I Think We Have a Topic for Conversation

For a Sunday spent entirely in my own company, it was a surprisingly satisfying day.

Not just because I knocked out the last minute deadline I was given to compensate for someone else's writing sloth, despite it taking up my entire afternoon and missing out on an invitation to see a play with a friend.

We intend to walk and take in an exhibit later this week instead.

Not just because I wrote a chatty and inquisitive four-page letter to answer one I got Friday, part of a correspondence recently begun to enjoy thoughts and questions in handwritten form.

Surely no one could be surprised that a Luddite like me could have a letter fetish.

Not just because I saw possibly the most simultaneously gorgeous and moving film I've experienced in years - "Moonlight" - which should be required viewing for every adult in our country now that we live in this terrifying post-apocalyptic Trump world, but a film that was also an open-ended storytelling wonder, unwilling to be tied up easily or neatly. Like life.

I did have the tiniest regret at having no one to discuss it with afterward, but I'll find someone who's seen it.

Not just because I can always count on the Washington Post to appeal to my wide-ranging interests once I get past the depressing front page news, as it did today with a travel piece about walking the Cotswolds, a book review explaining why playwright Eugene O'Neill was a terrible husband and a first-person piece about why being open, indelicate and downright impolite about your vices helps combat social pressure to relapse.

The struggle is real.

Not just because of enjoying at top volume my latest album acquisition - the National's "Alligator," an especially groovy chartreuse disc - scooped up at Steady Sounds yesterday, moments after the last Smurf passed as the Christmas parade ended and they bravely opened their doors to the masses.

When I first saw them in 2006 opening for Arcade Fire at Constitution Hall, they played a lot off that album and it's remained a sentimental favorite, one I now own on vinyl.

No, I think even an extrovert could be satisfied with a solitary day after a week soaking in the pretty wonderful things the people in my life have been telling me lately.

Like the email saying, "I have a bazillion questions about you I'd like to ask," or another complimenting me saying, "You are my best go-get-some-culture date!"

And probably the best of the best, "I need my Karen fix," like I was heroin or something.

With apologies to Roxy Music, life is the drug I'm thinking of.