I was just thinking of something, I think I just worked something out, sort of. I'm not sure I can get it down, exactly, but I might make a first stab and then try to develop the thoughts more in later posts.
I was thinking about knitting, and how my Mom knits and got me started. Tonight we were talking on the phone about casting on and casting off, and throwing your yarn vs Continental (I throw, she says Continental is faster, but when I try it it gets way too tight, but she gave me some tips that might help so I might come around eventually). She said, "You're going to be a better knitter than I am." I said in retort, "No, no. I was never a faster typist than you, I'm sure I will always be behind in knitting as well." And I'm sure I will be - she has such precision and regularity. Like her handwriting, always confident and beautiful. I love knitting and hope to advance, but I know I don't have the steadiness and built-in motor coordination to ever do it like she does.
I was thinking about starting out knitting, and the story in family legend about the first sweater she knitted, as a young married person, recently uprooted from home and family and everything she had ever known, to go live in St Joseph, Missouri, where her brand new husband had just been transferred (they moved one month after they got married, and she's never managed change very well, so I can't even imagine. When I ask Dad about it, he just says, "Well, she cried a lot.").
My Mom's side of this family has this thing that has come to be known as "Gaffney Hysteria". It comes down from the Gaffneys, my grandmother, and so it's only in the youngest three of the six daughters, the other three's mother was Mrs. Miller and they just have strong, German stoicism and practical, unflappable attitudes and aren't like the rest of us. Gaffney Hysteria is, well, crying a lot, basically. I have it, way worse than my sister, and I know one cousin's kid who lives in Denver has it, and Grandma had it but not as bad as others, and one of Grandma's brothers had a male version of it where he'd just get stressed out and would have to bring his family home from holidays and things.
From the inside, it's like a coil, like an orange mist in your brain. It's always associated with the future, or actually no, it's always associated with one's performance. It's associated with the future when it's a worry that one is going to fail at something, because of lack of time or a looming deadline or lack of sleep because one is up at 12:55 am worrying about it and has to go in to work, early, for a meeting and outside it's blowing a positive gale and polishing up the new snow so the drive to work, early, will probably entail risking death and mechanical damage and awkwardness and delay, and so one surely won't have time in the morning to do the thing that should have been done tonight, this afternoon, days ago, weeks ago. And so one shouldn't be blogging instead of just sitting down and doing the thing now, but one is because one has Gaffney Hysteria and there's an orange mist in her brain and all she can do it panic and worry and keep herself up later, there's nothing to be done about it.
Anyway, so I was thinking about knitting and thinking about the family story of the first sweater my Mom tried to make. It took her ages and ages, and she finally finished it, in that little house on Lover's Lane Heights in St Joseph Missouri, newly married and newly uprooted from her home and everything familiar. I can now appreciate just how long it would have taken, because sweaters are really hard and have a great deal of real estate. They take a long time to finish. And she finished it, but because she knits too loose, it was way, way too big, would never fit in a million years. "And she threw it across the room," Dad says when he tells the story. In fact, "threw it across the room" is a refrain that's spoken together when this story is mentioned in the family when this story comes up, it's the story's tag line or abbreviation.
I can imagine. The long hours of toil, the hard work that went into the knitting, also the expectation of what the sweater would be like, and then it's finally finished, and it's wrong, and then just the explosion.
I'm her. I have that too (and here I am knitting! will work slowly up to sweaters, though, and make sure to do a gauge). I know just what it would have felt like, and it's not good.
I am my Dad as well. I am the steady intellectual who can love this woman, but is not like her. But only half.
I am also her, I have Gaffney Hysteria, but it's not a good thing. It's not something I value. A therapist once got me talking about this - what qualities were identified with the female, in my house growing up, and what with the male. I don't want to have this orange misty thing. But I do, we all do, it comes down from Grandma. So, I was thinking about being that kind of woman, about my Mom being her back then with the sweater and about me having her inside me, and I was thinking about the men who love them, and it still baffles me a bit that anyone could love them, but they do. My Dad loves my Mom thoroughly, completely, steadily by her side, and for just coming up on 50 years.
