I went to bed at 10, woke up at 8. Migraine gone. Sinus headache in its place. Both have the same root cause–this cold front that can’t quite get motivated to get here. But at least, with a sinus headache, I don’t feel like throwing up and I trust myself to drive, if need be. And medication should take care of it, whereas migraine medication gets rid of the pain, but not the loopy crap.
So, it’s aggravating, but an improvement.
Since Google Reader is going away, presumably because Google hates America and Superman and baseball and Mom and apple pie and the thrill of riding around in an old V-8 with a backseat as big as a couch, I’m switching to The Old Reader.
I hate it, on principle. Because I hate unnecessary change.
But I am attempting to get used to it.
I wish I were at home on the couch reading a book and napping.
Instead, I will be doing a spreadsheet.
Young people, learn one thing from me–there’s always some damn spreadsheet. You could major in flutes of the ancient Romans and get a job in flute curation and still there are going to be spreadsheets.
Learn them as soon as possible.
I’m not sure today could have been much weirder. At least, I hope not.
But at least I’ve moved on from the “watching the clock until I can take the next dose of cold medicine” portion of the cold. I really hate cold medicine. It helps, but I react to it poorly. Last night, for instance, I kept seeing a cat in my peripheral vision where there was no cat.
So, that was weird.
I’m feeling better today but still not great.
I hope it’s not true that the first of the year is a preview of the whole year, because I am so very, very sick.
Nothing in this whole wide world is ever over.
I’ve got a beer sitting out for any Ancestors who want to stop by and a fire to keep the darkness at bay.
This is it, the darkest plunge into the deepest night. There will be colder nights, but none so long, not until we swing around to this position again, the spiral ever twisting–the moon around us, we around the sun, the sun in its arm of a twirling galaxy.
We have not been here before. And yet, we keep coming back here.
Have a drink, my old gone friends. Come on out, into the light. As Gillians says, let me see the mark death made. And I will show you the scars on my body in return.
I tell the same story over and over again. And always I put myself in the middle of it. So angry at the betrayal of Paradise. Still holding out hope I’ll find a comfortable way in.
Always ready to fuck over the people who have been so good to me for the brief affections of those who have fucked me over.
Spinning, spinning. Waiting, knocking.
And who waits at my door? Who knocks to be let in?
I really hate this time of year. It just feels like grief–stale and fresh. And I wonder when it happened. I wonder what, exactly, it is. And I can’t say. Only that I recognize that it’s gone.
I miss those folks so much sometimes that it takes my breath away. Who knew me like they did?
And yet, it was me who let go. It’s always me who lets go. The dance ends, the partners switch and I am gone.
Spinning. Slipping. Gone.
Until we’re back again, in the longest night. Me and my dead things, waiting.
Trying to make peace.
Oh, y’all, yesterday I got some lovely financial news. Not completely unexpected, but sooner than expected. And I was so happy yesterday evening and proud of myself because I immediately acted on this financial news not by spending what came in–not even a little, not even as a treat to myself, but by funneling some toward debt and some toward savings. As one does when one is a grown-up.
And I spent the evening being all woo-hoo. I am getting my affairs in order. Finally.
And then I had nightmares all night that I had fucked something up or that I had to pay cash for some huge operation or that basically everything was a lie and all the numbers were just made up and just when it looks like I’m going to be on okay financial footing–in a position to actually put a little away and get some of the big projects around here done–it’s all going to slip from my grasp.
I woke up feeling kind of like shit about it.
It’s funny because this whole ceiling thing taught me so much about goodness and how small acts by folks can have an enormous impact on a person. It was wonderful. And nothing shitty happened, you know? No one was like “Oh, wait, I just noticed what a jerk you are. I want my money back.” and no one has shown up with a saw to cut out their portion of the ceiling in either room. People can plan a nice thing, have it work out, and nothing bad has to come of it.
If I didn’t quite believe that before, I believe it now.
And yet, I have to tell you, I can’t quite believe that’s true of myself toward myself. I have been doing a series of tiny things, very tiny because I had so little money not tied up in bullshit, to get myself untied from bullshit or, if not untied, then to put myself in a position to untie myself at a later date.
And here it is, one of those later dates, where the tiny thing I started to do seven years ago has just become a pretty big thing I can do to fix a situation that’s been vexing me since my twenties. But I can’t trust that it will come to pass. I can’t believe that a plan I put in motion might work and not backfire on me in some painful way.
