Mental Illness

Busier than a one-armed paper-hanger on a unicycle in a hurricane. (And no FEMA in sight.)

/ wvfurandroot / 1 Comment

I don’t think I’ve ever been as busy as I am now.  And Lord knows, I’ve led a busy life.  But if something doesn’t give soon, I’m going to collapse in a quivering heap of twitchy woman.

I’d list it all, but it’s too depressing.  But no matter what it is I’m doing at any given time, somebody wants me doing something else.  If everything is urgent, then nothing is.  Ya know?

Word!

I’m too tired to lean over and drink the glass of wine I poured 3 hours ago.  Ain’t that sad?

It was recently suggested that I needed a hobby to help reduce stress in my life.  So, I’ve taken up “artisan bread” baking.  (Doesn’t that just sound pretentious?)  I was having fun (and gaining weight) with the breadmaking, but I’ve been too busy to do any baking for more than a week.  There’s something very satisfying about kneading bread when you start out preferring primal scream therapy.

But a friend sent me a 14-year-old South African sourdough starter (and a bodacious copper tea kettle!) and I’ve been busy (ahem) cultivating starter for my first attempt at sourdough bread.

This bread thing is addictive.  First of all, I’ve always had a thing for for kitchen toys and I’ve now acquired a baking stone, a lame` thingie, dough scraper/cutter thingie, thermometer, bowls, breadboard,bowl scraper etc. etc.  (This “artisan” thing requires accoutrements.)

I’ve also always had a thing for cookbooks.  Boy howdy, y’all probably don’t know how many bread books there are out there.  It’s probably a good thing Borders closed.

So.  There you have it.  Me.  Whining again.

(I think I’ll be drinking that wine now.)

Locking Great Aunt Bertha in the Attic

/ wvfurandroot / 6 Comments

I’ve noticed the more extreme the situation, the more apt I am to use clichés.

All I can say is it is hotter’n’hell and there’s a reason Great Aunt Bertha went insane and had to be locked in the attic.

I am near tears with the misery of this heat and the indignities of menopause.

The lack of air conditioning in my life means I’m focusing on one minute at a time – what I can do to get through the next 60 seconds.

When I left the house this morning, it was 80 degrees at 8:45 a.m. It was 94 when I left work. Besides hot, the area around me is water logged and continues to be under threat of violent thunderstorms. These storms rundle through with great crashes of thunder and lightening. The temperature drops 10 to 15 degrees and then ratchets right back up, more humid than ever. The weather people mutter about stalled fronts and whatnot.

Gills would come in handy about now. I don’t know the biomechanics of such, but I’m certain the body’s processing of a cup of water or so to every breath must entail some wear and tear on the lungs. More than likely, it increases body temperature.

It is only June. This sort of meteorological nightmare shouldn’t emerge until late July or August. If I try to imagine a whole summer of this, I may start screaming and never stop. 60 seconds of life at a time in this heat is all I can manage.

According to all manner of happiness experts, one moment at a time is the best way to live life under any circumstance. I am whining one moment at a time. This is probably not what they meant.

Periodically, I stop to cogitate on how for most of history folks lived without air conditioning and how for a good couple hundred years they did so while wearing a lot of clothes. I keep telling myself I should be thankful that I can strip down to bare skin while refreshing the Weather Channel website in hopes that an updated forecast promising unseasonably cool temperatures will appear.

When my grandmother went through menopause, air conditioning was unheard of and she was forced by societal norms to wear a heap of clothes – bras and girdles and hosiery and slips and gloves and all manner of layers of fabric. In the era before hers, long sleeves and long skirts were de rigueur.

Novels and stories abound about women locked in attics because they went insane and their people had to do something with them. While I don’t know for certain that menopausal women wearing a lot of clothes went crazy and had to be locked in the attic lest they run through town naked and raving was ever a norm, the idea doesn’t seem too far fetched. I do wonder where they got the energy to run.

The big white floor fan and the ceiling fans are the only reason I haven’t been locked in an attic. Well, that and the fact that I don’t have an attic and there’s nobody here to witness my madness.

