I think somebody forgot to use a filter. I could have used it to burn through sheet metal. That was less than two hours ago and now I’m thinking of going back for more. Today in a nutshell.

Things are strange right now. I’m somewhat adrift with regards to training; losing weightlifting has left me with a feeling that I’m never working hard enough and the winter means no races to measure performance or progress. Last week was also a rest week, and that means I don’t sleep well and regret eating things and have nervous energy that comes out in the form of Bad Idea Projects. Since I had already bought a BMW the previous Friday, I was able to rein in my Bad Idea impulses this past week and instead just spent a lot of time fretting. If I was the type of person to chew my hair, I’d have been bald by Saturday morning.

I don’t talk about my relationships on here much because [a] that means sharing things involving a person other than me and [b] my history is somewhat less than ideal. But that means omitting big parts of my life at times and in this case, I don’t want to do that. Not for your sake – if you’re bored and looking for juicy stories, allow me to recommend perezhilton.com – but because this is where I write about my life and sometimes that is going to mean relationships.

So I’ve been in one with somebody in the cycling community and now we are not together (permanently? temporarily? TBD) and it is very weird (saying weird sounds less sad than saying sad). Cycling is my life and we shared almost everything cycling, so that means doing a lot of things alone now. I don’t mind being alone. Sometimes alone is better. But this alone sometimes feels like too much alone, because a lot of my friends were mutual friends that were really more his friends. So now when I post on Facebook about a big ride on Sunday, not as many people will show up. That’s sad. Unless we get back together, in which case people will show up, but I will know that they will only last as long as the relationship does, so that’s sad too.

I think I put too many eggs in one basket.

Yesterday was not an excellent day. I woke up in a mood that did not improve throughout the day. At one point I decided get back in bed to cry, but after a few seconds that felt like it wasn’t going anywhere useful, so instead I listened to “Taro” by Alt-J very loudly on repeat. It’s a gorgeous song and after the fourth or fifth listen, I was completely dazed. The dog was curled up next to me and I had my hand on his back and ended up so out of it that I stopped being able to feel my hands or the dog (although I could still smell his Frito-scented feet). After nearly an hour of that, things felt better.

Better-ish. I still feel weird (sad) and oddly isolated. Hence the need for coffee to revive me for the meeting and the obsession with taking control of everything I can with regards to training. When I leave work today, I am going home to ride and then the rest of the night will be spent quietly at home. After enough time alone, I talk to myself, the dogs, a potted plant, my water bottle, etc, and it all starts to seem completely normal. When the water bottle answers back, that’s when I’ll start to get really worried.

I think it’s okay to feel alone sometimes. It’s good to know how to be alone. But it’s not easy, especially when it is unfamiliar. I’d like to learn how to settle peacefully into the feeling, but that will probably take some time.

This post makes me sound a little nuts. Don’t freak out, Mom. I’m okay. Everything is okay. It’s just weird.