How Does it Feel?

Like I just broke up with a girlfriend when I was a teenager and I don't know what to do with myself. I haven't worked through it quite yet to the point where I feel liberation. I feel that strange sense of emptiness where everything that had once meant so much to me will all be long in the past- that it will eventually lose its meaning and importance. My life as I know and love it will eventually be strange and foreign as the emotional attachments are severed and rebuilt around another life. On such a dreary day it was not a welcome feeling. My replacement was with me. I am on my way out and I cease to be significant. Can I be any more maudlin?

I had lunch in West Saint Paul with some staff from one of the programs located nearby. While I worked out of the West Saint Paul program myself for almost ten years, Robert Street had changed so much in the last five years that I had difficulty recognizing things. It was wholly unfamiliar. It reminded me how things have existed before me, and will continue to exist and grow when I am gone.

I left work early, since work is now a place I go rather than something I do. I have two days left. A coworker drove me home. We met up for a rainy two hour bike ride a little later. His track bike broke- literally, a few tubes were mysteriously severed. He is now on a beater conversion where he could literally remove all the bolts and it would still hold together- that is how corroded it is. I ended up with a flat tire a mile or so from home. It was cold and rainy, and it was a slow flat. I pumped it up and rode it out to make it home. I did not want to deal with it in the rain.

We are having a going away party of sorts on Saturday. I called an old friend and left a message a few days ago. He phoned me back from Chicago. They are relocating, and he is renting an apartment there until they can sell their downtown condo. Oddly, it was a pleasant surprise. I feel our move would be easier if everyone else we knew moved out of the Twin Cities- sort of a scorched earth policy of sorts.

On a lighter note, I did the impossible. In selling our house in twelve hours, and easily selling both cars, borrowing Porsches, Audis, and a Navigator are enough signs at the ease and smoothness of our move, this one takes the cake: I wiggled out of our Cingular cell phone contract! Since our phones were linked, there was a lot of money at stake, since we still have seven months left of our contract. I found a sympathetic customer service rep who thought we might return as customers if we were treated right, should we ever relocate to the US. I couldn't be happier. We will keep our US number for a few weeks with international roaming, until we are set up with Norwegian service. My phone is compatible in Europe. Lise lost her phone last winter, so she is using an antique that is so unreliable that it really should be put down.

Anyway, that is my life.