webcowgirl

Oh, one of those mornings when I understand my mother better.

She died at 53, in 2001. Not my goal, you understand; my goal is to live as long as either of my grandmothers, about 89. Maybe longer. But I don't think dying at 53 was my mom's goal.

Anyway, for all of high school and even junior high, I would come home from school and my mom would still be in bed. I guess it didn't register to me it was abnormal. She'd get up after a while, and make dinner, then sit up late watching tv. I think she'd probably break into some wine after I went to bed, but I don't remember ever seeing this, just the empty bottles in the garbage, which mostly never registered as having an meaning.

Someone convinced me at some point that all of this was due to my mom being an alcoholic. Sure, her yelling at us to keep things down on Saturday mornings was probably a hangover talking, but not this staying in bed until 3. I get it now, this morning, laying in bed until 11, letting myself fall asleep again and again, feeling gravity pulling me down so strong, urging me to stay there on my back, on my side, eyes closed, letting the dreams come and go and time pass, and pass, and pass.

Yeah, it's my mom. And it's not alcoholism, it's depression. I hate how I'm getting to understand her better and better as I get older. I worry that I'm replaying her mistakes, too, but I'm seeing now that so many of them weren't really about having bad taste in boyfriends or a feeling of entitlement (that a man should pay her way through life) but probably so much more about being depressed to the point of near paralysis, and then just finally giving up.

I've got two birthday do's to go to tonight but I'm having a hard time getting motivated. I felt mopey when I got up this morning and couldn't really get off the couch until 3 - when I went in the bedroom and fell asleep (a "hard reboot," I call it). I'm not out right now at the first event because the house is messy and I am backlogged with householderly things to do. I've finally got some of the cleaning and some more unpacking taken care of, but I've still got grocery shopping to do. This is a right pain to do on weeknights as our new flat is quite far from the store and lugging all of the crap uphill is not what I want to do before I get to eat. I'm going to be gone for most of tomorrow so basically if I didn't do everything today it was all just going to be sitting there staring me at the face for the rest of next week, too. And, hell, I don't know, does it actually look any better now? I guess the kitchen sure does and there's no getting around the fact that there's a lot of floor in the bedroom now that wasn't there three house ago, so I must have managed to accomplish something.

I think there are still real questions about whether or not I'm going to go anywhere at all tonight (in part because I'm trying to be super tight with the money for the next five weeks), but right now I'm hungry, and I am going to go to DosaAndChutney on Tooting High Street and have a late lunch/early dinner there and then go across the street and do my weekly shopping. It's moments like these when I wish I had a car again ...

Yesterday was a fairly undelightful one for me. I am feeling like escaping from my life but the old brain pattern of "keep a job so you have a place to live" and "have to stay in place you live as it's paid for and you can't afford to go anywhere else" keep me doing what I've been doing. I do know I have places I can run away to for a day or two, and that's good - helps me keep from feeling trapped. And work isn't awful, it's just dull.

I didn't go out at all last night but found myself at home trying to read three different books at once - David Sedaris's When You Are Engulfed in Flames, the new Charlaine Harris (An Ice Cold Grave, and Johnathan Strange and Mr. Norrell. (This exciting news is all documented on my Twitter feed, which probably explains why more people don't use Twitter.) Actually, I only managed the first two as the third was ony read on the train and I didn't actually pick it up again once I got home. The problem, see, is that the Charlaine Harris Harper Connelly books are so good I just have to stretch them out. The same is true of David Sedaris. I could probably plow through both of them in two, three hours tops but I don't want to hurry it - I want months and months of Sedaris' essays and a few weeks at least of the Charlaine Harris. In some ways Johnathan Strange is the pefect book to help attenuate my reading experience, as it's, you know, the size of In Search of Lost Time (though much easier to digest so far).

This morning I'm probably up too early, in part because my rather dull evening had me in bed before too late. I'm probably not operating at full speed yet, based on the fact that, as I stood in the bathroom getting ready to dye my hair, I realized I needed to get my water spray bottle (which is also used for discouraging the cat from begging for food too early in the morning), and then walked to the spare bedroom, our bedroom, the hall, and then back in the bathroom, finally realizing it was sitting on the bathroom counter all this time. The dye's on now, though, and while searching for a "safe" shirt to wear I found my very fuzziest sweater, which is 100% artificial (I should say it's made of whipped dinosaur, I suppose) but warm as can be, which is good as it's 39°(F) outside and I am in dire need of clothes that ward of the chill - in part because we're off to apartment shop today. We have three properties we're looking at in Earlsfield and a similar number in Tooting - no idea which will be the winners, and we're only even checking out Earlsfield for the very first time. I don't really want to move out of our neighborhood as we're very content here (and near wechsler, and transport, and grocery stores, and the river), but I can't see how we can stay. And in my next place, I will have a garden, and when you come to visit me in the spring, you will say, "Oh, how lovely."

Which reminds me - I need to, very much, remember to wash the RED DYE out of my hair, lest the estate agents think I was scalped before I left the house. After all, that's what _they_ want to do.

I made it through the training session fairly well today and got some career advice from Lee Copeland ("Go out and speak more!") that I will endeavor to follow. Between that, the conversation with my boss yesterday, and the chat with Wayne Macgregor on Saturday, I've got a lot of things I could write about ...

but I'm still pretty sick and I've been putting what energy I can muster for internet things into writing in my theater blog. For example, I've just finished a review of Alan Ayckbourn's Living Together at the Old Vic. Summary: try finding a real comedy instead of this dated, limp fish. Not that I'm bitter.

shadowdaddy was very nice and made me dinner again tonight - teriyaki steak on salad. He made a special marinade that included Chinese 5 Spice as well as soy sauce and brown sugar. The whole thing seemed to have quite a Hawaiian taste to it. That boy, he may become a chef yet.

