mmmhmmmm…..

i am so lucky.  i know it.  not many people can afford the luxory of wallowing like i’ve been doing.  i have been making it to work, and putting on what i hope is a positive enough show that folks don’t really sense the depth of my angst and anxiety.  then i go home, because that has been the foremost feeling i’ve had all day everyday, “i just want to go home.”  i’ve even been feeling while i’m here, at home.

while mostly i’ve wanted to sleep, i’ve managed to keep myself sewing. thank goodness i haven’t lost a taste for that.  knowing i still find pleasure in my activities is one of the signs this isn’t full blown depression.  so i have been productive in at least one sense during this extended ennui.

it’s a new  month, and i just started a new cycle, so when better than to once again put on my big girl panties and try to face the music that’s gotten stuck in it’s groove while i’ve been off ignoring the world.

life lesson

so, i’m driving home from working at school, listening to obama speak about his plans for the military, and he tells a story of two young marines who defended their corp from an oncoming suicide bomb truck, and how at the cost of their brave lives, so many more were saved.

thank god i was home by then, because i lost it. totally bawling, blubbering lost it.   they are in my living room as part of the big memorial project, and they will not be forgotten. but remembering them in their individual stories, it’s too much.

so, this is what i have learned about myself today, i am not any better than i used to be with the extreme empathy stuff.  this is why i am having so much difficulty getting going with the pr. the more i’m out with it, the more stories i hear and the more pain i seem to absorb.  i don’t know how to turn that off.  how does one be compassionate and empathic in a reasonable, non life sucked right out of me way?

fuck…….

every once in a while

i ponder whether or not i should have settled down and had a husband and a family.  but when i go through these melancholy patches, and have sooo much anxiety over what my logical mind sees is really nothing too major, but my emotional mind is completely overtaken, and i write in terribly composed run-on sentences, i am reassured that i have made the right decision.  no one should have to put up with this shit.

really

it seems like this place has gotten a little melodramatic as of late and i guess i’m going to decide to be okay with that.  normally in life i would force myself to shift gears and sing and dance and fight a way to be entertaining.  but, i feel like i am always, “on.”   i am so tired of being. “on.”

holy shit! do you see that glaring freaudian slip?  i meant to write “find” a way to be entertaining.  wow.  i don’t know that i’ve ever written a freudian slip before.  i don’t type very quickly and almost always catch my mistakes as i go.

anyway,  i’m not going to sing and dance here so much unless i really have things to crow about, and really and truly feel it.  i’m really not such a gloomy gus, i just don’t have many outlets for my darker, whinier side, and if it can find a home here, rather than in my gut, here it’ll be. maybe whining here will help my being pleasant in real life feel less insincere.

i really, really do feel overwhelmed.  i like all of my jobs, but i have 3 of  them, plus the community ed classes i’m teaching, plus the big fucking memorial project.  i’m trying to portion out my free time to better focus on class samples and the war project, but damn, that leaves no time for a social life. which honestly doesn’t bother me on the one hand.  on the other, i know that’s a sign of having one foot getting stuck in the slippery muck of depression.  right now it just feels like overwhelming anxiety.

it was always my fantasy as a little kid to be the only one left in the world.  i love spending time by myself.  lately i’ve been super annoyed and had to put on a happy facade when people call.  all of my jobs are people pleasing jobs.  i’m very good at them, but at the end of the day, i just want to garbo the world away. i vant to bee aloone.

too much

it’s just too much.  i thought i could do this and learn some new skills, skills i really need to learn, but maybe not with this project.  maybe with this project i’m supposed to learn to ask for help.  it was easy enough to get people to help with making blocks, well, kind of easy. people gave me stuff to make blocks, and have told me that i have an awesome idea.  and i do have an awesome idea.

so i may have found someone to help me get a start on this pr stuff. i’m going to have to find some focus and put aside some of the other stuff i’ve been using to fill my time and pretend  i’m doing something important.

