Getting over the blank page

The fact that I'm up late on a weekday makes me feel more like my old, creative, introspective self, the twenty-year-old who could spend a whole afternoon sipping tea and writing colossal diary entries. Egocentric and lazy, but with some sort of inner life. The transition from studying to full-time working has taken that inner life away. Traces of it remain, though; I haven't stopped spending time composing snippets of text, putting everyday impressions into words, even though they never get written down any more.

For example, on the long train ride back home tonight, I felt inspired to write about my evening. I'm just home from dinner at a colleague's, which is no frequent occurrence, and the colleague in question is a person I'm strangely in awe of. Getting to see her home was a thrill, and I wanted to tell the story, but now I can't muster the energy to construct something coherent. Something about how we made our way to the front door past a heap of bicycles of different colours and sizes, the remains of a molten igloo, and a couple of empty rabbit-cages covered with a mangy bedspread; how the interior of the house was minimalist and yet haphazard, with a few lopsided Christmas ornaments (some clearly made my family members, others not) still up; how the one ordered section of the bookshelf paraded the Harry Potter series, the Lord of the Rings trilogy, and Jean M. Auel's books, while the rest was peopled with crime, non-fiction, ugly objects probably intended as ornaments, and a toolbox.
Two of the children of the house were teenagers, the third quite a bit younger (powder boy, I thought, and reflected that perhaps I should try and read something else than naval fiction for a while). They were completely undisturbed by the presence of a bunch of strangers in the combined sitting and dining room and talked freely to us, so different from my siblings and me when we were young.
I sidled up to the stereo to look at the CD that lay on top of it; it was software, not music.
The food was an oven-baked mash of pumpkin with crispy little pieces of bell peppers in it and sprinkled with sesame seeds, accompanied by an unrelated dish consisting of meat wrapped in bacon and a random, very robust wine. It was served on a tablecloth of purple, crushed velour and the napkins had Disney figures on them.

Lately I've realized that my life is too ordered for my own good nowadays. Especially since I started working, I've grown used to eating professionally prepared food and ask the waiter for drink recommendations, of listening to in-laws discussing very fine points of interior decoration and praising the perfection of a holiday in Dubai, of spending nights in newly furnished hotel rooms. It turns out that I desperately need a bit of disorder and imperfection now and then, that it makes me feel revived and happy.