Monday

My mom left for her break this morning and I woke up to an empty house...This dosen't seem terribly unusual, but since our house is essentially one room, the experience of being alone (plus dogs and cats, but who's counting) is almost unsettling. I find that having other people provides an inertia--I wake up, the house is quiet. The immediate goal is to keep it that way, to go about my goals unobtrusively in a nice peaceful coexistence. But alone, the is nothing to stop me from bringing singing out of the shower, talking to myself, playing music loudly, and generally an absolute lack of self-consciousness. This is really nice, but being able to do anything makes doing nothing a lot harder. After a few hours alone in the house, with no need to be there (when you are alone, no one is going to talk to you) I rode my bike down to the beach and back for a little. It's something I don't think I've done since elementary school, and a lot less onerous than I remember. Being back on a bike makes me feel like everything is much closer than I think it is, which is quite liberating.

As much as I think I'll enjoy having a week with the house to myself during the day, I think it makes getting out a few times a day an absolute necessity. One can only interact with objects for so long, and I can only connect with the canned minds of books in brief spurts. We spend our lives procrastinating from tasks, struggling against obligation toward freedom. But, when freedom splays itself out before you, you realize that what gave you fulfillment was the struggle, not the goal.