And it put me in mind of a particular episode of Star Trek Voyager. I know, I know, but stick with me. There's an episode where Belana Torres is pregnant, having been married for a little while to the pilot Tom Paris. She finds out the baby has a very slight little genetic thingy, and the doctor can just wave a woobly woo device over her belly and fix it. All cool, very routine procedure, done of course on a space ship in the Delta quadrant by a doctor who's a hologram. Anyway, Belana then after hours sneaks in and looks up more about her baby's genetic structure, and finds her daughter is going to have forehead ridges, like her mother does. Belana is half human, half Klingon. The baby will look Klingon like her. She then does all sorts of sneaky and underhanded things to try to get the baby's genetric structure changed again so that she's a version without the ridges. And it's dangerous to do this and she gets caught and yelled at by the doctor, and her husband is outraged and baffled and they have a big confrontation scene toward the end. Belana explains that her father, Mr. Torres, left her and her mother when she was a child, because he couldn't handle two Klingon women in the family. He couldn't manage the temper or the gutsiness or the arguments, or etc. else. There is a tender flashback scene to illustrate this, showing Belana as a confused little girl. The grown-up and pregnant Belana is now terrified that if there are two Klingon women in her own household, that Tom won't be able to handle it and he will abandon them like her father abandoned her and her mother, and so she was trying to change her baby to be more human to prevent this from happening.
Tom realises, and grabs her and holds her and says, "I will love having two Klingons in the family. Or three or four, or even more!" He convinces her that he loves her and is not like her father and has no intention of leaving, ever. They go back to the medical center and look at the holographic projection of what their daughter will look like, and a tear rolls down Belana's cheek as she says, "She's a cute little thing, actually, isn't she?"
This episode just floored me. I sat on the couch and cried and cried and cried. It still moves me, to remember it, and I've only ever seen it once.
So, I've sort of figured out why. I have this emotional thing that has come down through my mother's side, I have it too, and it makes us emotional and hard to live with because we go hysterical, every now and again. But there are men who love us, just the way they are. I'm sure that resonant theme is what I saw in the Star Trek episode, and why it affected me as it did.
Wednesday, January 30, 2008
Tuesday, January 29, 2008
Home ahead of the storm
I left work at 3pm today because the weather forecast called for rain, then rapidly dropping temperatures, high winds, 3-6" of snow, very low visibility and blizzard-like conditions. Uh-huh.
As I left the office I had my first experience of FZRA . Walking out the door the ground was wet - like, with water, liquid, water-like water - but when I got to my car it was covered in little water droplets that had all frozen. I had to get the scraper out and scrape them all off, and the pavement looked like bubble wrap or really bad rubber flooring because it was also covered with little water droplets that had all frozen.
My knitting class was cancelled. One of the managers at the yarn shop called and left a message on my phone last night to let me know, and here's what she said:
"We want everybody to stay home, and stay safe, and keep knitting, and not be out in what they're saying's gonna be, you know, End of the World weather."
The first time through when she got to the phrase "keep knitting", it sounded like she was assigning homework, that we should stay home but use the time when we would have been in class to keep practicing. But then I realised what she meant was "keep knitting", like, live to knit another day.
Noted.
While I've been writing this, the freezing rain has turned to snow, which is falling horizontally in the high winds, it's starting to stick, and visibility has gone down to about 1/2 a mile. Good to be home. My plan for this evening is to keep knitting!
As I left the office I had my first experience of FZRA . Walking out the door the ground was wet - like, with water, liquid, water-like water - but when I got to my car it was covered in little water droplets that had all frozen. I had to get the scraper out and scrape them all off, and the pavement looked like bubble wrap or really bad rubber flooring because it was also covered with little water droplets that had all frozen.
My knitting class was cancelled. One of the managers at the yarn shop called and left a message on my phone last night to let me know, and here's what she said:
"We want everybody to stay home, and stay safe, and keep knitting, and not be out in what they're saying's gonna be, you know, End of the World weather."
