I guess that�s what diaries are for � expelling lingering thoughts, purging them through a pen or a keyboard. The thing is, thoughts that require purging are generally either mindbogglingly depressing or insanely joyful, and at the moment I am working a standard nine-to-five job and driving in traffic for between one and one-and-a-half hours each way, each day. This makes for grouchy, not joyful.

But really, I am pretty happy overall.

Good things about my life currently:

1. I have a mortgage. This in itself is a bit of a nuisance really, as it means that money is magnetically attracted out of my hands and into the loan payments (it even makes this cool �zip!� noise as it disappears, leaving a money-shaped cloud of dust in my wallet). However, the positive side of this is that it�s exactly the same as renting, only each time we pay the rent, we come a step closer to owning the place.

2. I have snowboarding equipment all of my very own, and I get to use it several times a year. This is a relatively new outlet for me � the buzz of going fast, the peacefulness that seems at odds with the whole notion of doing something as dangerous as strapping a plank on your feet and dodging trees. I wish I could explain it. It�s like adrenalin-filled yoga. In the snow.

3. I get to go overseas with Daniel and Joel every year, and for a whole month I can walk outside and see spectacular snow-capped mountains, and I can snowboard whenever I damn well feel like it. If that isn�t a cool thing to have in life then I don�t know what is. It�ll be nice to be in the Alps again in February.

4. I have an interesting (and slowly growing) range of mostly pointless qualifications. I am qualified to teach tap and jazz, having also danced myself for 14 years. I have a double degree in Commerce and International Studies, the latter portion of which resulted in my spending two months studying in France. Alone. I am now partway through a Diploma that could give me a career path in book editing and publishing.

5. I have someone who seems to enjoy living with me. It�s easy to forget that it�s not common to be able to spend so much time around the same person and not get sick of them (or have them get sick of you to the point where they want to stick a pencil in your eye socket and wiggle it around a bit).

Probably the main thing I�m lacking at the moment is a social life. Three of us from high school catch up a couple of times a year, but I just feel as though I have to censor myself around them these days. We�re quite different people. One of them turned out to be a real hardcore Christian, which is fine but I happen to know that she quietly believes that non-believers go to Hell, and that sharing a bed before marriage is a sin.

I�m not sure whether she thinks of me as a �sinner� and I�m not really prepared to ask. My friends and I were a weird group. Really, we hardly knew one another, and rarely shared secrets. We just all had the same sense of humour and laughed a lot together. So I wouldn�t ask a question like �do you think I�m going to Hell?�

This friend, A., though, was always the absolute straightest person I knew. In high school she wouldn�t even walk through a temporarily out-of-bounds area to get to our recess spot, even though we all knew the teachers wouldn�t mind. I ended up keeping her company because everybody else just thought she was being needlessly straightlaced, and went off without her.

She got a job at a small video store while she was at uni. Once I visited her at work, and I really needed to use a bathroom but there was only a staff toilet. She was the only person other than myself in the store but she still wouldn�t let me use the staff bathroom because they weren�t supposed to � it was only for staff � and she might get in trouble. It was night and I had to go around and find somewhere that was open and had a toilet I could use.

She doesn�t drink (I once managed to convince her to try a glass of alcoholic apple cider), so we can�t just go to a bar to catch up because that isn�t really her scene.

Society is full of rules, and unlike most human beings, A. lives by every single one of them. I just find that so repressive. We still get along when we catch up, but it�s hard when your values and boundaries are so different.

By the way, this is the same friend who drank hydrochloric acid with me in science, so you can�t judge a book by its cover. You just have to try not to take the book out-of-bounds.

My workmates are a fair bit older than myself. I get along with them but they are in a very different place in life from me. They have families, they own houses, they are� Grown Up. I�m going to have to work out how I can meet more people my own age, but I just don�t know when I�d have the time.

That just gave me the sudden compulsion to send one of my old friends a text message. Just thinking about how boring I am becoming is scaring me! My God. Anybody out there want to be my new friend? I�m not very trendy so you�ll always look great next to me.

Hm, it also appears that I am making imaginary friends through work. I just called a place, holding a fax in my hand from someone called Ronda. "Hello, could I speak to Ronda please?" The receptionist sounded baffled and I got put through to someone else. I asked the guy what heppened to Ronda. "Um, we've never had a Ronda here. There was an Ilma but she left." This is odd because a couple of months ago Ronda was my contact at that same place. I was holding a fax from her, with her name on it for goodness' sake! This is scary because it might mean that not only am I inventing people, but I am also spending time in my sleep creating documents to verify their existence.

Anyway, on a slightly less �scary-old-bag-lady-who-talks-to-pigeons� note, I need to find somewhere that sells bonsai plants that is open this afternoon. I like how I�ve worded that as though it is a matter of life and death. �Bonsai! STAT!�

Here�s a random fact about me: the most non-eatable thing I have ever eaten is a lolly wrapper. I was five years old, and the boy across the road had proven to me that he could eat a handful of grass clippings, the stuff that comes out of a lawnmower. When he went home, I decided that he wasn�t the only one who could eat non-food, so I ate a lolly� and then as an afterthought, I ate the plastic wrapper too.

Happy Thursday!