You know that feeling you get when you are anticipating something wonderful, but at the same time unknown or foreign...like diminutive people are tumbling on a trampoline between your gall bladder and your spleen? I've got that! I've had it since I got home from the Indigo Girls concert and lay down in my bed at just shy of midnight. It's the feeling that some really wonderful, yet overwhelming news is coming down the pike; it's the feeling that something I want is hurtling toward me; it's the feeling that I may have to make a decision that, while scary, will be the best thing that ever happened to me... THAT kind of feeling. You know, like I just won the Alaskan lottery and must claim my igloo and personal dog-sled team in thirty days or lose it. Or that Word by Word's grant came through, with the stipulation that I must interview only writers from countries that end in "stan."

The trampoline feeling has brought with it the urge to do all kinds of new things. Write stories! Pull together that Story Collection! Email that publisher guy I interviewed! Pitch that article! Call in favors! Ask for things I've always wanted. Buy that printer/fax/copier/scanner I've had my eye on.

I'm not saying I know WHAT "it" is that might be creeping toward me in destiny's slimy little jaws...and it may be nothing at all. Or it may be some Stephen King-style bad news--a severed limb, a sudden death--that is just masquerading as a premonition of good news. It may also just be the MANIA that accompanies being a creative person, which I must admit I haven't really felt in a long time because it's been suppressed by the despair of being a graduate student, a self-employed freelancer and a stifled novelist all at the same time. It may also be some of the goo that seeped in last night as certain Indigo Girl songs, like that one I always call "Chickenman," or the wonderful "Virginia Woolf" started recalling my undergraduate years, which are now far enough away from me that they require music to elicit memories of them ...those years in which I was SO MESSED UP that my first serious relationship inspired such trauma in me that I lost thirty pounds. Yes. Thirty.

It could be any of this, or none of it. It could be that my immune system is still in shaky territory, evidenced by the continual sore throat on only one side of my throat each morning and the wobbly feeling in my knees each morning BEFORE my coffee. It could be the hallucinogens of too little sleep, the insanity that the daily, steady whir of power-saws and hypnotic pounding of nails by the contractors next door is creating in me.

Or maybe, baby, my ship is about to come in.

Stay tuned.

Oh, and I forgot to give you a Now Playing for the past few days: Appalachian Journey, Yo-Yo Ma and Mark O'Connor. It's brilliant.