The first time through when she got to the phrase "keep knitting", it sounded like she was assigning homework, that we should stay home but use the time when we would have been in class to keep practicing. But then I realised what she meant was "keep knitting", like, live to knit another day.
Noted.
While I've been writing this, the freezing rain has turned to snow, which is falling horizontally in the high winds, it's starting to stick, and visibility has gone down to about 1/2 a mile. Good to be home. My plan for this evening is to keep knitting!
Monday, January 28, 2008
And what do we try to protect from all those giant plush microbes?
I Heart Guts!
http://iheartguts.com/shop/index.php?main_page=product_info&products_id=72
I Heart Guts!
http://iheartguts.com/shop/index.php?main_page=product_info&products_id=72
Sunday, January 27, 2008
But how does this affect me, Al Franken?
Inspired by some comments by both Astrobarry and Mystic Medusa in horoscopes about a month ago, I have been reassessing the way I interact with friends. I don't know if this is right, but I'm trying it out as a mental stance.
My new attitude is, I don't want to keep people around in my life who just drain me and make me feel guilty. It's important that when I have people in my life I am getting something from them.
Is this wrong? You will be thinking, this is why I am so lonely right now, because I've become a selfish rat bastard and have forgotten how to give.
Well, yes, okay, but in some ways I think it's a good stance too. It's based in the horrendous experiences I had when I was moving. Everyone, everyone acted just abominably, hysterical, demanding, pouring out their pain onto me and making me listen to them, and they didn't help me at all, one single bit, in my very difficult thing that I was doing. (With the exception of my ex, which is now just confusing.) Total strangers insisted that I meet them for lunch and then they told me their dark, horrible, painful secrets, and didn't at all want to listen to mine - I still have no idea why this happened. Australians never pour out painful personal secrets, ever, because it's considered a burden to the other person to hear them, but since I was leaving the country I suppose they thought I was okay to use as a confessor because I'd be gone and wouldn't come back. But it was horrendous, and has left me feeling battered and traumatised.
When I got here I had all those communication difficulties, and I still haven't got a reliable and easy-to-use phone card for calling Aussie people. And they never call me. And I feel like I should call them, especially the ones who sent me nice Christmas presents, but my feeling is based in guilt more than in appreciation of their company.
Are you obliged to call your "friends" because of how much they like you and the pleasure it would bring to them to hear from you, or is it better to weed people out of your life who you only contact out of guilt and you don't get that much from?
I'm trying to use the same rubric for activities. If I feel I should do something from some stereotype or social pressure or past vision of myself, that's not good enough, the thing has to actually contribute to something of value in my life right now. Like dishes. Dishes never contribute to some positive goal, it's maintenance only, there's always a better way of spending one's time than doing dishes, so they go to the bottom of the list, frequently, and get done only when they start to smell or I'm out of knives or somebody's coming to visit. And decorating. I feel like I should have great taste and vision and be able to choose furniture and arrange it in my place when my stuff comes, but I'm realising that I'm really bad at three-dimensional spacial things, and I'm actually thinking of hiring a decorator and just letting them do it. And writing a novel. I think I have an old belief that I should write a novel, but in fact it may not contribute to anything I want to accomplish in my life in the long term, so maybe it's not something to feel guilty about at all.
Careful readers, are you at this moment spotting the contradiction between this post and the anniversary post below where I claimed to have no goals at all in my life? Okay, well done, you spotted that I did actually make a list of goals yesterday when I was out having lunch post-haircut, and used it to evaluate my to do list. The goals I came up with were:
* hedons (this is a term from utilitarian ethical theory in philosophy, it's a hypothetical measure of a unit of pleasure)
* partner
* money
* community (that is, becoming more connected to my community which is Appleton)
* 85 (this is an abbreviation of "When you imagine yourself at age 85 and look back over you life, what do you want your life to have been like?" This is an exercise I got years ago from a time management book, and I use it because I kind of do have a pretty clear view of what kind of 85 year old lady I want to be.)
