Morning Fog

Early this morning a dense, frozen fog lay across everything, and filled up the woods for miles in every direction. It melted more slowly than usual--turning to mist and then eventually to steam as the sun swung higher into the sky--and the rich sunbeams and shining air held on until the last moment before sliding away. The crystalline structures of the cold dawn faded back into wood and leaves and stone, and by 9 am the silent (save for birdsong) morning cathedral melted completely into the strong sun and noisy energy of day.

I should spend more time in the morning.


I stepped onto the gas station lot to put gas in the van this morning, and when my feet hit the ground I inhaled, and the world smelled like Turkey. Smelled the way the world used to smell when I loved someone else. On Valentine's Day. When I want so much not to think of those things anymore.

Thoughts on a possible zombie apocalypse

I have something of a moral opposition to the idea of arranging one's life around a television schedule, and yet still I find myself regularly watching two shows when they are in season: Doctor Who, and Walking Dead. I've been watching far too much Walking Dead lately--catching up on the first two seasons, since I started on the third. I love the show, but now I've got zombies on the brain. I've been staying awake at night running back over the show, thinking about courses of action in the event of an apocalypse, eyeing buildings on my way around town and assessing which are the most defensible, wondering which kinds of people would fare better or worse.

I started thinking about what would actually happen, you know? Generally in talk and stories the zombie apocalypse is treated as an extinction event, and also generally (in my experience) isn't thought through to the end, or in a particularly logical fashion. For instance: These things are always set in populated areas. Even if they're set in the countryside, they're in the countryside near populated areas. Know why? Because that's where there would be enough zombies to be scary. What about Mongolia, where a third of the population is nomadic? What about communities isolated in the Amazon, far enough from civilization that corpses would rot or be eaten before reaching them? What about everyone who lives at high latitude? I don't care what people are wearing when they die--I doubt even the most warmly dressed zombie would produce enough heat to keep from freezing solid in the winter, or any time above the Arctic Circle. A lot--or even most--of the world would go to hell in a handbasket, I'm sure, but enough would survive. Gradually people would build safe havens, learn to protect themselves, begin to repopulate, and the next generation would be bred for intelligence and physical fitness and luck, or maybe even immunity. And slowly they would beat back the tide, retake the world, turn the power back on (probably renewable power this time, having learned a little from past mistakes), and start work on a cure. If things had followed the trend of Walking Dead, and people turned when they died, then the new world would take better care of their sick and elderly and mentally handicapped. They'd do a better job of making sure no one was alone. They would develop accountable communities out of necessity. They would be better than we are.

Oh, so that's what that is.

It has taken me until the age of twenty six to admit to myself that I have an anxiety problem. It never occurred to me before this week, though in retrospect it seems absurdly obvious. My paralyzing fear of graduate school that's keeping me in an endless cycle of unfulfilling odd jobs? My inability to sleep caused largely by my fear of not being able to sleep? My obsessive worry about relationships and commitment? Yeah. Totally doesn't sound like an anxiety issue at all. Two nights ago I had a two-minute argument with my roommate/twenty-year-best-friend/landlady about recycling, and then I cried for about an hour and a half before I could calm down enough to go to bed. I feel like that was a little bit of an overreaction.


In other news, I'm hoping that one of these days, breakup songs will stop tearing me apart inside* and making me emotional about David, making me start making bad, bad plans about giving him slightly-too-long hugs or sending him Valentines or writing him unnecessary emails full of oversharing. I think I'm getting closer, maybe, to not doing these things.


Speaking of Valentines Day, though I'm obviously still...me... Ian is so great, so sweet to me that I feel like he deserves something really nice for the holiday. I don't have any money, really, and I'm not sure what to do. I was thinking about saving dollar bills and getting him roses, which tends to be my typical response to Valentines Days, but it seems a little weak, especially since I know that, despite my protests, he has already ordered me a gift and will likely add chocolate and flowers to it. Ideas would be welcome.
































*This still happens despite the obvious issues that existed within our relationship. Despite his apathy toward improving his emotional state of frequent if not near-constant depression, despite my proximity to his depression worsening my own, despite my fervent avowal that I am not willing to be with a person who is content to spend his life unhappy, despite our inability to communicate with one another effectively, despite the two-seater rollercoaster of love and fear and uncertainty we spent nearly our entire relationship riding...I told him I wanted to marry him, back in whatever year it was, a few months before we broke up, and I meant it. I wasn't the only one to have brought it up. And I guess I'll never know what went through his head--then or ever--but in the end, it wasn't what he wanted.

