I'm not built like a writer.

I need to get better at saying no. My sister has this book about "love languages," and all the ways people receive and give love. In the little test that it gives you, I came up as someone who most comprehends and expresses love with quality time. Bummer, right? Why can't I love gifts or acts of service - things that take up less of my precious time that could be spent writing? Some of the best authors were famously anti-social, weren't they?

I'm recently in a new relationship and along with all of the awesome things that have changed, there are a few parts of my routine that have been rattled that I've yet to figure out how to balance. My weekends used to be mine. With friends who work in restaurants and retail and all but disappear once the week is over, weekends had become my sacred time. I could wake up early, head to the coffeeshop or library, or hole up in my room and read and write to my heart's content. I had the luxury of grocery shopping in the afternoon, making large meals that would last throughout the week and going to bed early. I wrote long, meandering letters and watched documentaries and actually made it through novels. I wrote blog posts and short stories; I revised things.

I miss that girl who had her shit together, though I don't for a moment wish things were any different than they are right now. I'll just pretend I'm a feather pillow in a dramatized scene about pillow fights: My feathers are floating around, and I just need to be patient while they fall into a brand new pattern, no less comfortable as before. I can't organize everything, nor am I very good at it, and so I'm relishing these circumstances that have thrown me for a loop.

Hopefully with the new order comes better analogies and fewer cliches.

I read Mary Gaitskill's "The Other Place," this week's fiction in the New Yorker and haven't quite figured out my thoughts on it yet. The past two weeks' stories have felt similar, almost pointless, like conversations over a bottle of wine.

It's Thursday now, almost Friday, and then off to Philly for a magical weekend in the 1920's. I couldn't be stoked-er.