I don't think I mentioned that I saw a bat flying around Grand Central a few weeks ago. Well, I did.

I wish I was doing things like baking bread and roasting squash. I am determined to be completely finished with painting and moving in by Monday evening (it would be Friday evening, but I'm helping Shelby do exactly the same thing this weekend). Once my room (and, by October 11th, the rest of the house) are cleaned and painted and emptied of cardboard boxes, and once my oven (six burners!) works, I'll be better about certain things.

Right now, I'm enjoying my tea the way I enjoy my bus ride and my new room, which is to say, "a lot."

I'm all for summers spent on the shore, for sunglasses and sea-tossed curls. Lately, though, I'm exhausted and yearning for something less primordial, something more human. I'm longing for shorter days, crisper air, and the holidays that get us through the winters, for bacon grease and aprons and feather blankets. It won't be like this forever.

More than anything, I suppose, I'm feeling happy, if out of place in my own body. Roger wants me to write an entry about him, but right now things are so perfect that there's nothing to say on that topic, except that he's allowed to stay in my imaginary log cabin full-time, provided he relinquishes control over the radio, and stops being allergic to cats.

I just saw a boy outside. He was wearing a dull red sweater and khakis, and was holding a baby disguised as a pumpkin. One of the pumpkin's orange fleece booties had fallen to the ground, and someone bent down and handed it to the boy, who may or may not have been the pumpkin's father. As I walked past, I overheard another girl say to the boy, "I like your baby." My mother once made me an Indian Princess costume out of a pillowcase, unless I'm remembering wrong. This time last year, I was reading a really lovely Neil Gaiman article, and some others on why the British hate Halloween. Having been accosted several times by children in monster masks screaming, "trick or treat," begging for money weeks before the holiday, I understood their feelings that Halloween was a virus of Americanism seeping into the veins of their culture, slowly killing off any and all remaining Guy Fawkes Day cells. I bloody hated Halloween while I was there, too. But the Gaiman piece made me really appreciative of the feeling I loved once, feeling too scared to sleep, knowing there was something in the room with me, sitting quietly in the dark waiting to do any number of horrible things to me. I requested a copy of The Sandman series, and drank a bowl of gin, but that was a long time ago now. This year, instead of spending the night on the bathroom floor, I was able to fully and soberly enjoy bartending what has been called "the best party in Sarah Lawrence history," and I wonder if this is what maturity means.

Now, the holiday season has begun again, rung in today with Reese's peanut butter cups. As the unofficial end of autumn, I thought I'd give you a peek into my personal thoughts on the matter, from several weeks ago when the temperature refused to drop below 70° and all I wrote were poems, poems on trying to stay warm, on eating heavily, on early American history. My handwriting is too large and childish, and I feel like I am constantly living under stones. It's autumn, and I think often of the Puritans, of autumnal foods and manual labor. Am I living a good life? I long for simplicity, yet beg for lavish, out of season goods. I want education, foreign cheeses, scented oils. And yet, I still crave fresh butter, days at the shore, lardy pleasures and squash. The leaves were not as flaming red as I'd hoped they would be on my way upstate, I haven't had time for many roasts, and I feel like the greys of everything, even the brightest days, are just reflective of my own innate mediocrity. Fall has passed once again, but without any of the usual promise it holds of a world bursting with life before it dies. Instead, everything has just been in quiet retirement. Oh, just to rush foolishly into something.

I am not ready for the onset of winter. I sleep under a plaid down comforter, wear a bright white down jacket, kill geese by the hundreds, I think, to stay warm, and still, this is only the beginning. With little snow last year, and a history of the world getting warmed, all I can think now is that this might be the coldest winter I will ever see, and I won't know how to keep myself warm once New Year's is past. I can sustain myself through November with the thought of joyful asceticism and feasting on roast fowl at the end, and December keeps itself cozy with hours of finishing and shopping and fish on Christmas, but New Year's Eve is meant to be a bit chilled and white anyway, and after that I'm leaving for the Caribbean, but still, no matter the temperature of the clear blue waters, I cannot imagine feeling warm at all this coming year.