To me, this is the way growing up poor most shaped me–that I know in my core that all my hopes and plans are fucked. Even if it doesn’t appear so, something will come along and fuck them.
The thing is that I feel like I am so very close, just a few years, away from having a small safety net against this kind of fuckery.
And I am so afraid something is going to screw it up.
This isn’t something that’s easy to explain–that kind of terror. And how it motivates you to act in all kinds of fucked up ways.
But whenever I hear someone talking about poor people, about why don’t they just…? And I think, man, how nice it must be to feel certain that there’s some “just” you could do that would obviously improve your life.
That’s just not a certainty a lot of folks have. For most of us, no matter what you do, something comes along to fuck it up.
So, anyway, if you see me and you notice all the fingers on all my hands are crossed, it is because I just so want to stay lucky, just for a bit more.
I should just finally admit to myself that I don’t like grilled cheese sandwiches. I like the idea of grilled cheese sandwiches, but I always feel like I’m eating someone’s warm snot.
I went out to nap in the hammock this afternoon. It was beautiful and green and lovely and I was sleepy and everything was gently rocking and I awoke with a start because I realized I was going to puke. I sat up and put my head down and it kind of stopped. I got in the house and then, weirdly, even though I’d eaten lunch, did this weird kind of dry-heaving retching thing, but nothing happened.
Then I laid on the couch all afternoon, but I couldn’t sleep because I just felt so nauseous. I ate some popcorn and it kind of settled me stomach.
But other than that, I feel fine, if a little spacy from feeling almost seasick.
So, that pretty much shot my whole afternoon, which is too bad. I hope that’s the end of it. I don’t feel like I’m getting sick or anything. So, I wonder if it was the hamburger I had for lunch or what.
Mrs. W. was kind of limping last night, so when she went to bed before I did, I didn’t make her get up and go to the bathroom before I went to bed. Which meant that she had to go to the bathroom at four this morning. Which also included all her nightly lollygagging. So, when my alarm went off at 6:15, I admit, I decided, “fuck it, I’m going to sleep in” instead of getting up to walk with her.
Which means I’m going to be grouchy all day and that there’s a good chance she will poop in the house, since she’ll be all off schedule. Plus, since she didn’t walk and stretch that knee out a little, it’s going to be stiff on her all day.
So, you know, not a victory of any sorts.
I also wrote a story this weekend which I hate. The weird thing is that I don’t hate it because it’s bad. I think it might actually be fine. I hate it because I find it so fucking unsettling. And I can’t really put my finger on where the unsettlement comes from. I mean, you might read it and like it or hate it just fine, you know? It might not be universally unsettling, just unsettling to me.
But it’s making revisions or even thinking about revisions impossible because I want to rush through reading it, just to get it over with. It’s like I read it the same way you rush past the creepy house on the way home from school.
I think it’s in part the protagonist. On the one hand, the story is about identifying with him and his grief pretty completely and compellingly. And then a thing is done–a sensible thing given the circumstances–and he takes devastating revenge and I deeply dislike it. I guess because I deeply dislike circumstances in which there either is no right thing to do or where the thing that looks like the right thing still costs.
And I wrote this post at Pith, which may be the most bitter thing I have ever written.
I woke up to discover that I had no antivirus protection. And then I couldn’t get my firewall to work. And on and on. Fixing it took all day and even Microsoft trying to convince me to spend $100 to fix the problem. But basically, the resolution came from resetting crap back to June.
Which I wish I had figured out back around lunch.
And then I found a tick stuck to my scalp.
So, it was that kind of day.
It’s hot. I don’t want to do anything outside. The dog is irritating me. But the dog does want to go outside. She just wants it to be cooler out than it is. Which irritates me.
I should be entering corrections, but I’m too busy being grouchy.
Also, I wonder if I’m at the age where I can just stop wearing a bra ever. Is that an age?
One of the embarrassing things about being stalked is that it doesn’t just happen to you. No, when someone has decided to focus on you, it smears all over your friends and family. My brothers were followed, because my problem couldn’t always tell if it was me or them in the car. Guys I was friendly with got threatened for talking to me. My mom got to hear about what a whore I was. And on and on.
It was not an easy time. When my brother was “borrowed” after school when I’d been out sick with pneumonia and my problem wanted to have an accounting of how I’d spent my week, I got in trouble for not being able to control my friends. I also got sent over to this guys house on a few occasions to “make up” with him because my behavior toward him was the problem, since it was causing him to act this way toward me, though no one could explain to me what, exactly, I should be doing differently.
