Not a great day, yesterday.
Getting ill—
verifiably ill with no part of it due to some subliminal desire to feel sorry for myself—makes me feel fragile, and when I feel fragile, I get depressed, I get
lonely.
But nobody I wanted to talk to wanted to talk to me.
J___ L_______ didn't pick up the phone.
He probably saw it was me, I thought.
And who would want to talk to me?My other phone-buddy of choice may be dealing with a cancer diagnosis.
Imagine! I thought.
He's letting a cancer diagnosis interfere with talking to me.I still wasn't feeling 100%: My stomach was lodgy, my appetite nil. I felt
exhausted, and with that kind of exhaustion comes a deep brain fog. I had work to do, & I was doing it but neither happily nor easily.
And it was fuckin'
hot out—like that
Twilight Zone episode where everybody is melting because the Earth is veering into the Sun only it turns out they are hallucinating because the Earth is really veering
away from the sun.
###
When I get depressed like that, I put off doing errands.
Like my car needs an oil change.
But
what if in mucking around with the car, the mechanic finds that it needs $5,000 worth of work or it will explode on the Mid-Hudson Bridge tomorrow?
Under
those circumstances, wouldn't it be better
not to get the oil changed?
I mean, if they don't discover the car needs $5,000 worth of work, then it
can't explode, right?
###
All afternoon long, I Remunerated gloomily away. Lew & Ed's wedding is this coming weekend, and I'm going to Ithaca & Edinboro for four days. Some details I took care of way in advance, but some are still dangling—like should I worry about the
cats?
Four days is kind of the max for leaving cats untended with lots of food & water, and multiple litterboxes.
I never would have left
Sybyl that long, but then, Sybyl loved me, and Mabel-Molly & Molly-Mabel do not. Never in my long history of animal companions have I ever had two who seemed so utterly indifferent. It's like adopting a waif from a Romanian orphanage & taking them home only to discover they have Psychotic Attachment Disorder.
(Well—Molly-Mabel may love me a
little. She follows me around the house & often leaps up, meowing, for pets. But she dislikes snuggling & being picked up. Mabel-Molly has a memory like an elephant because she has
never forgiven me for trying to condition & comb out her mats, and actually
hisses at me every now & then—half-heartedly, true: a hiss of dislike not of aggression, but still.)
I don't really get a whole lot back from the
kiskas.When I am feeling upbeat, this is not a problem.
But I can't always feel upbeat.
###
In the late afternoon, Ichabod called.
We were
both In a Mood.
Somehow, we started talking about RTT. "You know, every time I see him, we have at least one big fight," I complained to Ichabod. "And he tells me, 'I don't even
feel like you're my mother. We hardly ever talk. You don't ever know what's going on in my life—' which isn't true, by the way. Everything that goes on in his life, he immediately posts to social media.
"So then I try to call him. And he never picks up the phone!"
"You & RTT need to go to therapy," Ichabod said.
"
You think
everyone should go to therapy," I said.
"That's true," Ichabod said.
"But I already know what the issue is. The
real reason RTT doesn't feel like I'm his mother is because I'm so marginal. I don't have a home; I have a place where I'm staying for now. And he's
ashamed of me because all his other friends have mothers with
homes—"
"You
really need to go to therapy," Ichabod said.
###
In the evening, J___ L_______ texted a starburst of photos:
Was sailing up in San Francisco all day! I'll call—We'll talk SOON, I deferred hastily because by that point, I was utterly incapable of muttering a single word to another human being.
But the pictures of the glorious and presumably
cool San Francisco Bay did make me feel a whole lot better.
###
In the end, it is what it is.
You sit at the table with the cards you're dealt, and sometimes you know the game you're playing, and sometimes, you don't, and sometimes by the time you
figure out the game you are playing, they have changed the rules.
In the end, all you are really is a system of molecules whose coding has managed to defy entropy for 70 or 80 years. And the Universe is vast, filled with systems of molecules all doing their best to defy entropy. And so, gas clouds spin into stars and stars splinter into planets and things happen on those planets before the stars go all supernova, and nothing in your narrative can compare to those stories. Still, all stories have the same subtext:
It is what it is.![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
maju