As for me ... I am tired and worn out from my day of sitting, and I'm going to be going to sleep pretty early again tonight. I'm glad I didn't have anything tonight I couldn't get out of and also am glad I only have plans for a good night's sleep tomorrow (in preparation for working on Saturday), though I will get to see wechsler as he's coming back from France. I think I might be able to manage a little bit of David Attenborough before I go to bed, though.

(Note: if I make as many spelling errors as I just corrected in this post, please assume I am tired.)

Well, I'm still dizzy, so I skipped the gym thing. It's not much and it doesn't seem to bother me when I'm sitting down, but I wouldn't like it to get worse while I'm on a machine, so I bagged on the gym and sat and ate my little lunch in the kitchen and finished reading "Saratoga Longshot," the very first Charlie Bradshaw mystery (by Stephen Dobyns). It's strange to think I read the first one of these in '87 and I'm only now getting around to this, the first in the series.

By the way, I had this same problem on Saturday. It's very irritating.

So I'm sitting here buying some tickets for Venice ...

and the price goes up by 20 quid

per person

while I'm buying them.

God, airlines are irritating.

So, I get to Putney Bridge station in good time this morning (8:28) ...

and the platforms are already filled with a five minute wait (because there's an giant unexploded WW2 era bomb in East London mucking up the service) ...

and the train comes and, well, so much for that ...

and there is an 8 minute wait and the platform is already full, so I give up and go get a bus ...

and I get to Putney overground station thirty seconds after the train has left so I've got to wait for the 8:52 train ...

and as I'm standing there I realize I don't have the bag I packed with my lunch anymore ...

so I try to call shadowdaddy to ask him if he can look for it (he was at home in anticipation of his 8:50 doctor's appointment) and discover I've left my phone at home ...

so I can't tell my boss I'm going to be late to work ...

but when I did get to Waterloo, guess who caught up with me at the line for the bus because he hadn't been told he needed to fast for his blood test?

And the boiler is broken at work so in addition to not having my nice kettle anymore, even cheesy bags of tea are off the menu ...

but it's payday and I've already been to the gym three times this week so I can go out to lunch.

Any Friday tales of woe you'd like to share?

I enjoyed the Mikado tonight but I was tired enough during dinner (Wahaca, made me do the yummy food dance in my chair quite by accident) to wish a bit that I was just going home, despite the fact that going to see a show was the motivation that got me through the day (not that I'm not having fun and working hard). The walk to the Gielgud pretty much wrecked shadowdaddy and he was feeling a bit miserable for the rest of the night. I can't believe he didn't even have any aspirin lying around he could have taken to soften the edge.

Since I'm going to work tomorrow, I will just hit the hay now. I don't think there's more than about two people who like me writing about theater anyway.

So ... the show I wanted to see today was massively sold out (20 people turned away!), so I'm not sorry I didn't haul myself over to Bermondsey to watch it. But I've made reservations, so I will be seeing Annie Get Your Gun next Thursday. I do hope I continue getting better and that in fact I'm making some real progress on the health front, which my FURTHER reduced weight speaks against (I'm now at 166, which is a bit creepy as I think I'm eating well). But I've stacked my schedule as if I'm a healthy woman, to wit:
Monday: Meeting
Tuesday: Speed the Plow at the Old Vic
Wednesday: mahjong in Greenwich (crap, could have played with interior_lulu while she was over for tacos tonight if I'd only remembered)
Thursday: Annie Get Your Gun (review here)
Friday: The Mikado at the Gielgud
Saturday: Chita Rivera

If I'm not healthy this is not going to be a good week, that's for sure.

Based on having no responses to most of my posts this week, I'm assuming people are bored to listening to me whinge on about my cold. Believe me, I'm sick of having it. I should have some pictures up from the trip later this week and I'm going to post one of the recipes that I made yesterday as it was quite yummy but it's now 10 PM and for the new tired (yet light weight, soon to float away) me it's time to go to bed.

You know, I have now been sick for so long that it is getting me down. I had a coughing fit two nights ago that nearly had me crying from the unrelenting misery of this idiotic illness. Please, please by Sunday let me be really feeling better.

We're having (surprise) a night in. shadowdaddy didn't want to do any walking and I didn't want to have to stay awake past about 9. So we're cooking dinner at home (this is an improvement over our general abilities over the last several weeks, when "doing shopping" and "standing for more than 10 minutes" were really pushing us). Dinner is marinated rack of lamb (from the nice butcher on Theobald's Road) and HACK HACK HACK squash risotto. Afterwards we're going to watch Shaolin Soccer, because going to a movie anywhere further than across the road seemed like too much work and there ain't nuttin' funny showing there right now (Sweeney Todd and No Country for Old Men, I don't think so).

And I feel like an incompetent moron at work, doubtlessly in part because I was so tired today I couldn't think straight, but still, I think I'm a disappointment to my boss.

And J is supposed to go to New York for work and it will have him there over Easter because, well, his brother is there and he'd like to see him, but because he's mostly there for a conference there's no point in my going there and spending, what, four days looking at a hotel room. I hate doing shit by myself.

I need cheering up and sleep and health.