Thunder has moved into the neighborhood while I wrote this. The temperature inside the house has decreased by a degree or so. I can feel the air freshening. Perhaps, I won’t wake in a pool of sweat later in the night and, even better, maybe I’ll sleep through the night. Maybe, just maybe, this will be the storm that drives the stalled front out of here.

For the next 60 seconds, I will hope and focus on the maybes.

Perfect Person

/ wvfurandroot / 13 Comments

I’ve decided to become a perfect person. Maybe that should be A Perfect Person. Maybe it should be The Perfect Person. It’s hard to tell with such things. I think I’ll go with Perfect Person.

I came to this decision the other day.

Years ago, there was this cartoon thing that a lot of folks had hanging in their office. I don’t remember the exact wording but it was something to the effect of “One Aw Shit cancels out 1000 Ata Boys.”

With that in mind, I’ve experienced a lot of Aw Shits lately, both uttered at me and by me. I figure my stock of Ata Boys (Ata Girls?) is at an all time low and it’s time to restock like Macy’s preparing for Black Friday.

I find, however, that enumerating the characteristics of Perfect Person is not easy. Are the characteristics internally or externally defined – which is to say, does the generic You or the specific I mediate what is perfect?  (And is there a generic You?)

So, here I am stymied at the very beginning.

If I go with the generic You, I’m setting myself up for judgment by every You in the world. Or at least that intersection of the world I come into contact with. While it might be interesting (and painful) to learn what all the Yous in my life think I need to do to become perfect, I’m pretty sure one You will want this and another You will want that when the relevant this is diametrically opposed to the relevant that. I suppose I could develop multiple personalities to cope with that peccadillo, but it seems to me that acquiring, deliberately, a DSM IV diagnosis is not a Perfect Person strategy.  [I believe this paragraph reveals that there really isn’t a generic You, but a collection of brand name Yous.  At least to my way of thinking which may or may not be correct.]

Hmmm.

If I go with the specific I, the very first drawback that springs to mind is I’m high diving into the bottomless pool of the Cult of Individuality. The second drawback is that I have to decide what constitutes a Perfect Person (and we know how bad I am at decisions).

Now the deep pool of the Cult of Individuality is nice to splash around in when overheated by life in the new millennium, but, really, one can only swim and tread water for so long – unless, of course, Perfect Person entails the ability to infinitely maintain an aquatic (so to speak) lifestyle. Let’s not go there. It makes my head hurt. [Hmmm, is perfection painful?]

Let’s go here instead. The Cult of Individuality has fueled the Post Modern experience which was a nice change from what went before, but, really, hasn’t it all gotten just a little dated? And silly? Besides, anyone (including me) who thinks the I is completely divorced from the You enough to define Perfect Person is delusional. [Ah, here we are back at the DSMIV again.] While I’ve yet to read an intellectually or emotionally satisfying definition of postmodernism it is, for the most part, agreed that analysis of experience is socially mediated through context. In other words, the I and the You spend an awful lot of time line dancing together.

As I’ve said here and in other places, I’m not good at decisions. Here I sit having made a decision without any idea as to how to implement it.

But since the Health Department, most of my peers, and myself are of the opinion that a clean and orderly home are a Good Thing, I think I’ll get off my derrière and restore some order and cleanliness. After which, perhaps, I’ll be able to begin teasing out a definition of Perfect Person.

In Need of Iron and Fizz

/ wvfurandroot / 3 Comments

Really, all appearances to the contrary...I'm not...

Really, honest, I don’t try to be a Drama Queen. It just happens.

A friend just posted an appropriate passage from Tom Robbins’s novel Jitterbug Perfume. A young Indian woman, Kudra, has developed a passion for scents (and the mixing thereof) only to find herself arranged to marry a rope maker. Robbins writes the following which resonates loudly with me:

Rope. The Gods have a great sense of humor, don’t they? If you lack the iron and the fizz to take control of your own life, if you insist on leaving your fate to the gods, then the gods will repay your weakness by having a grin or two at your expense. Should you fail to pilot you own ship, don’t be surprised at what inappropriate port you find yourself docked. The dull and prosaic will be granted adventures that will dice their central nervous systems like an onion, romantic dreamers will end up in the rope yard. You may protest that it is too much to ask of an uneducated fifteen-year-old girl that she defy her family, her society, her weighty cultural and religious heritage in order to pursue a dream that she doesn’t really understand. Of course it is asking too much. The price of self-destiny is never cheap, and in certain situations it is unthinkable. But to achieve the marvelous, it is precisely the unthinkable that must be thought.

