I actually wrote this some time ago. My daily routines have changed somewhat. The sentiment is the same. Though, I did end up renting that apartment in Paris for my birthday.

I stay up late, fantasizing about renting an apartment in paris for my birthday, and looking up dead girls on the internet. Trying not to smoke a cigarette, regardless of how romantic it seems to smoke on the veranda while the rain pours down. These hours, seemingly wasted in the pre dawn. My dreams of accomplishment falling by the wayside as I peruse the night, never totally engaging, never completely capitulating to the idea of a regular schedule. What are those dreams? The ideals of everyday. Ending the day, falling into bed with the comfort of knowing that I earned the day. I was a champion in the face of sloth, the lure of sitting around…oh, fuck it, maybe I’ll have that cigarette after all.

And so I tiptoe back through the dark, my feet dreaming of light, my lungs wheezing slightly in despondency at my apparent lack of will with regard to smoking, my brain is filled with thought. I think often of the places I have been, the places I will go, barely touching on the place I am now. It has always seemed to be so, the illusion that I live in the now exactly that. Why don’t I sleep at night? It’s not that I prefer the night to the day, that there are opportunities for things grander at night. It’s just that I don’t. if I had to, would I? yes, of course. As I have, and likely will again. The dreams I have of travel are fragmented, no place I want to go more than any other. I just want to go, to see, to experience..what, exactly? The world? The people in it? I’ve often rambled about the disdain I feel for humanity, even while embracing it as my culture. I feel superior and inferior at the same time. My desire for spiritual release never getting a secure foothold within any one dogma. My yearning to experience life never having a focus. Ambling thoughts about helping people less fortunate, traversing areas of the planet that remark upon their own beauty with practicality, suggesting that these are not places to be revered, they merely are. Therein lies the beauty, the sacred everyday.

Is there really fault to be found within my vices, my virtues? I think of setting up a schedule, a daily diet of tasks appropriated to those things I find lacking, to give myself physical, mental, emotional, spiritual sustenance. They usually look in my head like this…

Wake up. Drink tea. Yoga routine. Breakfast. Brush my teeth. Make lunch. Work. Eat lunch. More work. Come home. Sit down. Learn Spanish. Have dinner. Play piano. Evening yoga or hulahooping. Something to get the blood flowing. Brush my teeth. Read a book. Fall into bed exhausted but happy.

But instead it usually looks more like this.

Wake up later than I’d like because I stayed awake until 4 or later. Eat breakfast. Drink tea. Make a lunch. Work. Eat lunch. More work. Come home. Eat dinner. Play video games, or watch fragments of movies I’ve seen before until late. Eat more food. Fall into bed and surf the internet incessantly because there’s just so much information about nothing I’m truly interested in. stay up too late, and wake up later than I’d like. Feel bad about the things I didn’t do, but reassure myself that tomorrow will be the day that I do them. Will it? I sleep now, the roosters are crowing, the rain has stopped, daybreak is not here, but not far off…

When I wake, what will change? My increasing frustration with my seeming inability to act on those impulses I find desirable? If indeed they were so desirable, wouldn’t I be living them? We’ll see.