two weeks and one day
Saturday 14 June 2008 | someone left a cookie
“It is certainly very cold,” said Peggotty. “Everybody must feel it so.”
“I feel it more than other people,” said Mrs. Gummidge.
[Charles Dickens, David Copperfield]
•
And without warning, sometime between being woken by my furry alarm clock and now, it piles into me like an irate Arizonan in an monster truck. Okay.
I slow down, bog in my thoughts, thicken in my body, harder to move, don’t want to talk, fingers made of lead and brain replaced with a plutonium lump. Okay. Okay.
Fortunately it’s roughly 3,000 degrees Kelvin, so I can’t do outdoor work anyway; and yesterday at the State School I acquired almost at random an armful of cinematic matter, films which I Should Have Seen By Now and somehow never did (Serpico? A Streetcar Named Desire? Whale Rider?). Okay, okay, okay already. Fine. Good. Whatever. Bring it.
For all the least-penetrable psychiatric studies show that the problem with having had major depressive episodes or dysthymia is that the mentally interesting one is much more likely to interpret mood variation as a familiar worst-case scenario, and then it’s off to the races from there, following that sharply etched neural rut down along the line of its groove into the recognizable landscape where everything is gray. And clinicians say medication doesn’t prevent relapse nearly the way cognitive-behavioral and mindfulness-based techniques do. They all say it, so it must be true.
Step away from the computer. Plug my ears to the shrieking din of its unaccomplished all. Plow myself into the dim bedroom’s cool sheets as if they were snow. And rummage around in the fabric-swamped closet for my dang DBT manual, when I get the energy.
Besides there is sooo much good news afoot that it undoubtedly deserves its own post. But I fold the morsels of joy in here, like plump blueberries in the oddly tasteless coffee cake I made yesterday morning (though the Brujo and I have managed to improve it a good deal by frying slices of it in pure butter, à la Mandarin and me preparing our more inventive college-dorm breakfasts, and drenching it with honey. Ingenious, no?).
1. I bought my ticket for San Francisco! Yes, I will spend FIVE delirious days in the city in August, during which the beloved Fruitbat officially becomes Mandarin-san; and maybe (if I ever write the thank-you letter I owe her) M’s mum and will get to visit real fabric stores and fall head-first into remnant tables of silk and wool and linen, emerging with yet more yardage to plan over, prewash, press, and carry around the house petting.
2. Walt Whitman left me the kindest phone message yesterday. He also let me know that my paycheck (?!) for the preposterous sinecure of being his puppet assistant (!?!) would begin arriving on July 1 (!?!???). I don’t even have words for this, other than self-deprecating undeserving ones; which may explain why I haven’t called him back, though he invited me to iced coffee and to make mandalas together, and though he is a total sweetheart. Just stunning.
3. Next weekend the Brujo and I journey once more to the mountain wilderness of the Poker Ranch (cf. euphoric description of last year’s outing). We drive in our battered little Honda many hundreds of miles (not going through SF, sadly, and so missing time with friends there) in order to spend nights in log cabins among stars and pine trees and hot tubs and wisecracking poker-dealing guys and whip-smart Hollywood directors and their actress sisters, who are also by the way incredibly good cooks. (Oh, the feast last July 4th, with grilled shrimp and salmon and corn-on-the-cob and Italian olives and potato salad and a heady buttercream-frosted cake rendered patriotic with blueberries and strawberries. Oh. The women stood around the icing bowl sticking our fingers in [okay, maybe that was just me] and talking about Dennis Kucinich and independent film, while outside the poker guys did bong hits from a balloon [vastly entertaining the abstinent Brujo], talked smack, and grilled animal parts. There were the requisite fireworks and unlike the year before, no c•nt•p•d•s crawled on my tennis shoe. Truly a night to remember.)
So whence all this downturned funkiness today, eh, peanut?
Because I just added a new project (the Brujo’s website) to my bloated list of undones? Because a couple of e-friends have been, per Ally McBeal’s paralegal, perhaps snappish of late, both understandably stressed about frustrating personal situations? Because the Brujo and I glared at each other on Thursday, our eyes momentarily flashing like those of sparring alley cats?
[I fussed at Finny for begging, interrupting him as he was talking about teaching fractions, a speech act I had actually requested, and our eyes arced in anger as he said COULD YOU JUST and I got up abruptly from the table and said YOU KNOW I DON’T THINK I CAN and he said WELL I CAN’T EITHER and he cleaned up lunch as I tottered into the bedroom pouting and immediately fell drool-on-the-pillow asleep for an hour, waking only when he joined me. And we giggled, embarrassed, not even quite sure what it was we both JUST COULDN’T.]
Or because it stung that I got “unfriended” by a livejournal acquaintance, which is admittedly hilarious on several counts (not least because her blog got on my nerves)? And what the hell kind of fake-ass verb is “to friend” anyway? What happened to the perfectly useful verb, to befriend? We all know, though, friending isn’t the same as befriending.
—So, hey, actually, you know what? Belay all the preceding ominous bodements of relapse, because I just laughed my flabby ASS off at THIS. Move it along, folks. Back to your irregularly scheduled freakishness.
someone left a cookie
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Maybe the difference between blogs and fairytales is that happily-ever-after we are sure our favorite blogger has earned, dammit, has the occasional shitty day? The occasional mixed day? The day when everything ought to be okay and happy and one is inexplicably out of sorts or worse?
On in this end of the internets, we confess, there is the occasional confusing of self with literary character, and even the reluctance to delight in things being more complicated, slightly worse-smelling, slightly more surprising than that. And how to convey that brains all over the spectrum for mental interestingness are capable of mercurial readings of our lives, completely rosy one moment and despondent thereafter.
Oh, wishing we had a link to delight with, something that might make you smile, or at least amuse you temporarily, and we come up empty-handed, so instead send unending affection.