Karma Police

Listening to Radiohead while I work.  I guess the last time in my life I listened to this band regularly must have been when I lived in Australia, because my mind is flooded with images from that trip while I listen, almost to the point of distraction.  A long drive up a coast road; an endless, wine-drenched night at a terrace bar under the winking Southern Cross; a dirty hostel kitchen and the requisite flip flops in the shower; frigid, sleepless nights in the back of the car, getting up every hour or two to refill the hot water bottle; dreadlocked fellow travelers and their glassy-eyed smiles; Uluru pulsing orange on the horizon at daybreak; a backpack of clothes and a wide open agenda.  These are the trappings of my adventure, which is now ten years past.  Just now I feel every inch of those years.

Yesterday we received wonderful news, of a contract job for my eminently qualified husband.  The Professor will be The Professor in blog-speak AND in actual, legitimate job title, and I see the recession as a huge black pool, fathoms deep, and this job is the buoy that will let us rest a bit from our endless, gasping swim.  His pay will begin around the same time that we become parents of two, and my summer pay for this job that I do, this job that I like, will become the down payment on a car for a family of four.

Myriad blessings, and their attendant stresses.  How quickly ten years has flown, how quickly it slipped from me.  ThomYorke croons through my headphones, and I take plodding notes about ambiguous conveyances in deeds of sale in my windowless cubicle with my feet up on an old banker’s box, and think is it any wonder I cannot breathe these days.