Light content this week.

As I told my therapist, if I end up staying in this apartment past the end of August, it'll be the longest time I've lived anywhere since moving out of home after high school. I'm getting to the point of hesitating to apply for jobs outside of New York, mostly for that reason - I've moved every year since I turned 18, and I've gotten tired of it. And I've gotten comfortable living in this little space. I'm unpacking my stuff and consolidating my things, finally making meals in my own kitchen, using my own bathroom, and I don't want to leave when I've only just started getting settled in. There's work for me in New York past my current gig, with plenty of listservs and job boards telling me that pretty much every day, so that's not such a major concern as it would be if I was living in another city with fewer organizations looking for people with library science backgrounds.

We mostly talked about adjusting to life in new cities, and some of it was also on emotional range and reactions. There's someone I work with who doesn't seem able to establish her boundaries well; she doesn't like me using the computer in the little shared office space but hasn't come out and told me that flat-out. What she said was if I needed to check my e-mail or somesuch, there was another computer I could use. Which is fine, except she never came out and said "please do not use this computer" and that bugs me that she doesn't seem able to do that. Or to tell me it'd be nice to talk about TV during lunch, but not now, since she needed to work on coordinating various schedules to the school year's calendar or somesuch. So I'm left mildly baffled and largely frustrated that - especially after I told her I sometimes need people to be blunt with me - direct communication doesn't seem to be one of her skills.

It's probably bad timing on my part and never asking her about this stuff at lunch, but I've yet to manage to talk her into a good, lengthy conversation, and it seems hard to get her to show genuine enthusiasm. I talked about how it can be hard to get anyone to show deep, genuine enthusiasm and how after a long time in society and working on day-to-day concerns it's that much harder to find moments of passionate joy for things one encounters. Feeling things passionately is important to me, as someone who wants to make other people feel those same deep emotions, and I'm not quite sure how to talk to people that don't get stoked up about one thing or another.