i realize that one of my philosophical issues with the project is that i don’t want the focus to be on me.  so i have been busy creating an alter ego in a sense, as a creative and crafty quilter as well as politically motivated.  too much focus on me from the memorial quilt, feels like accepting money from investments in haliburton. blood money. shudder.

promotion makes me feel uncomfortable and is sparking all of my really bad coping mechanisms.  the ways i used to keep myself safe from attention and predators, arent’ working anymore.  i need to figure out where to go for help with that. homeopathy? massage? therapy?  i could benefit from all, but can only afford one.

uugghh….

nearby

you know how sometimes nothing is really wrong, but nothing is really right, and you know you’re supposed to be figuring out the answer to one of those really big life questions, and sometimes, you come up with an answer, but it’s realllly hard to get yourself out of that rut you were in and implement the changes you figured out  and while you’re halfassedly trying to to fool yourself into believing that backward step you took, could, in the right light be construed as a baby step forward, you have a new revelation, and that one totally makes everything else make sense, but, it happens while you’re driving and, you couldn’twrite it down or tell anyone, and now it’s like a dream – peripherally, you catch a glimpse of it, but you can’t get a full handed grasp, and you know it was the answer – maybe the answer to everything, and you want it back….

avoid much?

pink & orange

I so did not want to do what really needed to be done today.  I have huge issues with pr type stuff.  Something about it feels bragadocious and boastful.  I know that it really isn’t, and no one is ever going to know about this war project if I don’t get out and tell them, but it’s really hard.

Somehow when I speak to people about it, it ends up back at me and “what an awe inspiring idea”  I had, and it feels too much about me, and it’s not supposed to be about me.  The whole rest of my life is selfishly about me.

Instead of whining, I’ll post some photos of someone elses charity project that I maniacally worked on instead of my own.

another project improv block

project improv block

modern poetry

Can anyone explain the reasoning behind the way  new poets recite their work?  I heard an intelligent, well spoken woman on the radio this weekend read her free verse poem in that ever present la la la laaa, la la la laaa, la la la laaah.

I don’t hear any of the words, because no matter what her poem is about it is “performed” in that saccharin sing songy way.  Set to a tune which has nothing to connect it to it’s content.

Maybe I missed the memo explaining how this greatly improves the poetry today, or, please say no, perhaps I’m getting old and crotchety. They just don’t read poems like they did in my day…

Send me the memo – I’ll try to understand.  Maybe I could read your poem back to you in my “style” and see what you think.  I once had a roomful of people stop dead in their tracks with an emotive recitation.  I could do it again.

mania?

one of a dozen postcards I completed this weekend - emphasis on completed

I hate to look a gift horse in the mouth, but, I’m not certain where this sudden surge of energy has come from.  Still experiencing the social phobia that keeps me in my house when I don’t have somewhere specific to be.  But for the last week, I’ve been getting so much done, it makes me wonder what the hell was going on before.

It’s like I was moving in extreme slow motion, still accomplishing some things, but everything felt like it took all the effort I had. Oh, the pain! Oh, the  agony!  Right now things are just flowing, and I feel, different.

I get through the slow motion times by reminding myself, it won’t last forever, just ride it out and you’ll be okay.  The less you fight it the shorter it will be.

Now, I’m wondering how to extend this good bit.

HeadButt

One word or two for that phenomena?  I have such a headache now. I know he didn’t do it on purpose, and it wasn’t a misjudgement on our (the Special Ed Para Professionals whose care he was in) part, it’s just comes with the territory.  You think you made some progress in your work, and bam! Progress is never a straight path is it?  As much as autism has stolen his speech, it hasn’t stopped him from communicating.

I’m gonna stay up and sew for a while, just to give myself a good 12 hours afterwards.  I didn’t hit the floor, but this lasting headache has me concerned about a concussion.  I don’t really want to know, so am not going to look anything up.  It just seems like people with possible concussions in the movies aren’t allowed to sleep for a while.  My life is so much like a movie.