Restlessnessnessness

Restlessness is one of those words that have really fun, seemingly endless pronunciations, like edited (editededed). At about 6:30 this afternoon, an hour after I woke up from a three-hour nap, I started feeling really restless, and when I went outside, just to be outside, and realized it was cloudy and cool-ish, I felt an immediate desire to drive to High Falls, my favorite nearby state park; it's thirty miles from my house, and about 25 of those miles are interstate. (Sprewell Bluff is my favorite sort-of nearby state park; the drive there from home is 50 miles of mostly state highways.) Even though it's fairly close, to drive to High Falls with only three hours of remaining daylight seemed wasteful. I considered expensive options, like buying a tent from Target and spending the night at High Falls to make the (gas money spent making the) trip worth it. And I tried to make justifications for the expenses ("I'll use the tent every weekend!"), but about 40 weekends of my year are dedicated to tennis, and tomorrow I have play planned for 10:00 a.m. which means, if I had decided to go to High Falls, I would've only been able to do river things for about three hours. So not worth it. Because of my tennis commitments, state park visits are pretty rare for me, and when I get to make those visits, I always enjoy myself so immensely that I consider giving up on tennis to instead spend every weekend in the woods. But I know myself better than that: My park trips are so satisfying because they're infrequent, and since they're infrequent, each trip feels almost totally new; if I went weekly, that appeal would be gone.

Next, after deciding against the tent purchase and the High Falls trip, I considered driving ten miles to Barnes & Noble ... and that would've been tremendously stupid. To spend money on books when I have at least six I haven't read yet would've, post purchase of course, really made me frustrated with myself. Those bought and unread books include (followed by parenthetical excuses or excuse-like explanations): To Feel Stuff by Andrea Seigel (Bret Easton Ellis' favorable review of the book mislead me, and its first three chapters really bored me - I truly love dull books [Graham Greene is my favorite writer], but boring books written badly are … well, I can't do it. Seigel's blog (http://andreaseigel.typepad.com/), however, is waaay fun to read.); The Poetic Edda (I used a 40%-off coupon to buy this book from Borders, which means I still spent more than nine dollars on a book that I feel obligated, given this passion for fiction I pretend to have, to read. Goddamnit.); Despair by Vladimir Nabokov (This one is terrifically good and so much fun to read, so I'm not sure why I haven't been.) Of Grammatology by Jacques Derrida (What the fuck was I thinking?!); The World as Will and Representation by Arthur Scopenhauer (It doesn't shatter my earth, but it's moderately illuminating and its discussions on suicide make me really happy.)

Since I have a library of books I've lazily disregarded, and since I wanted to be outside so bad, I made what I guess is a concession: I sat in the grass of my front yard (pesky, playful dogs would've bothered me in the back) and read until it got too dark and unbearably buggy to read anymore. So that's the story of my not yet satisfied restlessness. Next time, I'll do the same thing with 4+ drinks.

Tomorrow. Tomorrow. Tomorrow.