C'mon baby, do the locomotion.

There are moments in your life when you hear something come out of your own mouth and have an intense "what the fuck" moment. (This often occurs when I hear myself sounding like my mom as in, "Dan, grab the extra plastic bags from the hotel bathroom in case we need a barf bag on the train.") Such was the experience when, while recounting our London experience, I heard myself say, "By the end I was really missing my routine."

What.

The.

Fuck.

Even writing this I have this icky "get it off! get it off!" feeling about my seeming admission of adult-iness.

I used to set my alarm for 11 if I had to be at work by noon. I used to laugh in the face of long-term planning. I used to say I never want to live a life where my every day looks exactly like the one before it.

How then, did a routine sneak its way in?

And a routine it is. This is what I was missing while on vacation:

Wake up. (Lately it's been by the sun, just before the alarm goes off at 6am. This varies.)

Go to kitchen, put on kettle.

Go to bathroom and then before flushing (a strange detail I stick to for some reason) I strip down and weigh myself. (Up five pounds...mo fo.) Then I carry on.

Back in kitchen, pour boiling water into prepped French Press for steeping.

Spend the time waiting for coffee---the longest five minutes of the day---opening blinds, turning on lamp, locating journal. (The remaining four minutes and thirty seconds is spent staring at the French Press. Sometimes I look out the kitchen window for Woody.)

Sit at little table by window and spend about 45 minutes to an hour writing morning pages with my coffee.

Go back to kitchen to prepare cereal. I have been eating the same exact bowl of cereal every day for almost three years now: 3/4 cup (measured)Kashi GOLEAN high protein cereal with blueberries, 2 tablespoons of ground flax seed and 1 cup (measured) skim milk. (Before eating and while drinking my unfinished water from the night before I take a multivitamin, a Vitamin D supplement and a fish oil capsule.)

I'll often check e-mail or balance our checkbook while eating but as I've been a little anti-computer lately, this part of the routine is fading out. Balancing my checkbook and the weight that can come from e-mail can't be good for the morning qi or any other creative endeavours.

"If I start my day by paying bills or trying to price out flood insurance, I can ruin my whole writing day..." Joyce Maynard.)

After that, the days vary. However, you can bet there is some combination of exercise, showering, salad, and time with either writing, Molly, or Dan that constitutes my day. Laundry, too. (Sadly, laundry and everything else on the list often get more playtime than writing but I'm working on it...)

I missed this routine. We've not even been home a week and back into things we are a-swinging. Last night on a walk, noting all the same construction projects and the same feelings of a summer evening in Exeter, Dan and I remarked how "It's like London never happened." It's so weird...it's like we were here all along. But if I squint my eyes a little, I have the vaguest sense of a world where Dan and I laughed worrilessly about not knowing how to cross the road and drank beer with every meal.

I would say for the first three weeks of London I was content to just wander out the door and see where the world took us. By the last week---Paris, etc.---my body wanted a calorie cap and to log some sneaker time.

It's not just that.

Since we've been back I have been listening to Suze Orman audiobooks and trying to organize all debts and bills. My inner nomad was searching for an anchor and seems to have found it in the form of an Excel spreadsheet.

I can't make enough lists.

I am excited to develop and stick to a budget again.

I want to set an out-of-debt deadline.

Since we booked London, most of our extra money and time was devoted to getting there. Now that it has passed---this special gift of a trip---it's like my train parts are slowly starting up again, and this locomotive is happy to be back on a track.

I'm so disappointed in myself.

During our trip, whenever Dan wanted his sister to have another drink or stay out a little later he would ask her, "What would 20-year-old MB say about this?"

20-year-old Lola, even 25-year-old Lola, would be shaking her head reproachfully.

"Back to your routine, huh? How very bold of you, (stupid.)" (I even speak to myself in parenthetical asides.)

Oy.

The real downer is asking, what track am I on?

Where is all this routine and ritual and normalcy taking me? Or is it insulating me? Is it an illusion of control?

You know it is.

Flax seeds and fish oil does not a "real adult" make.

There are still the big questions. The big goals. The stuff that rips at the meticulous stitching of a five-year plan.

Of this, Dan and I are mostly sure:

We don't want kids right now.

Though we would eventually like a vegetable garden and maybe a little land of our own to go with it, we don't want all the responsibilities of home-owning just yet. Will I in five years? Who the eff knows? As Biggie said, "Mo money, mo problems."

I suppose I would like to focus on my "career" if career means getting to play on the page as much as possible and maybe earning enough to buy a standing mixer. (After ogling all the pretty colors that this particular kitchen appliance comes in nowadays, I told Dan that this is what I will buy with the first check I get from selling any creative writing. It should be said that in all our culinary endeavours we have never actually needed one.) Does that count as being "career driven?"

While I suppose it would be nice to have the validation and gratification (and ego masturbation) of "being received" on some mass scale, the rule I must most ardently follow in my effort "to be a writer," is to (try my goddamn hardest) not to look for outside validation.

"If you're not enough before the gold medal, you won't be enough with it." Anne Lamott

(I'll save for another entry the question of whether or not I cling to this notion---this, "I don't care if people like what I write or if I'm even 'successful'; What is success anyway?"---as the mother of all cop outs.)

Still, there is this business of connection (particularly woman-to-woman) that has always intrigued and driven me. I can't pretend that's not there. Nirvana to me will be a room full of women being TOTALLY HONEST about our gender's most guarded secrets. (Not that I've done that here yet.) I'm a feminist by birth (ooh---memoir title!) as the youngest of five girls and I've always sort of thought ("sort of thought" read: another effing cop out) this would be a guiding light in whatever work I ended up doing.

So is this what I'm working on? Is that the stuff of five-year plans?

How 'bout this, here's the five-month plan:

Blog more regularly, do less laundry and find the flow. I'll also floss daily, return e-mails and water my plants. Write to and from and for women. Figure stuff out. But I will not, for one second, presume to know what the fuck I am doing no matter how structured my days get.

Ooh, I'd also like to save up and maybe travel somewhere for four weeks.

Okay, maybe three weeks.