Dawn in Suburbia

This morning, I read about a study that found too much coffee adds to the voices in your head. Just what I need.

Maybe that's why I got a haircut yesterday. I hadn't planned on it, but suddenly I found myself sitting in the chair that had just been occupied by my daughter, puzzled as I watched my unruly locks falling in clumps to the floor. The din in my head must have been loud; I think I mistakenly heard the voices screaming cut it off, realizing only after it was too late to salvage my pony tail that they were simply imploring me to cut it out.

Oh well; it's just hair. I can't go back, can't glue it back on. Which brings me to the wonderful movie I saw last night -- Midnight in Paris. Say what you want about Woody Allen, but he certainly knows how to hit the nail on the head of the human condition. Or maybe its just the human condition of people who went to Midwood High School in Brooklyn (I wonder if Woody goes around bragging that Jill Ocean went there too), we dreamers who grew up in cramped apartments wondering what it would feel like to have room to run.

Midnight is, in a nutshell, about idealizing a place and a time, one that has already passed. I could certainly see the appeal of Paris at midnight in the twenties, the place and time to which Owen Wilson repeatedly traveled in the movie (shocking, I know, given the title). Heck, if I had my druthers (whatever the hell those are) I'd travel back to last Tuesday in Podunk and be certain I'd hit the jackpot. But there's no time like the present and no place like home -- for better or for worse -- and I'm guessing I might as well make the best of it. I don't foresee any trips back in time or across the pond any time soon.

So here I'll stay in deep dark suburbia in 2011, with my chopped up hair and my blind, depressed dog and my broken mother and my as yet unresolved divorce and my uncertain future. Wait, doesn't everybody have an uncertain future? And, though I'm not sure of many things, I'm fairly certain my mother's bones will heal and my hair will grow back. Who knows? Manny might even regain his sight and my life may be free of attorneys, as my husband has promised, by Labor Day.

I'm going to start listening more carefully to the voices. This morning, I got an extra large coffee, hoping those voices will rise above the din and some useful instructions will come through loud and clear. By noon, if I play my Starbucks card right and infuse enough caffeine into my bloodstream, I will have so many conversations going in my head I won't have time to daydream about time travel, or travel of any other kind.

I'm just going to have to cut it out.