weather adaptable

Man, it's hard to break five years of silence.  The habit of idly contemplating writing something and then going nahhhhh has some roots.

My emotional state was kind of bad this week.  I blame hormones, mostly, plus sleep deprivation.  My body is still adjusting to the pill, perhaps, and I never do well when I'm tired.  Whatever the reason, everything was all splintery in my head the last couple of days, my perspective like a slivered mirror, so that everything looked distorted and horrible, and I kept cutting myself on my thoughts.  So I did what I usually do on Bad Head Days and holed up.  The comfort rituals have changed a little over the years; this week it was sushi and Pride and Prejudice instead of [whatever comfort food I used to eat] and Aliens (although I still love to watch Aliens in any mood because oh my god can I be Sigourney Weaver when I grow up?).  It helped; today was a little better than yesterday, and hopefully tomorrow will be better still.

I guess that's the thing with mood disorders.  You never get rid of them, never "cure" them; you just learn how to live with them, manage them, cope.  Which isn't as defeatist as perhaps it sounds; it's actually kind of empowering.  I've been saddled with these things (depression and, less severely, anxiety); they're part of my genetic heritage and my learned experience, and not "curing" them is not failure, just like not "curing" my nearsightedness is not failure.  It's not curable.  But it's absolutely manageable.  Wonderfully so.  I've had a lot of therapy to learn better tools for relating to myself and to others; I take medication to maintain a more even baseline; and when the bad days come, as come they will, I know how to handle them.  And I know that they'll go away, and everything will get better.  Which leaves me free to be myself, and to accept my experiences.  Hell yes, that's empowering.  I can't control the weather, but I have tools to mitigate the weather's effects: umbrellas, coats, scarves, gloves, boots, etc.  So with my mood disorders.  The nasty days come, and I can't stop them from coming, and it's not my fault that they happen; but I have a good array of implements to buffer me against the worst parts of them.  And mostly those tools are things I do to relax and make myself feel a little better, a little more comfortable.

So the week has felt pretty shitty, but having not had Bad Head Days like this in awhile, getting through them as well as I have averages out to a net positive, in my book.  It's been crap, but I'm still okay.  And that's pretty profoundly wonderful all by itself.

quiet evenings

God, I love not having school for a few weeks.  

I had a fairly stressful day at work.  Nothing catastrophic or irreparable, just snarly and fairly unpleasant.  There were a couple of bright spots: Talking about life for 40 minutes on the phone with a paralegal from another office who is as stressed as I am, while doing other work so I wasn't wrecking my productivity; and receiving the first of a wave of packages from Amazon, the fruits of my annual January baby-it's-cold-outside-so-let's-spend-some-money-on-music-and-sundries spree.  The contents of this first package: The first translation into English of the first edition of the Grimm Fairy Tales (available here, in case that news made any of you, my gentle readers, cream your pants the way I did when I found out about it in November); Quartets, a compilation of albums by jazz tenor saxophonist Charles Lloyd (why is it called Quartets when it contains five albums?); a Diva cup (because saving money + eco-friendly + menstruation = weird + gross, and curiosity is a curse); and a USB computer mouse (because I love love love my new laptop, but the built-in mouse is as moody as a pimply teenager).

I guess another bright spot is realizing the increasing return to a sense of self-groundedness.  The last year has been full of change and upheaval, much of it internal, and all of it unfinished/unresolved and leading up to significant external changes, and like change seems to do, it caught me rather by surprise and threw everything into disarray.  So this, following a nice long almost two-week rest at Christmas (taking all that time off was so smart, so wholesome, so restorative), this easing up of anxiety, this settling into a sense of general security, is enormously welcome.  Might only be the calm in the eye of the storm, but I'll enjoy it all the more consciously for that.

