I have completed another section of “the difficulties”. I find Jericho Beach a most inspiring locale – I may go down there for a day sometime and just sit around and write.
I am adjusting rather better to the shift in workload and priorities. The customers are being kind as I learn, and my predecessor (he went to a different department) kinder yet. The new hire accepted and agreed to start July 30th o frabjous day.
I will be heading out for a family dinner with Mike M tonight after I go talk to Paul.
I reread Lilith’s Brood, the Oankali stories by Octavia Butler.
I’m taking a little break from Patrick O’Brian.
My back hurts constantly these days, and my foot is very numb. Walking helps, as does sitting on the posture ball at work. I’m having a lot of trouble finding a comfortable sleeping position.
I have been sad for the last couple of days, not so much this morning, thanks to KatieK, a friend of mine whom I invited over for dinner and an earflapping last night. Those of you familiar with my family’s folkways will know that this is a chat, live and in person, usually unattended by males (or they flee, brows furrowed, into quieter and darker corners, while the womenfolk screech and flap and gabble.) Anyway, she’s been through what I was through, but worse and darker and different, of course, but she doesn’t waste more than a breath on self-pity before she gets up again and starts assessing her life for the possibilities of happiness. She’s berloody amazing and I intend to see more of her.
I just wrote two paragraphs about my emotional state, and they were so self-pitying and morose that I’ve done my readers a favour and deleted them. Someday I’ll look back on this time in my life, shake my head and laugh. But that time is not now, and it’s not a good time to be writing about it. Had I the pen of Elizabeth Smart, perhaps, perhaps.
And then, of course, the phone rings, and it’s Keith announcing that he’s picked me up the latest Harry Potter book, and despite the rain and fog, the sun has come out again.
I think I’ll call my mother.
The first year after divorce is a period of growth with all the ups and downs that go along with it. There will definately be a time you will be thankful you got through it and made it to the other side. For now, it’s one foot in front of the other WITH good days/moments in between because you have wonderful friends and family and you are actively building YOUR new life. My thoughts are with you.
Earflappings, you did not say it but this is a criterion for a good one, require the conversation to get FAR beyond the superficial, and deeply into the mental landscape. Consider the matriarch of the elephant tribe, communing with her sisters and daughters. Ears flapping, she is NOT talking about what’s on sale at Safeway, or the elephantine equivalent. The subject of conversation among those large ladies is – life, the universe and everything.
Or 42
My ears are flapping all the way over here!
The Xenogenesis books are so delicious. I love Octavia Butler’s way of saying “Life and human nature are incredibly more grim and depressing than you ever imagined, you gibbering febrile Pollyanna – but buck up, there’s still a pathetic little crumb of hope.”
That’s why my mOm will never read them. Her Pollyanna vibe is intact.
While I must necessarily cop to an intact Pollyanna vibe, I DID read Butler’s Parable of the Sower, and found more than a pathetic little crumb of hope. Octavia won a big prize for that novel, and then up and died.