This is going to be one of the hardest posts I’ve ever written because I’m going to write it entirely with my thumbs. I left my laptop charger at my sweetheart’s house this morning and my computer only lasts about 10 minutes on a full charge, so there it is.
There’s this thing that happens to me at the end of my weekends. I have a hard time with the transition, with leaving. It’s not that I want to stay forever, or that I don’t want to go back to Boulder. It’s just hard. I detach myself, try to leave as quickly as possible maybe so I don’t get that feeling like I am in the way or that I/we are bored/boring, you know?
So I drive home and my brain turns into a catastrophe machine. It turns out I am the anxious attachment style. Great.
I guess this means I should 1) refrain from manufacturing of emotional crisis, i.e., an unconfirmed feeling I have versus an actual event, and 2) I’ll need to go back on Wednesday to get my charger so I shouldn’t blow up my relationship.
Does my sweetheart know I do this? Probably. I mean, he is on the receiving end of my anxious episodes and likely sees a pattern. If he read my blog he would likely know me a lot better than he does but my blog is a beast. Where would someone even start?
I’ll tell you what, if anyone I dated blogged I would be subscribed and getting alerts. But that’s just me.
But I’ve been thinking about the fact that I haven’t blogged in a while and I have pictures and memories backing up in an anxiety provoking manner. Caitlin pointed that out to me the other day, so I guess I better get on it.
Of course my mind is a blank.
I have a whole folder of photos on my laptop to embed in a post just for Marcia, I can’t get to it but Lauren sent me this photo from Thanksgiving with Marcia. I’m so glad I went back as many times as I did.
I miss Marcia. I miss picking up the phone and hearing her “hello” on the other line. It was always spoken as a question almost.
Casey and I drove to Junction last weekend to pick up a few things Marcia bequeathed to me. I wanted to wait until everyone was gone, to avoid socializing and talking about Marcia, to have to feel someone else’s grief and hold it up next to mine. My grief feels broken.
But Marcia liked to call it her Wartha Mashington. The bins on either side and were made to hold yarn. It’s now in my tiny house and is quite useful for holding leashes, scarves, and gloves.
Casey and I did the 8 hour drive in one day. We left at 4am to avoid I-70 traffic and I wanted him to get freeway experience without tons of cars and construction. He did great, driving the entire way there and half the way back.
Lauren had already left and I didn’t have it in me to visit with Marcia’s husband. I got the feeling he was overwhelmed with all the guests showing up after she was diagnosed with cancer and it seemed appropriate to give him some solitude.
So we picked up the Martha Washington and then went to Taco John’s. We don’t have one in or near Boulder and they happen to be my favorite fast food taco place. So we ordered too many tacos and some of their tots, which were amazing.
The tacos were strangely soggy but we enjoyed them, messy as they were, and Chief got to eat all the bits that fell out. Then we turned around and drove home. We were back at 2pm on the dot.
I’m still adjusting to the new administration, it’s a feeling of cautious relief and hope. I cried through the entire inauguration. It was like being able to let go a little bit after five years of fear and dread.
I think I was even happier the next day when we were listening to Biden’s press secretary hold her first briefing.
To go from waiting for the next shit sandwich to be served up to thoughtful communication from competent public servants has been quite the joyful shift.
I find it cosmically appropriate that Biden was inaugurated on a palindromic day, palindromes being a favorite thing of mine.
Here’s a compendium of post-Trump memes that have fed my soul.
I’m not foolish enough to believe that our nightmare is over, as January has made abundantly clear. We are still in the teeth of this pandemic and there is a very dangerous culture/movement growing im the country that has guns and isn’t afraid to use them.
So yeah, now isn’t the time to give up on self-care. Here are my attempts:
And of course, funny, inspiring, weird shit on the internet. You can stop reading, this is just me cataloguing shit onto my blog so I can delete it from my phone.
I’ll admit that the last weeks running up to inauguration were hard. I’ve been so good about doing the things one is supposed to do to combat stress, i.e., eating right, exercise, meditating, etc., but it has been hard to motivate. One thing that made me feel really good was watching Lover’s Rock, a short film by Steve McQueen that’s part of his anthology of short films called Little Axe (on Netflix). Watching it brought me tears of joy and loss.
This review from The Guardian summed it up best.
This single night ignites a constellation of sexual sparks in its indoor cosmos, the traditional unspoken eddies of romantic disappointment, same-sex frissons, eruptions of family resentment, violent crises and an extraordinary, building musical euphoria. Lovers Rock is a cine-tab of MDMA, which through continuous immersion gradually, for me, ascended to something like an out-of-body experience. (It really needs to be seen on the big screen.) It’s a case of Saturday Night and Sunday Morning But Mostly Saturday Night.
We particularly enjoyed this livestream.
And there we have it. A whole lotta nothing but at least now I’m kind of up to date. That is until I get my charger and can get pictures off my computer.
As always I love reading your stories and seeing all of your pictures. I understand about not wanting to see/talk to people when you were going to Marcia’s. My sister’s and I had cleaned out mom’s house and were putting stuff outside for free. One of them posted it on the neighborhood app? The name eludes me. I did not like people looking through mom’s things when we were still there, luckily it was getting dark so it did’t last long. But BJ was there the next day and really enjoyed talking to people and sharing stories. Some of the painters wanted to know if we were selling the refrigerator. We told BJ to just give it to them. They were thrilled. I was in the space of knowing I would never go to that house again. I have been visiting mom and dad and staying with them in my childhood house for the last 38 yrs. When my sister’s moved out(they all live no more than 1.5 hr drive) that didn’t stay there more than one night, but for me it is different. Speaking of that…the house is being sold to a lovely young couple. The women is pregnant, she is an architect, and they have a golden retriever puppy. The sister’s are thrilled. Of course I have to see what she ends up doing with the place.