It’s weird, in some ways, because that was so long ago and I don’t really feel any anger toward him any more. We were kids. He was fucked up. And it’s been over for a long time. When I am forty, it will have been twenty years.
But the thing that has stuck with me, at my heels like a shadow I can never lose, is that feeling that, objectively, knowing me meant you had to be involved in this fucked up shit, even though, what I would wish for you more than anything is that it wouldn’t affect you in the slightest. That you would never notice.
I know, intellectually, of course, that it wasn’t my fault that I couldn’t protect people from what was happening to me. But I still get this feeling, every once in a while, that it sucks for people to know me and like me, because their relationship with me might give someone else an excuse to abuse them.
I’m just down. I’m tired of being sick, once a month, every month since fucking god knows when. I’m just not feeling the whole garden thing this year. And I kind of feel like I’m failing because I just don’t have the skills I need to succeed. Nobody looks at me and says, “if she can do that, then I can get her to a place where she can do this.” And I don’t know how to get to the place where I can do this myself, because I don’t even know what this is. And it makes me angry, but I can’t quite articulate why.
The Professor and I were talking about the difference between our 20s and 30s, and how much of our 20s was devoted to figuring out what we didn’t want and fleeing from it. That’s what motivated us–fear. And I feel like I’ve spent my 30s trying to learn how to positively want things–to not be motivated by fear, but by desire.
I’m afraid I’m going to spend my 40s learning how to live with not getting the things I want.
I am completely panicking about the impending tornadoes. I’m not so worried about getting hit, but I am all worked up over the idea that NASHVILLE could get hit and I might not be able to get home. I’m going to leave here before 1 p.m.
Though there were points this weekend when death seemed like it was sitting at the other end of the couch, not because it was my time, but because one never knows when a person might accidentally choke to death on her own snot.
My dad was like “Are you still sick? You’ve been sick for four weeks!” To which I had to explain that, no, I’m getting sick at the end of every month, not one continuous illness.
To which he replied, “Well, at least March is a long month. You’ll get some good non-sick weeks in there.”
I know I’ve said it before, but one of the hardest things for me at this stage in my life is that I’ve believed, for my whole life prior to my late 30s, that, if something is not right–either externally or internally–if you can figure out why it’s fucked up, even if you can’t fix that it’s fucked up, its fucked-up-ness cease to affect you. The explanation will be the solution.
But as I’m getting older and more used to the rhythms of my own quirkiness, I realize that “the explanation will be the solution” is just false. I mean, I can tell you why I get such vertigo in high open spaces, why certain stairways are just off-limits to me, but that doesn’t mean I still didn’t have to find a libertarian to haul me across the catwalk to Radley Balko’s talk.
And I know I didn’t used to have problems with something at that height even when I was in grad school, because I navigated the library just fine. But I also know that, with the exception of Monday and my trip to the Nashville Room, that it’s been many, many months since I’ve had problems at all. So, it’s worse than it was way back when and better than it was a while ago. But it’s not resolved, you know?
So, all day I was feeling good about “Sarah Clark” and proud and then, like fifteen minutes after I got my revisions turned in, I got this massive anxiety about myself as a writer. I spent the evening getting the final version of “The Witch’s Friend” copied from the website into a Word document because I am overcome by the need to “do the right thing” with it.
Oh, fuck. “The right thing.” Much like “deserves” it’s a boogeyman of a concept that floats around after me, often compelling me to good things, sometimes compelling me to waves of fretting that cannot be soothed.
I couldn’t work on Sue last night, which also caused me great fretting. I sat down to write what should be the most fun scene to write of this whole section–a full, formal seance–and I just finked out.
But anyway, I’m thinking about selling “The Witch’s Friend” on Kindle if I can figure out how to get it from a Word document into an ePUB. I’m not preserving all the links, but I would like the table of contents at the beginning to work. I guess this is going to require either a brief foray into XML or a long trip into Amazon’s website to see if they have directions.
A City of Ghosts is about 80,000 words, I think, and it’s $4.99 for Kindle. “The Witch’s Friend” is just about 20,000, so I’m not sure if I should just price it at $.99 or if I should price it at $1.99, so it seems like it’s a little more than just fishing for readers. But I am fishing for readers! I don’t know. Feel free to fret with me about this. I think $.99 is probably right.