Things like doing dishes fall into "basic maintenance" and so have to be done as a baseline but don't contribute to any particular goal any more than to any other. Which is probably why I'm having trouble getting myself to the gym - although that does get a bit of extra credit in the "partner" column.
More on the to do list later, but on friends, if the friends don't contribute to my life or goals at the moment, but I'm only sustaining them out of guilt and about how much it means to them, not me, should I keep that friend at all? You have to have some friends, and I'm a bit short on them at the moment, but which ones should I put energy into? Is it okay to just drop all the Sydney ones, since I moved 10,000 miles away from them anyway? Or am I just being selfish and lazy? Or is it okay because I was traumatised and I have to hole up and bunker down and heal for a little while?
New friends are kind of getting this metric as well - I've met two different people who have close relatives who are very, very, very sick with cancer. I have dropped them off the the potential new friends list. I don't have any resources to help someone through something that awful, right now. I have my own trauma. I need someone happy and strong, in a positive and easy space in their own life, so I can lean on them, and gain energy, and have them help me heal and get established here. Is that so wrong?
Probably. I'll probably go to hell and in the meantime be cursed with permanent loneliness. But these are my current lines of thinking, so if you guys have any thoughts you can put them in the comments. And if I don't write back you know it's because I think you're a boring, draining, selfish bore! Right? No, not at all.
Dear me, maybe I should just hit "delete" on this one.
My new attitude is, I don't want to keep people around in my life who just drain me and make me feel guilty. It's important that when I have people in my life I am getting something from them.
Is this wrong? You will be thinking, this is why I am so lonely right now, because I've become a selfish rat bastard and have forgotten how to give.
Well, yes, okay, but in some ways I think it's a good stance too. It's based in the horrendous experiences I had when I was moving. Everyone, everyone acted just abominably, hysterical, demanding, pouring out their pain onto me and making me listen to them, and they didn't help me at all, one single bit, in my very difficult thing that I was doing. (With the exception of my ex, which is now just confusing.) Total strangers insisted that I meet them for lunch and then they told me their dark, horrible, painful secrets, and didn't at all want to listen to mine - I still have no idea why this happened. Australians never pour out painful personal secrets, ever, because it's considered a burden to the other person to hear them, but since I was leaving the country I suppose they thought I was okay to use as a confessor because I'd be gone and wouldn't come back. But it was horrendous, and has left me feeling battered and traumatised.
When I got here I had all those communication difficulties, and I still haven't got a reliable and easy-to-use phone card for calling Aussie people. And they never call me. And I feel like I should call them, especially the ones who sent me nice Christmas presents, but my feeling is based in guilt more than in appreciation of their company.
Are you obliged to call your "friends" because of how much they like you and the pleasure it would bring to them to hear from you, or is it better to weed people out of your life who you only contact out of guilt and you don't get that much from?
I'm trying to use the same rubric for activities. If I feel I should do something from some stereotype or social pressure or past vision of myself, that's not good enough, the thing has to actually contribute to something of value in my life right now. Like dishes. Dishes never contribute to some positive goal, it's maintenance only, there's always a better way of spending one's time than doing dishes, so they go to the bottom of the list, frequently, and get done only when they start to smell or I'm out of knives or somebody's coming to visit. And decorating. I feel like I should have great taste and vision and be able to choose furniture and arrange it in my place when my stuff comes, but I'm realising that I'm really bad at three-dimensional spacial things, and I'm actually thinking of hiring a decorator and just letting them do it. And writing a novel. I think I have an old belief that I should write a novel, but in fact it may not contribute to anything I want to accomplish in my life in the long term, so maybe it's not something to feel guilty about at all.
