Realism

I feel the inexorable tug of depression, the dark promise it holds to wrap me up in warm darkness.  I fight it by inches, never gaining on it but keeping it from swallowing me whole.  The hardest times are when I can't remember why the fight is worth it, when it seems that depression is not the pathology it has become but another word for realism.  This is my life.  There's no reason to expect it to get better, and it could certainly be worse.  Maybe the idea that happiness is achievable, even an entitlement, is the real pathology.  Why should I get happiness?  The biggest mistakes I've made were things I did in an effort to push back the bleakness and grab my piece of joy.  I think the better option may be to strive for acceptance rather than happiness.  This is it, this is all there is; and yet, I watch the people around me live their lives with passion and energy.  In my lighter moments, I look for hope in their example, but right now their efforts seem futile, their hopes sad in light of their inevitable frustration.

Bitch, bitch, bitch

I am so over myself.  All I do is complain, and when I get tired of hearing myself whine out loud and bite my tongue, I still hear the litany in my head.  I don't even know what I want, what I expect to be different, what end I want to have in sight.  I need a lobotomy, or a week in a hotel with bad pay per view, or a winning lottery ticket, or a padded soundproof room.  I think I need a hiatus, but really?  That couldn't end well.  The last thing I need is the company of my own thoughts.

Gratitude

It's easier to walk the line today, when my only responsibility is to cook and eat ridiculous amounts of food. Even so, the trap in my brain has its hair trigger, ready to snap shut at every argument between the kids, every misplaced shoe or coat. I napped after dinner and dreamed of horror, of fear and malignancy and dark things hunting, and woke up sweating and scared.

I cast my net for a stable support, someone or something to prop me up and make the charade easier to maintain. That kind of weakness is dangerous, though; I know I should be trying to strengthen my own legs instead of damsel-in-distressing.

Of course, I am lucky, I do know that. Today is a day for gratitude, and there is much to be thankful for. My children, most of all - so much tougher and more resilient than I am, thank goodness, and so creative and spirited and beautiful. My mother, who makes it possible for me to move toward that so-far-away light at the end of this tunnel. Even the lessons, so painfully learned, that I should have known by instinct or common sense - even those are worth gratitude. Better late than never and all that. And so I will finish my day with my thanks in mind, for these things and for so much more. I will try to remember my luck and let go of my worries and hopes, at least when they become too heavy to hold.

Hollow

I spend every day on a tightrope, desperately seeking balance. When it comes, in brief pulses, it is such a relief that the euphoria sets me back off-kilter, flailing around with my balancing bar and scanning the horizon for the rope's end.

How many mistakes is too many? I dream of clean slates, yearn for fresh starts. I try to be all good things, hoping that living well will pave a firmer path. But trying to be good at everything, I fail at it all. I end each day with regrets, new on top of old, and a need to talk, to talk and talk and talk, as if it would help. As if anyone would listen. As if I would know what to say. The words are in my chest, weighing me down, pressing out my breath.

I am annoyed. A pencil falls, is replaced on the table, falls again, and I can hardly keep from screaming my frustration. It never stops raining, it drizzles and mists and damps all over splat squish squeak. I am contradictions - bored but too busy, sad but giddy, lonely but craving solitude. I am procrastination. I am lack of motivation. I am remorse.

Words can't express the depths of my loathing

I am 10 days away from my physics final, after which I will never have to take another physics class, ever. You'd think that having the end in sight would alleviate some of my chronic hatred for this class/professor/subject, but sadly such is not the case. I have never worked so hard for so little - no sense of satisfaction, no idea what my grade is (because this teacher, among his many other crimes against education, lost all of our homework grades, hasn't graded any labs, and added a few random quizzes that aren't represented in the grade formula in the syllabus). Hate hate hate. I have a test tomorrow, on chapters were were supposed to cover the last week of October but just completed last Tuesday, and which I still don't begin to understand. We will not be covering anything at all about optics, and while god knows I don't want to be responsible for even more information in this awful class, I need to know optics for the MCAT, so it would have been nice to at least see something about it.

I signed up for the MCAT last night - $225 for a sure-to-be miserable experience. It's like spending money on a root canal, or a new tire (oh, yeah, just did that too - stupid flat tire last week). I guess I'd better start putting together my study plan for that. As for now, I have to get back to studying for my craptastic test tomorrow, or there won't be much point in the MCAT.

Did you know I'm from Forks, Washington?

That ought to bring in the page-hits, too bad I don't have google ads. It's so beyond weird that my crappy small hopeless poor dying hometown is now world famous. For those of you who don't have preteens (or don't admit to reading preteen literature even though I know you totally do), the hit book series (and upcoming movie) Twilight takes place in Forks, Washington. For those of you who have never been there, and I'm guessing that's just about everyone in the whole world, statistically speaking, it's a really really REALLY small logging town in the middle of nowhere in Washington state, about 4 hours west of Seattle (no, Seattle is not on the ocean, I swear easterners never look at a map west of the Mississippi).

When I graduated from high school (oh, about 58 years ago), there were only about 2500 residents in town. Logging had pretty much dried up and even liquor had stopped being profitable, to the point that the last solvent bar literally burned to the ground a couple years ago (the rumor is that the owners burned it up for the insurance money, but I can't confirm). The town is about 5 miles from a Native American reservation, and although I spent my whole painfully long high school tenure in town, I couldn't tell you anything about the rez, because PC or not, the twain just ain't meetin'. Don't buy everything you read in novels written by a woman who's never been there.

Our sports teams had to be bused up to 12 hours (no exaggeration) for meets, our homecoming dances and proms were held in not just a gym but the old gym, there is no fast food or movie theater within 60 miles, and (this is coming from a 1st generation Forks resident) the gene pool isn't all that deep, if you know what I mean. My close friends and I spent nearly every day that I remember dreaming of the day we could leave town without looking back. There's really nothing to do in Forks, and that is also not an exaggeration.

So it's something of a surprise to hear that people are choosing Forks as a vacation hotspot based on the Twilight books. Don't get me wrong, I love the books, but most of the excitement in them is caused by the proximity to vampires, not the proximity to mind-numbingly dull nothingness and constant rain. I guess it's just sour grapes - I wish I'd bought real estate when it was still about $2.50/acre.

A weird holiday feeling

My emotions don't seem to know where to settle. I'm tired, after a long day, but it was good to keep busy while my nerves were fraying. I took my oldest boy with me to vote, and I hope he remembers this when he's older, the way our parents remember Kennedy (though hopefully with less death and horror). I start to get excited and hopeful, then dampen my enthusiasm with anxious watching, as if my own optimism could jinx the election. In short, I'm all over the damn place. I don't like that the first states to close polls are almost all too close to call - I want this to be decisive. I love that the voter turnout was huge. I want more sugar but I am already down to like 2 pairs of pants because of all the nervous eating I've been doing this week between school and the election.

PleasepleasepleasepleasepleasepleasepleasepleasepleasewinOBAMA!

Ooo, champagne.