Dress

Tonight was the annual Christmas/holiday party at my godmother's house--the last, at least on Stratford, as she will be moving into a condo soon. It was a nice time--everyone was there, the food was all eaten and everyone seemed to have had just enough, the audacious young cousin was audacious, we sang carols at her command and listened to a story from my godmother's childhood, and a poem. And, toward the end, my cousin Megan, after complimenting my shoes, my scarf, then my bracelet, told me that she loves the way I dress. I wouldn't put this here except that I want to remember, because it's something that I never thought would happen. So many of my female cousins (particularly on the other side of the family) could be or are basically professional thrift store shoppers, and have amazing style. I am not naturally that way, and always admired the way they dressed, their confidence, the way they always looked so effortlessly put together--and I thought I could never do or have those things. I asked for help for a while and then just started to go for it. Looks like maybe I'm getting my wish, at least a little. And that's pretty amazing.

Apparently it's that time again

I wish I wanted to post here more. It seems like I always find myself wanting to look back on something that I feel I must have written about, and then find that I didn't.


Things have been okay. I've been dreaming a lot--daydreaming sometimes about this idea I've had for a while about becoming a counselor, and daydreaming a lot more about designing and building and sometimes even living in tiny houses of the variety that can fit on an 8x20' trailer, and be hauled around the country. I have such a love of efficient design, and of the idea of efficient living--living without the unnecessary accumulation of the mounds of stuff that perversely ensnare our affections and weigh down our lives without enriching them at all. More recently this has expanded to include the desire for a small, high mpg car. I'm tired of using up gas to lug around all this car that I'm not even using. I'm using the driver's seat and maybe the passenger's seat too, and yet I'm pulling the weight of both back seats and a trunk halfway full of crap that was left there by the family members who drove the car before it came into my hands.

Anyway, I've been funding the daydreaming by still working part time at that daycare I thought I had quit back in the spring, and doing some odd jobs for various people, mostly extended family members. I am tired of this, and I want to find doorways into something new, but I don't know where they are. And I don't know how to stop being afraid of committing to a plan.


And I love Christmas, and it's my favorite holiday, but I am tired, so tired of getting depressed every Christmas season. Back when I was with David (Oh Lord, his name is still like honey. Will that ever fade?) I thought that my issues at Christmastime were due to strife--some new one each year--within our relationship, but it doesn't seem to have changed. Or maybe it did, and maybe I am just in another doomed relationship and I can somehow feel it and it is hurting. I don't know. Was I sad like this last year? The year before? I can't remember. Lately I feel like I can't remember anything. And sometimes that's okay. Sometimes I feel like I just live in the present, I just am where I am, and maybe that's okay. But sometimes I feel this void where memories should be, and I feel like I am surrounded by nothingness, and it's a frightening thing. Obviously I don't exactly have alzheimer's, but I was listening to this radio special last night, and a man from Ireland was talking about his childhood Christmases, citing memory after memory after memory, and it was lovely--but I don't have that. I have a handful, but for the most part it's all a haze. Everything runs together. Why? Does that happen for everyone? Does everyone's mind feel like a chalkboard in the rain?


I admitted to myself tonight that I've been unhappy. It's been going on a while--weeks? Some months?--but I have not been seeing it. But sobbing on the floor (apparently that is my red flag of choice this past year or so) is difficult to ignore. So. Now what.

October.

I feel that I ought to remind myself that I love days like today. Days when work is almost unnaturally smooth, when the kids are so self-sustaining that I can actually read a bit at times, when even my worst bus run is tolerable, when homework time is blessedly quiet and we suddenly start making bats out of construction paper, and that carries us through the rest of the evening, and then suddenly there's a bat garland in the art room and they all loved it.

And then I get off work and the air is cool and clean and clear, and the sky looks like a three hundred and sixty degree fairytale. It was beautiful.

Tomorrow Ian and I are going pumpkin picking, I think. I ought to do some planning for carvings tonight. Doctor Who will probably be involved, because I'm suddenly obsessed this fall, and I've dragged him down with me. Evidence? I drew this in my shower sometime last week:

A few days later, when I wasn't looking, he drew something else in my shower and then went home, leaving it for me to find. He drew this:

I laughed through the first ten or fifteen minutes of my shower, and responded (with slight spoilers, if you are a fan who hasn't watched all the Eleventh Doctor stuff).

In case you can't read my shower-crayon writing, that says "Would you like one of these souffles? They're killer."

It's that kind of day.

Do you ever just...collapse on the kitchen floor, and start sobbing over things that happened years ago?






Right. Me either.