Ennui, thy name is Pepe

Yes, I know, I know, I have lately been waxing all philosophic about contentment this and satisfaction that and oh isn't life grand. Well, let me tell you people, Pepe is not gone for good. That would be too easy. Just tonight he reared his ugly head and roared. I was sitting outside at a restaurant with seven friends (which in itself is no small miracle), drinking beer and eating pizza and just in general enjoying the fact that I had seven friends to drink German beer and eat Italian pizza with. And just a few hours earlier, I had been at a restaurant just down the road, eating ice cream with two other friends and their baby. Well, the baby mostly just gummed the crackers that came in the ice cream. But this is beside the point. The point was Pepe, who arrived uninvited and wrapped his cold fingers around my heart.

The weather is warm enough to sit outside at tables covered in red and white checkered tablecloths and make tentative plans for a bike trip on Sunday. The city is just the right mix of hopping (in Restaurant Row) and dead silent (200 meters down the road at the Market Square), so that you might imagine the whole city belonged to you and your friends, who have laughingly named themselves the "Avant Guard" (OK, that's the best translation I can make of a German play on words) and are just as excited as you are that you have all found each other, the lone remaining heathens after the Total Rapture of Young Adults.

As I am wont to do, I sat and soaked up the happy for a while and grinned giddily at everyone within smile-shot, which caused our poor Italian waiter to come over to the table more than once, thinking we'd like to order some more drinks. And then I spoke the cursed words: "You know, you guys, this is exactly what I had beeen yearning and hoping for the first six months I lived here. And now I have it." Apparently in French, or whichever language my dear Pepe speaks, this was an invitation to come and wrap himself around my soul and squeeze. Maybe I jinxed it by expressing my delight out loud, or maybe it's PMS or culture shock or any number of other handy scapegoats... but the bubble I've been going about in finally popped, and I landed smack dab in Pepe's cold, hard embrace.

OK, I know this beast, he's the one who whispers things like "you're not good / smart / pretty / talented enough" or "your socks don't match" or "they don't really like you, they're just being polite." And he sings the same songs, so mostly I can shoo him away nonchalantly and backhand him with practiced self-confidence: Pepe stuff it, will you? I am fine just how I am. Or, if I'm feeling centered, God made me this way, Pepe. Just whom are you trying to insult? But sometimes he hits a bull's eye; the nail on the head; right where it hurts; pow, right in the kisser. That Pepe, he sure knows how to push my buttons. And this time it was, "Sure, you're having fun now. But then they all go home to their girlfriends and boyfriends and spouses... and who is waiting for you, hmm?" And this one hurts right now. Because of course, no one is waiting for me. No one's day is incomplete without the RDA of Vitamin Me. And I am selfish enough to want more than the astounding amount of blessings that have been heaped upon me in the past weeks.

In order to survive the first few months of this desert wandering intact, I half-consciously packed all my troubles into a bottle and heaved it out into the ocean. I had to do something drastic, turn the emotion faucet down to barely a drip so that I could function at all at work. And then, the past few weeks, suddenly my cup ran(neth) over and my calendar filled up and I recklessly ripped that message out of its bottle, dusted it off and stuck it back in whichever bodily orifice makes an appropriate metaphor at this point. Which was probably not the greatest idea in the world. These things take time, and this was a bit of a jolt, to be back in full emotional schwung after barely dripping for so long. (Sorry, I realize the metaphors are getting confusing.)

So maybe Pepe is the small price I have to pay for allowing the sine wave of my heart to get a little steeper. Well, all right... but only grudgingly.

Good morning, Amy!