Experience Boredom.

A couple of years ago, my friend Claudine drove out to see me at my then-boyfriend's house in a somewhat rural part of the universe. She called me from her car and said, "My GPS is saying 'YOU ARE HERE', but I'm in the middle of a field. Where the hell are you?"

I laughed. "You're here".

The boyfriend turned out to be a total douchebag, but I loved the idea of his house being surrounded by nothing but fields.

I don't get a lot of downtime as a single mom. My daughter recently started going to her dad's once a week and staying over, and instead of going out with friends or hitting the docks and trolling for my next husband, I have been spending these days in a coma. I surrounded myself with books and movies this weekend, and got so wrapped up in chick flicks and napping, that I actually woke up at some point today and took about 3 minutes trying to figure out if it was today or tomorrow.

It's so fantastic.

There are days when, after spending hours talking to other people for work, I just want to unplug and do nothing, but mini-me requires macaroni and cheese, or wants me to make her a meatball with her play-doh, or needs a bath, and it's not that I don't love my child more than oxygen, I just get cranky when forced to interact with people for several weeks in a row with no time to myself. I love the idea of living in a house surrounded by nothing. Drop kid off at daycare, silence. Kid goes to bed, silence. Wake up in the middle of the night, wander out into the backyard, scream my head off, silence.

I watched a documentary this afternoon on a Zen monastery in Austria, and it just looked so relaxing. You wake up, stretch, sit and face a wall, and think about nothing. You knead some bread and think about the energy that your knuckles are putting into a food that is going to nourish others. You sit outside and watch a leaf blow around.

I realized that the one thing that has really been missing from my life is the regular experience of conciously doing nothing. No phone calls, no lists, no plans whatsoever. I now live for Saturdays.

I'm going back to bed.

:)