Or is it Wednesday? No, it’s Tuesday. It’s so hard to remember the days of the week after the week starts over again. Worse, though, is I keep thinking it’s September or October. Nothing about this feels normal. Doesn’t feel like any January I’ve had in the past 30 years. I don’t think January even exists in my subconscious. It’s like the peak of the circle of the year, but also the top of the roller coaster, and things don’t start moving again until about March every year. Then there are things that can be accomplished. This year I’ve planned a garden, and have stores of wood for the fireplace or for grilling if anybody wants that. The fact that food will be available makes me feel better, even if everybody around me thinks it’s unnecessary. But now that I’ve moved to the Polar North, I have no clue yet when the frost season really will be over.
I have many activities to do, aside from the normal duties of living. I have several art projects going on: the new Chinese painting, acrylic and watercolor, using Chinese inks, oil pastels and a variety of collage ideas. But storage is becoming a problem, so therein lies the dilemma: do I wait until the gallery is ready for more, or keep producing at the rate I was before Christmas? If I’m not producing, what am I doing? Reading, while I am still mobile? There may be years ahead in which I can’t do anything except read. So I feel obligated to “do” – which was something I could never explain fully to my husband.
My husband, who is no longer my husband, has moved on to greener pastures, tired of the domestic humdrum of commitment. I miss my home; I miss our life, the life that was not enough for him. I worked hard to create that environment, and I miss it sorely. But I was so wrong to assume it was forever.
I missed my far away granddaughters too, and now I have the opportunity to watch them grow up and learn and be funny. I hope that before I become too old to supervise them, they’ll be old enough to supervise me. Say, four more years? Please?
Last night I took a break from reading, after I finished a John Grisham, and went downstairs for a drink of water. As I reached the top of the stairs in the dark, (hoping desperately there were no sharp toys or plastic high-heel shoes or groups of zhu-zhu pets in my path) I paused for a moment to reflect on whether or not I can live this life of semi-boredom for another twenty years. There’s no one to talk to, who is not either racing out the door someplace, or being paid to listen to me; I have tired of msnbc for now, so once I have decided not to paint for the evening, I retire to my tiny room to read myself to sleep.
Therefore, there has been a lot of time for insight, and examining the reasons for my view of things. I see my childhood dramatized before my eyes, with my daughter and her husband playing the parent role. In my dreams my daughter/mother becomes more easily understood as a unique “other” with her own insecurities and demons.
I painted an acrylic which I have entitled “A Child’s Nightmare”, but it’s still not quite right. Although, I must say, that having painted it I feel released somehow from a lot of the inner conflict that often haunts me.
"A Child's Nightmare"
I see in my youngest granddaughter a mini-me, but with parents who don’t spank, and wonder how she will turn out in her own search for expression and meaning. It is impossible not to love her because I can identify, I can read her mind most of the time. She requires lots of touching, lots of cuddling, even more than is possible sometimes, but she is beautiful and loved and she knows it. She tests and tests, to make sure we still love her. And she is not punished for that.
The women in my family tend to live a very long time. I try not to think of the horror of that. My mother took up sewing until she tired of it. Then she got hurt and spent the last twelve years in a walker or wheelchair. (All the more reason for me to wonder what is on the dark stairs.) I clearly don’t want that, or to not be able to get to my studio a few steps from the back door.
I live with people to whom old age is just a remote possibility, just as it was to me when I was in my 40s. They are too busy with their daily demands to worry about any future issues. That’s how we live. In our teens we assume we will have a successful life, unprepared for obstacles or setbacks to our plans. We change our plans two or three times in our twenties, then in our thirties chase children around until one day we look up and our life is half over. When it’s time to retire, then what do we do? It doesn’t seem right to sit in a rocking chair and knit. Daytime TV is out of the question for me, but seems to satisfy many people.
Without support or guidance (because everybody we know is in one of those other stages) we are left to figure the best and most meaningful way to spend the years remaining. Thanks to the Internet, there are hundreds of websites set up to take up our time, offer advice, invite us to join this or that group, all time-wasting arm’s-length endeavors. In the midst of all that, there are people lying in wait to take advantage of our vulnerabilities. After going through some of those experiences, we are back to square one – not an invalid by any means, but not quite able to keep up with the young ones.
