Mom, proceed at your own risk. I wash my hands of any responsibility for raising your anxiety level.

If you work in a job that involves punching a time clock, literally or metaphorically (I once worked in an office with a time clock; it was a hassle and a half), then TGIF! may be the response to the arrival of the end of the week. But if you're more or less your own boss and you have a to do list dated Monday with virtually nothing crossed off of it yet, you might wonder, How The Heck Did It Get To Be Friday Already?! Theoretically, of course.

So it's not quite that bad. I keep at least five parallel to do lists running at any given time, and there's only one of them that's still stuck on Monday. (And one stuck on Wednesday, and one stuck at five weeks ago...) But of course it's the must-dos and the overdues that throb to the front of my consciousness as soon as I wake up. I started keeping my to do lists in my prosthetic brain precisely so I wouldn't have to keep such things at the front of my consciousness all the time. But old habits die hard.

I've just got some grading to finish, and a backlog of e-mails to answer, so it's not even a particularly heavy load. It just feels that way...

Tell you what. I'll report back tomorrow on my progress. That way I'll be more motivated to get it all done. Right?

In other news, I am at this very moment listening to Over the Rhine's Ohio double album. And enjoying it. This in itself is not a Big Deal. But for those of you who are tracking with me on the road to recovery from He-Who-Seemed-Like-A-Nice-Boy-At-The-Time-But-Turned-Out-To-Be-A-Sociopath-Number-Two, this is what is known as a Milestone. My capacity to listen to and enjoy music in general has been significantly impaired in my of-late bout with depression, and music that bore a psychological association with my latest failed relationship in particular was boxed up and hidden away so that I wouldn't have to SEE the CDs, much less listen to them. In May or June I turned the corner of being able to pull out and enjoy most of that music again (why should the devil have all the good music, after all?), but somehow this one has a holdout. But then yesterday I found myself humming "Long Lost Brother," (I wanna do better / I wanna try harder / I wanna believe / Down to the letter /Jesus and Mary / Can you carry us / Across this ocean / Into the arms of forgiveness...), and wanting to listen again to it and its brethren.

"I wanna do better, I wanna try harder" is the story of my life. It's the reason I'm beating myself up before I even get out of bed over my overdue to do list. Forgiveness, Grace, is hard to grasp hold of, first and foremost for myself, secondarily for everyone else, including ex-boyfriends. I try harder to do better at forgiving and being forgiven, and miss the truth that it's a gift, it's precisely not about my ability to do it perfectly, because if perfection were an option, forgiveness wouldn't be a necessity. But perfection is not an option, it's an idol, and a nasty, persistent one at that, one that demands constant human sacrifice and never is satisfied. So I pray for deliverance, for the grace to know forgiveness from both sides as a supernatural gift. And I'll head to church on Sunday to eat and drink unworthily in remembrance of the divine human sacrifice to end all sacrifices, the Perfect lover who loves me perfectly, in all my imperfection.