And there just aren't adequate words to express the simple joy of a quiet evening.  I came home from work, reheated leftovers for dinner and ate while watching Archer; bought entirely unnecessary wrist and arm warmers on Amazon (hey, most of them were $5.00/pair, the remainder even less); worked out while watching Cosmos; washed my dishes; got ready for bed; and now I'm sitting in bed listening to Fish Out of Water from Lloyd's mystifyingly-named Quartets (god, this music is beautiful) and sipping tea while Simon reposes next to me with an expression of contentment that only a cat can wear, an expression that eases all the troubles in my mind just to look at it.  (Yes, Simon is still around and going strong!  I love this cat.  Hard to believe he's 13 this year.  He still runs around apartment like a kitten.)  It's been...it's heartsease, having evenings like this.

Trying not to stay up too late, though; today went well despite its level of stress precisely because I got more sleep last night.

So, not the best of days; but a balm of an evening.  These are the times when I know how much I love my life.

routine

Wanting to tap out a quick post before I hit the hay.  January isn't quite off to the ball-busting, get-up-at-five-work-out-and-journal return to spartan discipline that I had fantasized about, but we're going to try this getting up earlier thing tomorrow.  Which means going to be earlier tonight.  Because I'm just not 21 anymore, and I can't function energetically on short sleep.

It is lovely to return to quieter, simpler routine though.  This past weekend I washed all my dishes and put away all my laundry, and so far I'm successfully doing my dishes and keeping my clothes picked up on a daily basis.  It feels...rhythmic.  Grounding.  I'm remembering all over again how much easier it is to manage my depression when I don't feel like I'm helplessly living in a troll hole.  I think the strategy (daily tidiness to manage depression) comes from bifold roots:  1.)  Messiness is depressing all by itself.  2.)  A huge part of depression is not being able to do anything, is powerlessness, is the lack of energy to deal with the tasks at hand.  The more your surroundings fall into decay, the worse you feel, because the task becomes monumentally harder, because there's more to do to clean it up.  And you also feel worse because you should be doing better than this, you should be keeping your shit together, and so the self-loathing and self-blame creep in too.  But if there's enough time to get some rest and reset the clock by cleaning everything up, it's a lot easier to maintain the tidy system by little daily tasks.  

I don't know how well I'll be able to maintain this when school starts back up.  And I don't have a lot of weekends to myself these days (though only for a few more months), and the system is rather weekend-dependent.  I'm hopeful though.  Determined, but without that get-it-together-you-useless-piece-of-shit self-hating that just makes everything worse.  If I can't maintain the little daily system, then I can't.  But I'm going to try, because I feel so much more relaxed and happy when my living space is clean and airy.

Tonight in an effort to combat the transubstantiation of my elbows into dragon scales I cut a knee sock into a pair of elbow sleeves to wear over slathers of petroleum jelly.  We'll see if that has any effect.  (I love petroleum jelly, so new uses for it delight me.)

lazy saturday

As always, I started out this day with grand ambitions -- laundry, housecleaning, sealing the sunroom windows in plastic, paperwork for school -- and so far I have:

- become conscious
- made coffee
- journaled
- watched videos on the Internet
- found more checks so I can pay rent (but haven't written the rent check)
- made tea

So productive.  No wonder my housework never gets done.

Right now my tea is steeping, wrapped in a thick yellow kitchen towel, in the big brown English teapot I found for two dollars at the Salvation Army several years ago.  I absolutely love this teapot.  It has several features that previous teapots of mine have lacked: a small metal tip on the spout that apparently serves to keep it from spilling when poured, a stamp on the bottom that says "made in England," and a built-in internal strainer in front of the spout that means that I can use looseleaf tea and not need a strainer over the cup.  Delightful.

I may need to knit a tea cozy one of these winters.  Right now the kitchen towel suffices, and I am not allowing myself to knit anything until I finish knitting the infernal blanket I've been making for my sister for the last four years.  I designed it myself, and it's going to be beautiful (lots of smoky purples and blues broken up by pewter eyelash yarn: I was going for "ocean" or "sky" but Chris said, when I first pulled it out at his place a month or two ago, "That looks like a Muppet skin!"  I hate that he's right), but I should have thought a little harder before using sock yarn and size 7 needles.  It's taking forever and I'm so sick of the project I'm tempted to do what my petite grandmother always did and stop with a lap blanket.  But no.  I will soldier on.  Fucking blanket.