Careful readers, are you at this moment spotting the contradiction between this post and the anniversary post below where I claimed to have no goals at all in my life? Okay, well done, you spotted that I did actually make a list of goals yesterday when I was out having lunch post-haircut, and used it to evaluate my to do list. The goals I came up with were:
* hedons (this is a term from utilitarian ethical theory in philosophy, it's a hypothetical measure of a unit of pleasure)
* partner
* money
* community (that is, becoming more connected to my community which is Appleton)
* 85 (this is an abbreviation of "When you imagine yourself at age 85 and look back over you life, what do you want your life to have been like?" This is an exercise I got years ago from a time management book, and I use it because I kind of do have a pretty clear view of what kind of 85 year old lady I want to be.)
Things like doing dishes fall into "basic maintenance" and so have to be done as a baseline but don't contribute to any particular goal any more than to any other. Which is probably why I'm having trouble getting myself to the gym - although that does get a bit of extra credit in the "partner" column.
More on the to do list later, but on friends, if the friends don't contribute to my life or goals at the moment, but I'm only sustaining them out of guilt and about how much it means to them, not me, should I keep that friend at all? You have to have some friends, and I'm a bit short on them at the moment, but which ones should I put energy into? Is it okay to just drop all the Sydney ones, since I moved 10,000 miles away from them anyway? Or am I just being selfish and lazy? Or is it okay because I was traumatised and I have to hole up and bunker down and heal for a little while?
New friends are kind of getting this metric as well - I've met two different people who have close relatives who are very, very, very sick with cancer. I have dropped them off the the potential new friends list. I don't have any resources to help someone through something that awful, right now. I have my own trauma. I need someone happy and strong, in a positive and easy space in their own life, so I can lean on them, and gain energy, and have them help me heal and get established here. Is that so wrong?
Probably. I'll probably go to hell and in the meantime be cursed with permanent loneliness. But these are my current lines of thinking, so if you guys have any thoughts you can put them in the comments. And if I don't write back you know it's because I think you're a boring, draining, selfish bore! Right? No, not at all.
Dear me, maybe I should just hit "delete" on this one.
Yank language school
On an ad for some financial thing, I think it was an insurance company, voice over:
"With policies costing like 500 dollars."
On the screen there was text that said policies cost "from as low as 500 dollars".
So, will "like" replace "starting from as low as" as an official legal term you can use in sales?
"With policies costing like 500 dollars."
On the screen there was text that said policies cost "from as low as 500 dollars".
So, will "like" replace "starting from as low as" as an official legal term you can use in sales?
Happy Anniversary to me
So, folks, as of today (actually yesterday at about 9pm) I have officially been here for three months.
I knew I would hit a three-month wall, I knew it would be about the time the excitement wore off and the tiredness and the view of the very long road still before me would kick in.
There are lots of good things, really. I have already absorbed myself into this new place in lots of ways, and mentally I think I feel pretty grounded and positive.
But there is a wall, nonetheless, and I have kind of hit it, so this post will have some whining in it as well.
Good things - I am really soaring at work. I am so, so qualified for my job, and I do in fact have a great deal of passion for it. I can contribute so much to the company and those sites, I have all the qualifications and life experience to do it. It doesn't just take a book-knowledge of internet best practice, it's also taking my leadership skills, presentation skills, negotiation and persuasion skills, diplomacy (like last Friday when two of my suppliers were acting like three-year-olds, honestly, and I had to referee and calm everyone down). Editorial, budgeting, design, technology, communicating between people in about 20 different disciplines, keeping my eye on strategic matters and not getting bogged down in tactical, going around people while making them still feel like they have power. Working hard without burning myself out and still leaving room to build a life here, because at the moment I have no life. I can do all of it. I'm great at nearly all of it. It's a good feeling, and inspirational. So work, mostly, is a good thing.
The landscape. It still makes me sigh, even though sometimes I wake up in the morning and look out the window and gasp in confusion. Despite that it's really cold and hard to drive in, I love the snow. It snows and stays, for weeks and weeks, because it's so cold. It's really pretty, and stays pretty. It's hard to drive in, but I love it. And the barns! I love the barns. I want to get out in the countryside and drive around and soak up the landscape through my eyes, which I haven't had a chance to do because it's so cold and snowy. It's not like the state does not realise that its barns are wonderful. There is a barn on my license plate. There is a barn on my driver's license. But they make my heart warm, when I see them. Barns are another good thing.
