"And after that there's sleep."

I finished things today. I realized I didn't have any pressing work to do, and was thinking I could go home and not be wasting time, when I realized I could do board-review reading. So I did that for a while. It was making me sleepy.

The new Lifetime record is growing on me as I listen to it more.

More Doug Coupland - this is from a story about separation:

I told her that everybody feels lost when they're young.

But she says there's a difference. She tells me that at least when she was younger she felt lost in her own special way. Now she just feels lost like everyone else.

....

When I was younger I used to worry so much about being alone - of being unlovable or incapable of love. As the years went on, my worries changed. I worried that I had become incapable of having a relationship, of offering intimacy. I felt as though the world lived inside a warm house at night and I was outside, and I couldn't be seen - because I was out there in the night. But now I am inside that house and it feels just the same.

Being alone here now, all of my old fears are erupting - the fears I thought I had buried forever by getting married: fear of loneliness, fear that being in and out of love too many times itself makes you harder to love; fear that I would never experience real love; fear that someone would fall in love with me, get extremely close, learn everything about me and then pull the plug; fear that love is only important up until a certain point after which everything is negotiable.

.....

When you're young, you always feel that life hasn't yet begun - that "life" is always scheduled to begin next week, next month, next year, after the holidays - whenever. But then suddenly you're old and the scheduled life didn't arrive. You find yourself asking, "Well then, exactly what was it I was having - that interlude - the scrambly madness - all that time I had before?"

.....

I am kicked in the gut. She says that one of the cruelest things you can do to another person is pretend that you care about them more than you really do. I'm not sure if she means this about me or if she means this about herself. I ask her and she says she doesn't know.

.....

She says: "First there is love, then there is disenchantment and then there is the rest of your life."

And I say, "But what about the rest of your life - what about all the time that remains?"

And she says, "Oh - there's friendship. Or at least familiarity. And there's safety. And after that there's sleep."