I am rarely plagued by insomnia. Probably I could sleep, now that I’ve wiled away the night playing Ms. Pac-Man and aimlessly searching the internet for things Podrostok can do with the rest of the summer and/or the “gap year” he’s planning between high school and college.* But the bed’s up there, and I’m down here.**

* “Gap Year” sounds much nicer than “Constructive Ways To Keep Podrostok Engaged In Life Until He Is Sufficiently Motivated To Pursue Adult Life Agenda Under His Own Steam.” His job application efforts have been somewhat lackadaisical, so I’m thinking he needs a volunteer work experience to start breaking him to the yoke of the workplace. Alternately I suppose I could have him working with a tutor, but for some reason I have yet to see a report card from the high school and therefore don’t know which subjects he needs help with. What I am not doing is expending effort on college research, because I refuse to entertain the notion of funding post-secondary education (beyond gen ed credits at the local community college) for someone who does not know what he wants to study and has a high school GPA that perennially hovers somewhere between 1.9 and 2.4. God forgive me.

** The household’s good laptop mysteriously sustained an injury that partially destroyed its screen display, hence it is attached to a monitor in the basement.

I dropped Mouse off at camp – two weeks of sleep-away camp – last weekend. I’ve been in a funk since then. It’s funny – I was looking forward to being untethered from my daughter, who is a wonderful tween and excellent company but believes in attachment parenting a lot more than I do. Instead I’m lonely and peevish and staying up late to play Ms. Pac-Man. My baby is going to grow up and leave me to face the reality of  The Rest Of My Life! I’ve checked out and read a bunch of books about aging and/or coping with existential issues, but they haven’t done much to cheer me. (They have, however, scared the crap out of Dino Spouse, who was alarmed today by my spate of questions about what we could do to be happy in our empty nest years. As long as he has Podrostok at his side he will never feel alone, but TeenBot’s daily wanderings and efforts to escape family time have some of the same effect on him that Mouse’s absence is having on me.)