The town. The town has a good feel to it. I was looking for Appleton postcards at a bookshop in town yesterday, and the photos are just ridiculously bad - a picture of Memorial Bridge which is just a picture of a road, with a beige 6-story building in the distance. I imagined sending it to someone and the mental picture it would create in them - a bleak, boring, featureless, semi-abandoned nowhere in the middle of the midwest. This town is not like that. This town is kind of unphotographable, because the main street is so long and the nice impression it makes is derived from driving down it as a totality. There is a set of etchings on display at both the library and the historical museum that depicts the whole main street one block at a time, and it is breathtaking and wonderful. It kind of captures the positive impression of the main street as a single photograph cannot.
I don't know anyone in the town yet, and I am in no way at all connected to my community, but it has a great feel. I get the feeling there is interestingness and people I will want to hang out with. Which is good, because I'm kind of committed to staying here for a while. My stuff isn't even here yet (oh God, how I dread that day, when I have to shop for my own furniture and spend weeks and weeks working out how to arrange things in my apartment). And it was so traumatic pulling up stakes and getting here that I couldn't go through it again in the short term. And I would lose so much time - it would be another three months in the new place before I was thinking of getting out and getting social, and hitting the wall of illness and depression, and having to write stern lists to force myself to do what needs to be done. I couldn't afford the backward step. So, here I am, committed to stay for a while.
But wait, Ellen, what was that you said about illness and depression? Yeah, I'm done with my cold but I think I'm in a state a doctor once called "post-viral". Friday night I feel asleep on the couch (watching bad stand-up on Comedy Central) and finally stirred and dragged myself to bed at 3am, where I slept like a dead thing until 11 the next morning, having dreams about work. Yesterday I went and got my hair cut and then tried to organise all the "shoulds" in my head by working out if I have any goals - someone had mentioned goals the week before, actually two different people, and I was struck by the thought that I don't have any. None. No reason to go on, nothing in particular I want or am working toward, still in this bleak post-apocalyptic limbo of my broken heart. And the broken heart was, actually also as of yesterday, two and a half years ago! I should be over it now. But I'm not. When I did my matrix of things to do, the winner was to come back home and spend time on the computer, but instead I came home and took a long nap and then stayed up until 2am watching a whole series of America's Next Top Model. Again. Having done exactly the same thing last weekend. I am wasting my life.
Today I'm trying, I'm really trying, but I can't move or motivate myself to do anything. I woke up and lay in bed with the radio on for an hour, listening to an NPR show on musical tastes that was talking about Celine Dion and the Roches, both of whom are not to my taste. I dragged myself out of bed thinking, "I should have something different for breakfast. Maybe eggs? Something special, because it's Sunday." And instead had exactly the same precise thing I have for breakfast every single fucking day. And ever since then I have been trying to get myself to stretch and go down to the little gym in the office building of the apartment complex. I got myself there last Sunday, I should do it again. But so far have not. Everything hurts - back, shoulders, hips. Everything is stiff. Every muscle is weak. Post-viral. But also toxins from stress, and also out-of-shapeness from not going to the little gym as much as I planned to. But I can't seem to get myself there. And my mind is in a fight between, "Of course not! You're post-viral! You're tired and achy! Rest, darling! Don't push yourself! You know you will be fit again, and full of energy, one day." And the other side, which is saying, "You know that the only cure for stress-induced depression is aerobic exercise. You can remember how amazing you felt when your trainer in Sydney used to push you beyond your limits. You didn't die, you didn't hurt yourself, and it was exhilarating and wonderful afterwards, and you were getting fit as an added benefit. You know the only thing that will cure your sore back and lack of energy, and low-grade post-viral depression, is to get out there and flog yourself on the treadmill. Don't whine, you know it's true. How do you expect to be a top performer at work without any energy or fitness? How do you expect to ever win a man, you 44-year-old over the hill dried up spinster, how do you expect to keep passing for early 30's and fool them into sleeping with you, unless you go to the gym, right now, and at least three times a week, which you have not done?"
