Haven't got the time.

The washing machine ate the money I put in for two loads - it accepted the coins just fine, and stopped the cycles after less than a minute. I'd ask for a refund, but it doesn't seem willing to be fair. So I've got a large set of fairly damp clothes, a set of unwashed pieces, and more things which need to be taken care of sometime tomorrow. So there was that. It's a problem I can throw money at to make it go away, which I can deal with. Other things that brought today down, not so much. I'm back in a round of editing a large batch of cover letters while having a pile I need to send out, which speaks to the fact that I'm putting in effort, yet doesn't feel like it's producing anything. I've been living here for about two months now with four interviews so far - one forthcoming - and one interview every two weeks is a reasonable amount, except I can't feel any of that until I hear the equivalent of "please come in next Thursday."

I'm not happy doing this, and I can accept and work with that, because I wouldn't be happy doing this anywhere. It's too easy to blame living in New York for all this. There's a lot of city living to blame, true, but that's not the entire story and I shouldn't put the focus on the location when the circumstances would be identical anywhere. Even in Pittsburgh or San Francisco. I don't like it much here, and knowing that makes it easier to look for jobs that'd involve moving to where there's dirt.

And I still can't get over how difficult it is to communicate to people that grew up in cities that it's possible to miss dirt. I've taken walks in Pittsburgh's parks where it's possible to not hear or see anything to say I'm in a city; there's a lot of those, even if I didn't go into the gulleys and to the bottom of stream beds. I think there might be one or two places like that in Central Park, if I stand at the right angle or if I go in spring when all the leaves are in. I'll have to keep checking around.

I didn't manage anything this afternoon at the library and ended up back in a depressed mode, but got out of it after dinner and this evening got the latest round of letters to the point where they can be edited to a reasonable level tomorrow. Then the laundry happened, and it's too late to do anything except go to bed and try again tomorrow.