Also I'm running out of looseleaf black tea, so the time has almost come for me to return to the seedy Russian grocery store and see if they restocked on Assam.  They have great deals on imported tea, and you can get a pound or so for thirteen or fourteen dollars, whereas at Wegmans you'd have to sell your car and half your soul for the same quantity.

Hard to believe it's only Saturday.  I awoke from dreams of exploring Incan ruins and geeking out over thoughts of long-dead human beings having once lived what they must have considered mundane lives in those very spaces to the sinking conviction that it was a.) Sunday and b.) noon and I had wasted the remainder of my vacation.  So to check my phone and learn that it's still only Saturday was like a little gift from my subconscious.  Which is good because I've done nothing worthwhile with my time today.  (But it's vacation!)

It doesn't help that it's a dreary, rainy, foggy day.  I hate this weather in winter.  It should be blizzarding out.  Something about that always motivates me to nest.  This shit?  This shit just makes me want to go right back to bed.

Man, it feels nice to be back on this blog.  Like coming home.  Funny to think that you can click back for glimpses of me ten years ago now.  So much has happened.  So much has changed.  I'm still not quite sure how to go about documenting all of that, so for the time being I'm electing to relax into enjoying the sheer act of writing again, and rambling on about my own mundane life.  The other things will come up when it's time.  No point in forcing it; that's part, I think, of what has kept me from writing for so long, the sense of obligation to discuss my various transformations into the person I am now.  (Some things haven't changed.  I'm still mulish about obligation.)

Well, if I'm not going to do anything else today, I might as well at least get the sunroom windows sealed in plastic.  My heating bill and my bank account will thank me.  At least this year I don't have to go around caulking the edges of all the windows, since last year's labor has held up so well; it really shouldn't take too long.  It's just the jungle of pothos tendrils that will hamper the whole procedure.  (Over the last few months of busyness and generalized anxiety -- god, I'm terrified of dating -- I've let them kind of go, so now I have to prune back the vines that are full of dead leaves.  Sigh.  Poor plants.)

All right.  Once more to the breach.  Must save on gas.

uphill (yes, to the very end)

This article just cropped up on my Facebook feed: "A Guide to Saving Money for People Who Love Spending Money." Oo goody, I thought, clicking, I've got a decent handle on my spending, but maybe I can glean a few more tips!

Narp.

Actually what I took away from the article was, Who lives like this?  For real, who needs a tip to reduce their number of manicures to a few a month?  Or to stop buying bottled sparkling water and spend $80 on a machine that will do it for you?  Or to buy groceries at a grocery store instead of a convenience store?

I hope this article is targeting college students.  I hope it's not relevant to 35-year-olds.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not claiming any miserly brilliance.  For the last fifteen years I've lived under the eye-bulging weight of credit card debt and underemployment in a terrible economy.  I know the demoralizing dread of those horrible window envelopes and the panic triggered by strange area codes on the caller ID that always mean calls from creditors.  I am no stranger to the phrase INSUFFICIENT FUNDS followed by a $35 bank fee, and I have known, intimately, the sleepless 3 a.m.s frantically calculating mental math tallies that add up to "you can't eat tomorrow."  I've paid bills with credit cards because I only had enough money in the bank to cover the minimum payment on the credit card.  I know the helpless shame that comes from living at the mercy of debt.

