Introvert

It's not that I don't want to work out, but today I really just don't feel like teaching. I just don't want to be the center of attention. I know it's ironic to write that on a blog (since the point is to make people read things that are probably only important to me), but there's just this weird feeling lurking under the surface today. I'm anxious for no real reason, and I don't like being in front of a crowd (especially one I see regularly) when that happens. In moods like this I like to wander off by myself and just let my subconscious sort it out for me. Sort of like in Bag of Bones when he talks about "movers in the attic". I swear that's a quote, and I Googled it just now...the only thing that came up was this post from my other blog, which I wrote almost exactly a year ago. Weird. 

Found it: 

When I left the restaurant, I didn't go home but tramped over half of the damned town, the section 

of newspaper with the partly completed crossword puzzle in it clamped under one arm. I walked

until I was chilled in spite of the warming temperatures. I didn't think about anything, and yet I 

thought about everything. It was a special kind of thinking, the sort I'd always done when I was

getting close to writing a book, and although I hadn't thought that way in years, I fell into it easily

and naturally, as if I had never been away.

    It's  like some guys with a big truck have pulled up in your driveway and are moving things into 

your basement. I can't explain it any better than that. You can't see what these things are because 

they're all wrapped up in padded quilts, but you don't need to see them. It's furniture, everything

you need to make your house a home, make it just right, just the way you wanted it.

    When the guys have hopped back into their truck and driven away, you go down to the basement 

and walk around (the way I went walking around Derry that late morning, slopping up hill and

down dale in my old galoshes), touching a padded curve here, a padded angle there. Is this one a 

sofa? Is that' one a dresser? It doesn't matter. Everything is here, the movers didn't forget a thing, 

and although you'll have to get it all upstairs yourself (straining your poor old back in the process, 

more often than not), that's okay. The important thing is that the delivery was complete.

So not an attic, oops. 

Anyway. I think the major cause of this is anxiety. I still feel like the new kid in school with this group, and that makes me anxious. Not sure why, since I hold their fates in my hands, but whatever. I'm lame like that. This is what I feel like doing, every Wednesday: 

This is the shirt I need though: 

How do you cope with social anxiety?