Scott, Anne and I spent the weekend cleaning house. We split the duties, and collectively we swept cobwebs out of corners, removed dead weeds from the yard, mopped or vacuumed the floors, scrubbed the walls, and put away the detritus that collected in the living room over the last several months. Then we started looking ahead, planning things like where we should put mail or important papers, and finding a place for the pile of CDs that's been on the floor since we moved in. We got a new little case of shelves for the living room, and reorganized things throughout the house.

We moved on then to repositioning the furniture in the living room and the bedrooms; Scott had gotten a wall mount for the television he uses as a computer monitor, which he's been planning to do since he first moved in, and we were looking for a place to install it. We considered shifting all the furniture in the living room so that the couch could be closer to the screen, but only one set-up is possible with our house's orientation of walls, windows and electrical sockets. On the other hand, we would have to rearrange everything in the master bedroom in order to get my computer desk in there instead of the living room. We shifted everything in the bedroom (bed, chest of drawers, night table, bookshelf, and plastic drawer tower) to make space. Now it looks like a room in somebody else's house, or a new room altogether.

While I moved my computer into our bedroom, Scott used his new stud-finder to find him a stud, and a good one this time, not some wimp who was afraid of committment and was only going to stay with him for a couple of months. Scott got a position on his stud, and drilled into the wall for an anxious fifteen minutes in search of it. It turns out that in our wall, there's a lot more dry-wall than stud in the hole where the wall-mount screw had to go. There was a chance that putting the television up would cause a chunk of the wall to rip right out and crumble down onto the floor. Each of us took a flashlight and looked into the hole he'd drilled, trying in vain to make sure that the stud was reliable enough. It seemed that the only way to know if the mount would hold was to test it, and so Scott put it in and pulled down hard. Everything seemed okay, so he set the television onto the mount, ready to remove it at the smallest sign of trouble. He let it go to see if the wall could hold the full weight--and it stayed! So now we have two new-looking rooms, suddenly, after months of slowly accumulating furniture.

I've recently been aching for something to help me break the tedium of my lazy job and slow life, something that would let me feel just a bit of the excitement or wonder that I felt at times while in college, and at least occasionally after I graduated. For the better part of a year, with the exception of our visit to Maryland and New York over the winter break, I've felt dull-witted and sedentary, stuck not only in time and place but also in thought. I didn't have much that made me feel anticipation, enchantment, ambition, or really any deep emotion at all. In talking to Anne about it, she identified what I was missing: a sense of novelty. I felt pretty foolish when it was revealed to be such a trivial thing. Since I have no intention of leaving my job or house, and I can't start graduate school until Anne has gotten her undergraduate degree, I thought that I had better find something else to help me feel a passion for living.

It's a small change, the rearrangement of furniture in our bedroom, but it seems like even that is enough, at least for a while, to make me feel the wonder of being around something new. Now when I turn out the lights in bed, or first walk into the room, I feel like I'm staying in someone else's house for a while and moving on soon. I wonder if it's childish of me to cherish this feeling, but I don't really care. For now, I feel more energy to write and think creatively, just by looking up from my bed and seeing a computer where there was no computer before, or by having to recall that the bookshelf is across the room. Once the novelty is gone again, I hope I can find something more lasting and deeper to sustain me.