On Friday, I was feeling better, but not great. Good enough to have a nice long talk with the Professor, but then I had to go to bed. So, since we were going to eat lunch with our parents for Dad’s birthday in Vincennes, I took Nyquil. Oh lord.
It took me until we got until Vincennes to sober up. Honestly, I can’t believe that people do that recreationally. I couldn’t tell if I was asleep or awake. I still felt like crap, but also so groggy.
It was terrible. And I feel worse today than I did on Friday.
I should have never taken the Nyquil.
I had some other stuff to say, but I can’t remember what.
In Vincennes, even the grass was icy.
Thanks for nothing, Butcher. Though he says he still has it, so I guess technically we are sharing the cold. Mom and dad would be so proud.
Apparently lots of nights of getting up every two hours to either let your dog out or check to see if she needs to be let out while she’s sleeping soundly coupled with the Holiday exposure to lots of friendly people has resulted in my yearly Christmas cold.
I have no cold medicine in the house.
So, fuck, I guess I’ll get up, go to work, get some cold medicine, come home, take it, and try to sleep this fucker off.
I’m trying to read Silber’s Gender and the Sectional Conflict (which is fancy talk for the Civil War) and I can’t. It literally makes me want to punch UNC Press. It’s beautifully designed, but the type is so delicate and my eyes so bad I can’t read it in the evenings. So, that would be an advantage to staying home and being sick all day–daylight may make that type more legible. But I’m scheduled to go to the scary part of the library today and I really, really don’t want to miss that.
Gripe. Complain. Snot. Blah.
Seriously, folks, let’s just write December 2011 off as the month Tiny Cat Pants was devoted solely to ways bodies fuck up. Let’s hope January 2012 is full of smooches or awesome things your cats can do without training.
I’m honestly not sure how this is going to go. My parents have only been here since 6:30 last night and I’m already feeling antsy and upset. The typical stupidity has taken on new contours as they’ve gotten older. I called my mom to specifically tell her not to dawdle because they were predicting tornadoes yesterday morning for yesterday evening and I didn’t want them to get caught out on the road in them.
And then my mom sent me texts about how they’d stopped to get their oil changed and stopped to get my dad a new driver’s license and stopped to do something else and stopped for lunch and I was like Jesus Christ if this is what they do when they’re not dawdling, I would hate to see procrastination. Luckily the weather forecast changed so I was like “Fine, I get it. I’m not the boss of you. I can’t order you to get here in a hurry.” And I was a little pissed, but what the fuck ever.
People, I wish it were passive aggressive “you’re not the boss of me” bullshit. My mom apparently hung up the phone with me saying repeatedly “don’t dawdle. Get here as fast as you can.” and turned and told my dad–and seems to believe that I said–”There are storms. Dawdle.” Like I wanted them to hang back and give the storms a chance to pass. At least at dinner it seemed to freak her out enough that she’s going to get her hearing tested when they get back.
But then they told my brother that they’d take my nephew back to North Carolina on Friday, since he has to work Friday night. So, rather than my brother just skipping Thanksgiving and driving to and from North Carolina today and tomorrow, he’s coming here today and Mom and dad are taking my nephew to North Carolina on Friday and then driving back here on Saturday and then going home on Monday.
They want me to go with them, which I don’t want to do for many reasons. I hate my sister-in-law. I don’t want to be trapped in a car with my parents for sixteen hours because I can’t be sure if I’m going to get sweet people or “No one will ever love you because you’re so fat and your house is so filthy and you’re stupid.” (Our house is, apparently, “so filthy” already–I heard that on the way to dinner, which is at the level of insanity of my dad yelling at my brother this summer because the tub wouldn’t drain and then me going and running the shower for a half an hour unable to replicate this not draining tub.) Plus the Butcher is working crazy hours and the dog can’t not go to the bathroom for sixteen or seventeen hours at a time. Plus, they didn’t ask me to go with them. They just announced I was going with them, of course, because they need three drivers.
And so I would happily–though with much anxiety–tell them to drive their own fool selves across the mountains doing my brother’s job for him.
But my god, people, every time I see them they are visibly older. And now my mom’s just making crap up that people say to her rather than admit that she’s not catching bits of conversation?
They drive me insane. They make me so mad. But that, put in the scales of “how will I live with myself?” does not even come close to outweighing how terrified I am to send two little old people on this stupid-ass trip by themselves.
