Sam is grumpy, and I know why.

He had the day off school, and he really didn’t do anything. Which is partly down to him: he didn’t try to do anything, didn’t look for a friend or set out to build a LavaMaster 5000 or anything like that, and partly down to me. He is ten, after all, much of the really fun stuff he gets to comes from me planning really fun stuff, and today, I didn’t. I was working, and happy to be working.

But I came home to a pile of dissatisfied, scruggy semi-disgruntledness. That was then supposed to go to hockey practice two hours later–hours that were filled with oops I forgot I had homework and a guitar lesson (shared with me and thus fun). Then he didn’t want to go to hockey after a day of not doing whatever it was he really wanted to do, and then he went and wasn’t happy about it, but he didn’t want to not go, either. I have to say that I was particularly touched by his disappointment that he wouldn’t be home to eat dinner all together, which we do six nights out of seven. By the end, he couldn’t win.

I have days like that all the time, but Sam is used to feeling very cheerful, and he isn’t taking it well.

And the upshot is that we are both kind of struggling against feeling dissatisfied with ourselves, accompanied by a these are the very last nice days we will ever ever have fall feeling and in my case, at least, a disturbing sense that there is something i promised somebody somewhere that i would do that I have not done and a touch of that sort of existential confusion that floats up every once in a while, even when things are going well.

I think what we need is to play some good music really loud, and have something to eat.