I'm staring at a fresh, white text document waiting for inspiration. I thought I had a lot to say, but tiredness is squelching my creative impulses. I, perhaps, shouldn't have forced myself to go running this morning. It was one of those mornings when you just don't feel quite 100%. I felt almost as if I had a slight hangover, although alchohol hasn't touched my lips since Saturday. It's been an exhausting week all round. Screenwriting class on both Monday and Thursday this week, and in-between, a two day trip to Southern California. Add to that my new resolution to go running four times a week instead of three, and you have a very tired person.

Work is busy too, and it's looking like I'll have to go up to Cupertino each day Monday through Wednesday next week. Overall, though, I can't say that I have much to complain about currently. I'm generally feeling in great physical condition, healthy, strong and fit, and all my aches and pains of earlier this year dealt with. Depression has kept itself more distant, too, in recent weeks, though has never completely disappeared. And in between working on my work the two screenwriting classes, I've been hatching new plans. Trying to figure out my Summer travel plans. I'm still extremely undecided. On the one hand, I'm tempted by a month-long drive across heartland America. But I'm also feeling a very strong draw to more common stomping grounds, and I'm thinking of a week in NYC, two weeks in England, and a week in Boston.

Gosh, now that I think about it, I don't actually know that I have much to talk about after all. No sturm und drang. So I might as well talk about an interesting conversation I had with my therapist this week. One of the constant themes since I started to see her in the Fall has been the sense of disconnectedness I often feel. That's also, as it happens, the theme of the feature-length screenplay I'm working on. Anyway, we started to talk last night about the difference between "friends" and "community" - how they're not at all the same thing, and how you really need both in order to have a sense of being connected. It's something I'd thought about before, but not in such concrete terms. When you think about it, community starts with frequent interactions with the same people on a daily or weekly basis. So, in that sense, community includes, for example, the people at Pasta Pomodoro, where I get food-to-go several times per week. And the nameless faces I exchange nods with at the gym. And the people I breeze past in the corridor at work. And so on.

I know, from my own experience, that these interactions do enrich life, but not in an extraordinarly deep fashion; those quick passing webs of everday community aren't enough. My therapist asked me to recount periods in my life when I did feel a strong, rich sense of community. Not surprisingly, I came up with high-school, college, and, particularly, grad-school and the few years after grad-school when I worked as an academic employee at my grad school. In those types of environments, the daily contacts are frequent and in-depth enough that they dig deeper roots, and spout more foliage. So it's really not that surprising, then, that now, in the absence of that kind of environment, I feel disconnected. My therapist says that in her experience, there's an epidemic of this type of feeling amongst city dwellers. So many people feel cut-off from the people around them, and have no true sense of family or community in their life.

The odd thing is that few people will admit to this, except to, perhaps, their therapists. If you have casual conversations with people at the gym or at work, you're left with hints of a rich, connected life. But people really present things to acquaintances in the way in which they want to be seen, which may, in fact, be a long way from the truth. I think that part of the unhappiness that comes from disconnectedness, at least in my case, is from the feeling of being the only one who's like this. You contrast yourself with everyone else who seems so connected. Whereas, in fact, that may well be a spurious perception.

The fact that so many people experience this lack of connection doesn't mean that you should just accept it, though. I know for myself that I've tried many strategies over the years to build for myself more of a sense of community. Not with much success, it's true, but that doesn't stop me trying. That's, in fact, one of the joys of my screenwriting class. I was lucky enough to find a core group in that class of like-minded, kind-hearted, feeling people, and we enjoy our interactions in class. There's one guy who now always turns to me to share a grin, when the teacher says something funny. And that simple act is worth so much. None of these interactions have yet led outside of the class-room, and, indeed, they're likely to end with the class in June, but it gives you hope.