Whoa. 15 days without a post.

I mean, it’s not like I don’t have reasons. I do. But that’s beside the point. They’re not particularly good reasons, either. And besides, I’d started this project precisely to escape the endless cycle of rationalization. No excuses! I told myself. One post a day, without fail! I said. [You have to imagine here a lot of grumbling and eye-rolling.] I’m cutting this short because nobody likes when bloggers make excuses – partly because it comes across as insufferably grandiose, as if the whole turned on whether they posted or not. I don’t suffer from such delusions, just from a twinge of disappointment that I haven’t been able to keep up my promise. (Although there’s still time to make up for … let’s see.. the 15 missed posts. Whoa. Yeah, totally doable.)

A lot has happened, too. Spring break came and went in a blink – had visitors, Miruna’s birthday party which required some serious energy and planning chops, then work work work and trying desperately to keep my spirits up despite the perpetual winter we’re having here on the East Coast (is that what Scandinavians have to live through every year? Because I’m seriously never moving there. I’ve been more seasonally affected than ever.)

Miruna started walking, which is a surprise, delight, and challenge. Every day, although I don’t think it’s possible, I find myself loving her even more fiercely. She fills me with joy and awe and love every single moment and I … just can’t. She is everything.

Which is a good thing to think about since disaster has struck a little too close to home lately. In short, my three writing partners (on three very different projects) have been afflicted, in order, with: 1) broken ankle (followed by narcotics-induced haze, bed rest, and vicious respiratory superbug); 2) OD-ing spouse (a spouse who is a repeat drug offender to boot, but that’s beside the point); 3) diagnosis of ovarian cancer, plus, for good measure, her daughter DYING of ovarian cancer, slowly but surely. I mean, seriously. My goal today was just to get through the day without more bad news. I am an empath and have to be very careful about processing this information if I don’t want to end up in the loony bin. (No, it hasn’t happened, but have I lost sleep and shed way too many tears and spent days in anguish over similar news? Yes, I have.)

On top of everything I read this incredibly powerful, sad, and devastating account of dementia. Talk about my fears being exposed raw!  (Seriously, anyone should read it…it is incredible and unique and beautiful.)

I tried to soothe my nerves with grading but the papers I did grade were INCREDIBLY bad. I took a break… a long one. Don’t think I’ll grade any more tonight, as a matter of fact, but geez, was that depressing.

So…back in business. I’m going to try not to screw it up this time.

Time flies by, or something

I have entered a perverse relationship with time, in which I live in a perpetual tomorrow/next hour/after lunch/after this (x), which is to say, I don’t really live at all. It’s not even fair to say that time is my biggest enemy, since enmity implies, for me anyway, a mutual relationship, in which time actually takes issue with me. Or angrily smashes a plate on the wall, raising its fist: “That woman! Oh, how I’ll get her! You don’t want me to be your enemy, little lady, oh no, sirree, indeed!” I mean, it would be scarily funny if that would be the case, but the sad/fortunate truth is that time doesn’t give a shit. Calling time my enemy is equivalent to calling life my enemy. Because life IS time: we define it as a succession of precise moments with pre-defined connotations (birth, childhood, puberty, and so on, marching toward inexorable death). The suspension of time would mean the suspension of life itself. People who somehow want time to stand still focus on keeping death at bay but forget, conveniently, that they would also put life, altogether, on hold.

So anyhoo. I can’t make time my enemy, nor my friend by the same token, since, again, no relationship could ever form to warrant a description of any kind. Time is part of me, it’s a variable of my very existence. So is procrastination, it seems. I suspend my sense of time — that’s probably a more accurate description of what happens– in order so that I forget the painful world of outside obligations. Wow, it sounds almost… self-medicating. Yeah. That’s it. I’m in a THERAPEUTIC relationship with time.

And it’s not going well at the moment.

Snow snow go away

I know, I know, everyone’s been kvetching about the weather, but seriously, it’s March THIRD and THERE IS A FREAKIN’ SNOWSTORM OUTSIDE. It will snow all day, basically. Or sleet (let’s pretend that’s a verb). It will be wintry-mixing all day, which superficially sounds really cool as if you’re doing a new dance at a cocktail party or something but in reality is just brutal, miserable, no good, blah weather designed specifically to extinguish the last spark of humanity and warmth in your soul.

In other words: grrrrrr.

After a full day of bouncing about with the baby, my eyelids are magnetically attracted to the bottom of my eyes, and I’m fighting a futile attempt to keep them from dropping. I’m just sad that I have to go to sleep to the sound of misery pounding on my windows.

(Also glad I can type blindly, more or less…comes in handy when you’re writing a blog post basically with your eyes closed. Hey, look at that, much fewer typos than I thought!)

Swarming

My head has been swarming with ideas and frankly too many thoughts to be contained in this wizened old skull, which is why I periodically explode and have to be reconstituted bit by bit by lifelong convicts burdened with Sisyphean tasks. Sorry, I meant, this is why I have to empty my head regularly by just staring blankly at the screen, then closing it and deciding to go to bed, hoping that in my sleep my brain would drain itself gently, maybe through my ear canals (I’m merely speculating here), airing out the good from the bad (yeah, right) or at least the old from the new, the worthy from the unworthy, and whoa, right there, I think I just placed WAY too much confidence in an irrational, subconscious process, but that’s me, when I can’t understand myself I throw myself into the unfulfilled promise of science.

A thought I will have to leave unfinished for now, but which I’ll pick up just as soon as I awake from this slumber….

Samsara

SAMSARA food sequence from Baraka & Samsara on Vimeo.