It's not working, as you can see, dear readers, the scoldy voice in my head. I'm here instead writing all this down. On my anniversary - of both arriving in Apple Town, to start my new life, and of my baby done leaving me, to end my old life.
I knew I would hit a three-month wall, I knew it would be about the time the excitement wore off and the tiredness and the view of the very long road still before me would kick in.
There are lots of good things, really. I have already absorbed myself into this new place in lots of ways, and mentally I think I feel pretty grounded and positive.
But there is a wall, nonetheless, and I have kind of hit it, so this post will have some whining in it as well.
Good things - I am really soaring at work. I am so, so qualified for my job, and I do in fact have a great deal of passion for it. I can contribute so much to the company and those sites, I have all the qualifications and life experience to do it. It doesn't just take a book-knowledge of internet best practice, it's also taking my leadership skills, presentation skills, negotiation and persuasion skills, diplomacy (like last Friday when two of my suppliers were acting like three-year-olds, honestly, and I had to referee and calm everyone down). Editorial, budgeting, design, technology, communicating between people in about 20 different disciplines, keeping my eye on strategic matters and not getting bogged down in tactical, going around people while making them still feel like they have power. Working hard without burning myself out and still leaving room to build a life here, because at the moment I have no life. I can do all of it. I'm great at nearly all of it. It's a good feeling, and inspirational. So work, mostly, is a good thing.
The landscape. It still makes me sigh, even though sometimes I wake up in the morning and look out the window and gasp in confusion. Despite that it's really cold and hard to drive in, I love the snow. It snows and stays, for weeks and weeks, because it's so cold. It's really pretty, and stays pretty. It's hard to drive in, but I love it. And the barns! I love the barns. I want to get out in the countryside and drive around and soak up the landscape through my eyes, which I haven't had a chance to do because it's so cold and snowy. It's not like the state does not realise that its barns are wonderful. There is a barn on my license plate. There is a barn on my driver's license. But they make my heart warm, when I see them. Barns are another good thing.
The town. The town has a good feel to it. I was looking for Appleton postcards at a bookshop in town yesterday, and the photos are just ridiculously bad - a picture of Memorial Bridge which is just a picture of a road, with a beige 6-story building in the distance. I imagined sending it to someone and the mental picture it would create in them - a bleak, boring, featureless, semi-abandoned nowhere in the middle of the midwest. This town is not like that. This town is kind of unphotographable, because the main street is so long and the nice impression it makes is derived from driving down it as a totality. There is a set of etchings on display at both the library and the historical museum that depicts the whole main street one block at a time, and it is breathtaking and wonderful. It kind of captures the positive impression of the main street as a single photograph cannot.
I don't know anyone in the town yet, and I am in no way at all connected to my community, but it has a great feel. I get the feeling there is interestingness and people I will want to hang out with. Which is good, because I'm kind of committed to staying here for a while. My stuff isn't even here yet (oh God, how I dread that day, when I have to shop for my own furniture and spend weeks and weeks working out how to arrange things in my apartment). And it was so traumatic pulling up stakes and getting here that I couldn't go through it again in the short term. And I would lose so much time - it would be another three months in the new place before I was thinking of getting out and getting social, and hitting the wall of illness and depression, and having to write stern lists to force myself to do what needs to be done. I couldn't afford the backward step. So, here I am, committed to stay for a while.
