Shifting reference points.

Today has been one of those quiet days: I spoke to the person at the hairdresser's where I have an appointment for tomorrow, and I said hello to the check-out woman at the grocery, and I requested first-class stamps for thank you notes at the post office, and I left a phone message for someone. Other than that, I've largely been rattling around in my own head, in part because an answer to a question I posed to the world last week seems to have bounced back to me with an answer of stunning simplicity--simplicity that seems literally to have struck me dumb for a little while as I sort out what it means for me.

And yet I suspect that the subject of both question and answer is less dramatic, would be less exciting for you to read about, than these words make it sound. And so here's an analogy that ought to be sweet, if nothing else: the littlest Lexingtonian has discovered the key combination of her feet and her flexibility and can now suck on her own toes. All of those things--her feet, her mouth, her hands, her ability to grab things and put them in her mouth and suck on them--were there before, but now something has clicked and she's able to use them all together to greater ends.

I'm not rediscovering the joy of sucking on my own toes or anything like that. Acutally, now that I see it written out, I'm skeptical as to whether this analogy holds in any way (though I'll leave it because I still think that the littlest Lexingtonian's development is sweet enough to share). In fact, all that's happened is that I realized I was asking the wrong question. At the same moment that that realization buzzed in, I remembered that I can choose to step off the narrative at whose edge that wrong question has poised me. So: rather than go on into that narrative, I've zipped up these black high-heeled boots and am striding away from it. It's not a good one for me. I don't want it anymore.

I'll be damned if it doesn't feel as though I'm taking stock of things at every turn this year. Maybe I'll have something concomitantly dramatic done to my hair tomorrow.

***

And in rolls my day's horoscope (here, I get them at about 10 p.m.):

The past is returning to haunt you or help you, depending on what you were up to back then. Karma isn't always as obvious as it is today, so it's a good reminder to stay on the universe's good side.

So: does realizing that I should short-circuit a masochistic pattern represent some kind of good karmic reprisal--say, for having lived through last year's nonsense? Obviously it's time to read some Derrida and fall asleep. Tomorrow my head will be lighter in all senses.