(no subject)

With the change of seasons, I've been carrying a low grade cold-shaped thing for the past couple weeks. Runny nose, a little coughing, some eye irritation, generally gunky feeling. It comes and goes, for good measure, so lots of the time I feel just fine, but then it comes back. Fun! I took off from work Monday because I was feeling especially bad in the morning, but most days I wake up and I'm on that annoying borderline between staying home and going in. I prefer illnesses with more clearly defined beginnings and ends, but the past few years those have been comparatively rare, and these annoying semi-colds have been the norm.


Life has felt busy lately... I don't have a night at home to myself this week until Shabbos. Monday I went to a Torah study program, Tuesday was roleplaying night, tonight I'm meeting with a writing buddy, Thursday I have dinner with my parents. That is a lot for me, I like to schedule myself to have some nights at home to relax because my extroversion is a limited resource. This may have something to do with my semi-cold, I suppose.

But what's striking about this to me is that a few years ago, I was much more zealous about reserving those nights at home, because most of my friends lived in New York City and those social nights out involved a couple hours of exhausting travel into the City that demanded recovery time afterward. But all the social stuff this week is local. It appears that I've finally managed to carve out something of a New Jersey social life, so that I don't need to go into NYC to see all my friends. (And I've even managed to trick get some of my NY friends to come out to visit in Jersey, which was formerly nigh impossible.) This means I've been seeing some of those NY friends less frequently, which sometimes sucks, but mostly I think the new balance is probably better. But I probably do still need to remember that even without the travel, extroversion is exhausting.

I'm down to basically only two reasons for going into NYC: monthly Puzzled Pint, and the Metropolitan Opera. Very occasionally I'll go in for some other special reason.

Six months ago, Puzzled Pint was nicely covering all of my NY social needs- it gave me a one-stop-shop opportunity to hang out with friends from multiple of my NY social circles. But lately attendance has been sparser. I may need to look up some of the friends who have stopped being regulars at Puzzled Pint to make separate plans again, alas.

My Met season starts up with Nico Muhly's Marnie, based on the Hitchcock film, on October 31st. It was going to start with Carmen on October 30th, but remember what I said about going into NYC two nights in a row being bad? I traded those Carmen tickets to a friend for tickets to a Gaelic Storm show in New Jersey next week.

The counterargument to limiting my extroversion, though, is that we're a few weeks from hitting the point where I get to work when it's dark out and go home when it's dark out. And experience says that if I don't overload myself with reasons to force myself to leave the house as winter hits, I will overcorrect and spend the next three months avoiding social encounters altogether and being moderately unhappy with myself. So... yay.