a field guide to being alone.

Life as I know it is a series of birthday dinners and other celebratory gestures. In June, it's a sneaky sort of delight: "I've been out dancing every night - and I'm not getting anything done!" In February, it's a slower sort of regret: "Oh. I'm not getting anything done."

February is the month where everyday ordinary things seem hard: getting out of bed in the morning when you can hear the wind howl and it's still dark, working through your office To-Do list even when the things on it are simple and mundane. You find yourself with clear, bright intentions. This week you have 15-18 miles to run, you have to do your taxes, you have a few story ideas burning in your head and you're actually quite excited to attempt to pin them down and force them into language.

What unfolds instead is this dance of birthdays, the call of happy hour, the simplicity of invites to dinners at friends' homes, the lure of a rock show, and the innocence of "do you want to stay and have a drink?" It is rare for any of these nights to be late or wild or overly drunken, but they manage to suck such a nice slot of time that when you arrive home, you convince yourself of a deeper exhaustion that has you sliding into bed earlier than expected.

You are, in effect, keeping yourself distracted from being alone, but the only reason why is that it's February.

And so you wake up one (still February) morning and find that your day's plans have been cancelled due to a snowstorm that never came, and you note that you have yourself a weekend and nothing to fill it with but yourself and the notebooks, novels, and records that inhabit your living space. Shocked, a bit scared, you send a few messages intended to land you in someone else's world as soon as possible. And then, slightly dissatisfied at having to make an effort, you scale back.

If you're feeling any kind of discomfort about being alone, the first thing you must do is be alone for as long as possible until that feeling dissipates.

Then, from the cold hard ground of February come new signs of life in your brain: you listen to one of your favorite albums for an entire afternoon, you spend the entire day reading one of your favorite books, and you take the sudden Saturday silence of your Blackberry to mean that you're doing what's intended of you.

And then you remember that your entire existence used to look a great deal like this. You remember what it was like to go to rock shows alone, to spend weekend afternoons at the movies by yourself, to do everything in good measure by yourself because no one else's company quite matched what you wanted it to be. There's so much to be heralded about this fact no longer being the case, and about having a world filled with people who act in new and interesting ways every day.

Still, there's something to be said for this variety of alone, and you start googling the band whose record you're playing to see if they have any shows coming up. You might buy a ticket, just one, and you might consider this all part of a new project you like to call Alone.