But wait, Ellen, what was that you said about illness and depression? Yeah, I'm done with my cold but I think I'm in a state a doctor once called "post-viral". Friday night I feel asleep on the couch (watching bad stand-up on Comedy Central) and finally stirred and dragged myself to bed at 3am, where I slept like a dead thing until 11 the next morning, having dreams about work. Yesterday I went and got my hair cut and then tried to organise all the "shoulds" in my head by working out if I have any goals - someone had mentioned goals the week before, actually two different people, and I was struck by the thought that I don't have any. None. No reason to go on, nothing in particular I want or am working toward, still in this bleak post-apocalyptic limbo of my broken heart. And the broken heart was, actually also as of yesterday, two and a half years ago! I should be over it now. But I'm not. When I did my matrix of things to do, the winner was to come back home and spend time on the computer, but instead I came home and took a long nap and then stayed up until 2am watching a whole series of America's Next Top Model. Again. Having done exactly the same thing last weekend. I am wasting my life.
Today I'm trying, I'm really trying, but I can't move or motivate myself to do anything. I woke up and lay in bed with the radio on for an hour, listening to an NPR show on musical tastes that was talking about Celine Dion and the Roches, both of whom are not to my taste. I dragged myself out of bed thinking, "I should have something different for breakfast. Maybe eggs? Something special, because it's Sunday." And instead had exactly the same precise thing I have for breakfast every single fucking day. And ever since then I have been trying to get myself to stretch and go down to the little gym in the office building of the apartment complex. I got myself there last Sunday, I should do it again. But so far have not. Everything hurts - back, shoulders, hips. Everything is stiff. Every muscle is weak. Post-viral. But also toxins from stress, and also out-of-shapeness from not going to the little gym as much as I planned to. But I can't seem to get myself there. And my mind is in a fight between, "Of course not! You're post-viral! You're tired and achy! Rest, darling! Don't push yourself! You know you will be fit again, and full of energy, one day." And the other side, which is saying, "You know that the only cure for stress-induced depression is aerobic exercise. You can remember how amazing you felt when your trainer in Sydney used to push you beyond your limits. You didn't die, you didn't hurt yourself, and it was exhilarating and wonderful afterwards, and you were getting fit as an added benefit. You know the only thing that will cure your sore back and lack of energy, and low-grade post-viral depression, is to get out there and flog yourself on the treadmill. Don't whine, you know it's true. How do you expect to be a top performer at work without any energy or fitness? How do you expect to ever win a man, you 44-year-old over the hill dried up spinster, how do you expect to keep passing for early 30's and fool them into sleeping with you, unless you go to the gym, right now, and at least three times a week, which you have not done?"
It's not working, as you can see, dear readers, the scoldy voice in my head. I'm here instead writing all this down. On my anniversary - of both arriving in Apple Town, to start my new life, and of my baby done leaving me, to end my old life.
Wednesday, January 23, 2008
Minus how many?
Back in May of 2007, when this whole thing started, I visited my family in Denver. It was the first time I was in the US during the spring since I left for Australia, and everything was startling - all the flowers, the green of the new grass and the new leaves on the trees. My parents picked me up at the airport and we went to my sister's place, and I distinctly remember getting out of the car and walking to her front door with no coat on, distinctly remember it because it was the coldest I had been in memory. I found out it was 53 degrees. "Fifty-three!" I cried out. "That's not enough degrees!"
My sister still laughs hysterically at this when she remembers it.
I still stand by what I said that May, fifty-three is not enough degrees. But also, folks lemme tell you, four is also not enough degrees. Not nearly enough degrees at all. It was the number of degrees displaying this evening on both a bank sign and the sign out front of the Walgreens. By the time I got home, in my car, with the heat on full blast, I couldn't feel the tips of my fingers.
And right now it's four below, so not only do I not have enough degrees, I'm in the hole a few, and the universe owes them to me. Negative four, four degrees owed to me, is how cold it is now.
My sister still laughs hysterically at this when she remembers it.
I still stand by what I said that May, fifty-three is not enough degrees. But also, folks lemme tell you, four is also not enough degrees. Not nearly enough degrees at all. It was the number of degrees displaying this evening on both a bank sign and the sign out front of the Walgreens. By the time I got home, in my car, with the heat on full blast, I couldn't feel the tips of my fingers.
And right now it's four below, so not only do I not have enough degrees, I'm in the hole a few, and the universe owes them to me. Negative four, four degrees owed to me, is how cold it is now.
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