Probably my biggest handicap in social interaction was my formative years, when I learned to stifle emotion and to avoid painful interaction by schooling myself to shut down feelings. It’s harder to do that now in a crowd of people, so I retreat. I can keep up with one-on-one conversations fairly easily, but don’t operate on many levels at one time. For instance, it’s harder to walk and chew gum, to borrow a phrase. So I am alone, and much of the time it’s what I prefer.
Even when I am alone I have to constantly monitor myself – what time is it, is there something I’m supposed to be doing, what have I forgotten, how can I organize things better, is it time to eat, are we out of anything, what time is it, do I need a nap now because I’ll have the girls to watch tonight, no, that’s tomorrow – a constant vigil of my obligations and remembering a few things to plan for or worry about. Ah, to have a personal assistant; an appointment secretary and a “keeper” of some sort so I could use the brain cells still functioning for something that meets my definition of meaningful.
The high point of 2010 was my trip to Washington, DC for Jon Stewart’s Rally. Maybe I’ll take myself one more time to the John C. Campbell Folk Art School. I loved North Carolina, second only to Washington, DC. (But does it make sense to spend that money if I may need it in this unpredictable frigging 20 more years I have to live? Yes, probably, since that’s just a drop in the bucket compared to the massive needs ahead if I do live that long.) That occupies only a week. There is even a probability that I could come back refreshed and inspired to carry me through a month or so, with new knowledge and more spirit. Nobody is interfering with my work, or my choices to spend my time this way. (That’s the good part of being alone.)
Or I could write another book. But why? Who wants to read it? Too many books out there already. The writing is the fun part, and becomes eventually difficult enough to do that it creates its own stress and self-imposed deadlines. That’s always a fallback project.
Politics no longer interests me, perhaps because I finally see the futility of the system, and it is painfully obvious the gears are stuck in one position and what we hear day-to-day is just the surface entertainment. Facing the truth of what is happening in reality is just too painful and frustrating. History only repeats, ad nauseam.
Most of the time I feel as though I am just taking up space for no reason. When I examine what I consider as my own worth at this point, I see the first thing that comes up is (1) available babysitter. That’s definitely a need around here. The second thing is (2) another source of love and support to my grandchildren. Perhaps that’s enough.
However, when I peer into the possibly long future ahead, I feel guilty for not being some sort of mover and shaker like Jimmy Carter or Helen Thomas. Oh, but they have secretaries.
This is Tuesday.
Twitter Rediscovered
Never before did I really understand the value of Twitter. Since the departure from MSNBC of Keith Olbermann, and as I began following his Twitter feed the night of the State of the Union Speech (referred to as #SOTU on Twitter) I saw the merits of the application.
One of the Tweets Keith follows is called “Breaking News” which is the consolidation of every news source in the world, and I began following that also. I discovered that the mainstream media probably does the same thing, then constructs all kinds of fluff around it, as they decide which story to cover. It’s so simple, don’t know why this never occurred to me before.
Since that time I have been on top of what’s happening in Egypt, and with the additional release of cables re: Egypt from Wikileaks, the entire picture unfolds. Most of the information can be followed live on the English version of Al Jazeera, but the Tweets are more on-the-ground individual comments from a reporter for Democracy Now, to the individual voices of protestors. Also quite interesting is the view from other citizens around the world from all the countries, and to see the support voiced for the protestors of the current Egyption government.
The consensus is that the country of Egypt has never been seen like this before; it is a situation that is making any other Arab dictator quite nervous, perhaps spreading into the neighboring countries of Syria, Palestinian territories, Yemen, and then – omg – Iran? The Saudis are nervous, and it’s amazing to watch and wonder what will happen. There are protests at every Egyption embassy in the world, including New York and Washington.
I am overwhelmed at the amount of information the social networks can provide — not just repeating what the Huffington Post tells us, or the mainstream media; now we can get information from right there on the ground, in spite of curfews, in spite of attempts at Internet shutdowns.
Amazing time to be alive.