I am a hostage to their frailty and bull-headedness and possibly insanity.
God, I love the holidays.
1. If a dog is only as good as its owner, I must be an inconsiderate doofus oblivious to the worry my wandering off causes.
2. I wonder if the Tea Party people are jealous they couldn’t get that many motivated people out for their crap?
3. Eh, fuck it. Here’s what I want to say. The dog ran off last night. Not “I’m chasing something. Fuck you, I’m not listening!!!!” but just “I know where I am so it’s not that important that you know where I am so I’m not listening.” I called and called for her and I couldn’t find her and she didn’t come and I went inside and I put my shoes on and I stumbled around in the dark and finally, the back light came on, which is motion triggered, and there she was by the back door.
I felt this feeling, like fear and relief and rage combined. I was relieved she hadn’t gone too far for too long, but lord, I was pissed she didn’t come when she was called. It’s been a decade. She knows the drill. I slammed that back door so hard I’m lucky I still have glass in it. And I wanted to beat her down.
I mean, lord, I just wanted to drop her.
And that feeling scares me, you know? My whole life, it’s scared me. I’ve never beat my dog. Hell, her favorite game is “smack my bottom” so I can’t honestly say I’ve never hit her, but I’ve certainly never hit her to hurt her. But last night, I wanted to.
It’s weird. You know, they say as you get older, oh, you’ll regret not having kids. But, honestly, I don’t. Not because I’m not curious about what it would be like to have children, or that I don’t like children, or that I’ve got some great radical feminist anti-child agenda. It’s really because here I am, with eight hours of sleep, a non-stressful job, food on the table, money in the bank, bills paid, car working, all my family in good health, and one little hiccup like “Can’t find the dog for ten minutes” flips something inside me that scares the shit out of me. How do you put a kid in the path of that?
And it’s not just hypothetical, you know? I used to wonder “How could this relative do that to that relative?” But honestly, I get it. They feel what I felt last night and whatever thing there is in me that keeps me from acting on it? Theirs either broke or they never had it. Maybe there is a long path from “I feel it and it frightens me and I don’t act on it” to “I feel it and I let it wash over me and I rage at the people and things I love like some angry demi-god” but I’ve never really felt sure enough about that to bet someone else’s well-being on it, you know?
See, this is what I mean when you say that you can’t be sorry enough for being fat. Even if you are all “Oh, great! I’d love to eat better. Give me some cooking tips!” it’s turned into “Oh, see? Bless their hearts, they just don’t know. They’re stupid and we have to teach them.”
I swear, the thing that puts me on my heels about the obesity epidemic is how it works by letting people get to hate people under the auspices of “for your health!”
Even the reporter is all “whip up cookies that aren’t fat bombs.” Note to Tom Wilemon. Here’s something odd. Cookies literally used to be fat bombs. Your grandma went to the cupboard and pulled out a can of lard and… plop… a huge cup of it went right in her cookies.
And people were thinner then.
So, was your grandma smarter than these Memphis folks or is it something else, do you think?
Anyway, I can’t believe we’re going to have to continue to endure this condescending crap until some other health menace comes along. But what thing lets you pick on even children and feel good about it because it’s for their own good? Freckles? No, shit, I have freckles. Not freckles. Brown eyes. People with brown eyes have a mortality rate of 100%, you know. Someone really ought to look at changing that.
My doctor’s office called me yesterday to tell me that I am Vitamin D deficient. I had two thoughts in this order: 1. But I drink a lot of milk! and 2. God damn it, the lights in my windowless office are supposed to be those stupid therapeutic full spectrum lights. I guess that’s bullshit.
I’m supposed to start taking supplements.
That, to me, sounds like the opposite of fun. (And may I just say how funny it is that, in the medical community, there’s all this “You must try harder to exercise more!” recommendations if you’re fat but there’s no “You must try harder to spend more time in the sun!” pressure if you’re not getting enough Vitamin D. Yes, too much sun can cause skin cancer, but exercise can fuck up your joints, so… I’m just saying that it’s interesting which things can lead to harm when overdone are still pushed and which ones aren’t.)
Anyway, I think the easiest solution would be for Purity Dairy to make an ice cream for the vitamin D deficient. Make it as delicious as all Purity Dairy products and enrich it with a daily dose of Vitamin D and sell it in little “health sizes” and I will eat them every day. For my health! Ice cream.
It will be like heaven.