Clearly, I’m not piloting my ship correctly.

While I don’t think I’m “dull and prosaic”, my adventures have been such that my central nervous system feels minced and not just chopped. Perhaps if my adventures had meaning.

I wrote a blog post yesterday morning while waiting on the electrician. He’d rigged things so I had heat throughout the house, but only power in the kitchen – no internet, phone, hot water, or whirlpool baths. I’ll upload that post tomorrow, maybe.  [There’s newly developed laptop drama.] In it, I lamented having as my goal wanting to be bored. Finally, I was well and truly bored. I’d been stuck in my house, more or less, for a week without power and/or heat.

When did we have to start paying Knights in Shining Armor?

This morning, while waiting on the electrician to come and finish the replacement of my circuit box, I tripped over the cat in the dark and spilled my cup of coffee on the laptop. Guess what won’t work? My entire life is in that thing. Oh, sure, I can get the stuff off the hard drive by taking it to a shop, but if trying to dry it out doesn’t work, I’m going to be living without a laptop. I’ve really gotten attached to that thing.

I read somewhere that in such instances one should immediately remove the battery, dry everything off with a towel as much as possible, turn upside down and wait 24 to 48 hours. This is what I’m doing. I also chant, “please oh please oh please oh please” a lot. We’ll see.

I arrived home to power, heat, a working dishwasher, and a closet bi-fold door that will now shut. I was rather disgruntled at not to be able to curl up on the sofa with the laptop and proclaim my joy to the world. More importantly, I’ve got a boatload of photos and emails that I HAVE TO HAVE. I have a week’s worth of work on there. This laptop thing is a disaster. I’m not even done with one disaster. . . And so I lament the drama of my life.

Wall O'Art

Fortunately, my blue room makes me smile and I used the traditional laptop time to hang the “art” that just arrived in the mail. Yes, Virginia, you can buy prints of fine art for $4.99. The hanging went reasonably well. I bought these new-fangled hanger thingies that made it a breeze. No more wall anchors for this chickie.

For a better balance of color, I had to move things around on the top of the desk. The arrangement still needs work. The Moss West Virginia poster needs to relocate to another room, the one Georgia O’Keefe needs to move to the to-be vacated-wall and another Georgia (Morning Glories, perhaps) needs to be procured to complete that section of the room.

This Matisse *really* knocks me out - Decorative Figure. . .

Over the desk is now the perfect spot for Matisse’s Decorative Figure on an Ornamental Ground – one of his odalisques. I’ve been looking for this thing FOREVER and finally found the print at a reasonable price – next paycheck maybe.

 I have a thing for Matisse –he just knocks me out. I like Georgia, but she’s no Matisse. The two of them together are a yin/yang that please me. Tom Robbins also rocks my world and one of his novels features Matisse’s Blue Nude – I love how the circles of my affections intersect.

[Oh yes, I can hear you art snobs rolling your eyes. Yes, I chose prints to go with the room. But please remember the room was painted the color it is to go with the objets d’art that were already in the room. And besides, I bought prints that I had always liked – I didn’t just go shopping for blues. So there. As for my pedestrian taste – sue me.]

The print I haven't found yet.

So, yes, back to Tom Robbins – I’m lamenting the meaning of all this chaos. The big stuff I can handle – bone marrow transplants, etc. – it’s all this little crap that’s getting to me. I well and truly feel as if I’m being nibbled to death by ducks – the mundane is going to do me in if I don’t find the oars of my metaphorical boat and start rowing in a different direction. Ah. . .but what direction might that be?

Hell if I know. 

I do know I need fizz that doesn’t fizzle and iron that doesn’t rust.  And adventures that are  little less prosaic (and expensive).