A good part of my troubles stemmed from the fact that no one ever taught me how to manage money.  All I really knew was "saving is good," but I never had enough to save, so everything else was more or less fair game.  The rest of the trouble is my personality.  I'm a creature of comfort, a creature of impulse.  My sister and I call me an "Epicurean hedonist."  (We haven't come up with anything for her.  Spartan ascetic?  When we were kids, I was always the one who spent my allowance the second it came into my hands on candy and toy horses, while she hoarded hers in a coffee can under her bed.  I used to borrow money from her.  We always joked that when we grew up, I'd be the starving artist scratching my stories onto the floorboards of some unheated attic in charcoal while she sent me care packages.  It never came to that, but she's definitely the only reason I have a 401-k).  Between those two characteristics -- ignorance and lack of discipline -- I had gouged myself pretty badly by the time I turned twenty-seven.

I started getting my shit together six-ish years ago when I had to close out a credit card account to bring down my minimum payments to something I could afford.  That was the moment I realized that my system was unsustainable and needed to change.  Shortly thereafter, once I returned to intensive therapy to deal with my family dynamics and my crippling depression and learned that change was entirely within my power, I realized that I could do something to make my personal economics different.

Boy was that an uphill climb.  And very, very slow.  I was living with my parents and making $10 an hour at a part-time job; slowly was the only way I could make any changes at all.  I started by making all of my bill payments on time.  I went back to school, both for a career change (which I'm still working on) and to help with living expenses.  I chipped away at my credit card debt.  Eventually I got a better job and could afford to live on my own again, but between the credit card payments and my still-undisciplined spending, I was just barely scraping by.

About a year ago I decided I'd had enough with uncontrolled poverty, so one weekend I sat down with a notebook and a calculator and worked out how to become (credit card) debt free in a year.  (There are still the student loans, ohmyfuckinggod there will always be the student loans.)  I crafted a ruthlessly stingy budget, and mostly stuck to it.  I carved out room in my budget to start saving, and rearranged my shopping habits -- grocery shopping once a week at Aldi, with a monthly trip to Wal-Mart for the other adds-up-to-way-too-much-money stupid necessities like tampons and hair care products and deodorant and cat litter.  I generated a budget for each pay period, with groceries and gas and the monthly bills that fell due during that time.  I kept that budget in a little notebook that I carried with me everywhere, and consulted it regularly to check off the bills I'd paid and track my bank balances, my spending, and how they measured against my budget.  I shopped around for better car-and-renter's-insurance plans, and used my income tax return to pay for the entire year's insurance premium all at once, to free up my monthly spending.  I set money aside for car inspection, registration and repairs.  I saved for modest vacations.  I stopped eating out.

In short, I buckled the hell down.

And it worked.  A year later, I have reached my basic goals.  I'm still poor, but I'm no longer strapped.  I have hauled myself out of the well.

(I remember, when I first decided to make this happen a year ago, excitedly telling my then-best-friend my new financial plan.  Her response was wistful, envious and a little dour.  I think she would have been flat-out unsupportive, but the previous year when I decided to lose forty pounds and get in better shape and she scoffed at me for it, I bought an exercise machine, downloaded the MyFitnessPal app, revolutionized my exercise and eating habits, lost all the weight, and then kept it off, so she knew that I would be able to achieve this next goal.

Actually, in retrospect, I think that moment, as we sat across from each other at our favorite breakfast cafe and I enthusiastically showed her my new tactics for getting a handle on my money, was another crack in the foundation of our friendship.  It's been seven months since we parted ways, but by the time the parting happened, I think it had been coming for awhile.  I know that memory is a faulty thing, and it's a human tendency to craft narratives in hindsight to make sense of our experiences, so I don't hold my own perspective as hard-line data; but still it seems to me that she had trouble with each leap forward that I made in my personal growth.  It's a loss I'm still processing, since it's not a loss I chose, and I imagine my musings on it will crop up here occasionally.)

And I can with absolute confidence say that is it amazing not to live in fear of INSUFFICIENT FUNDS, and to assume that a strange area code is just a wrong number.  I put in a lot of hard work, and the rewards are deeply satisfying, empowering and confidence-building.  I love that I can read articles with money-saving tips and realize that I internalized them a long time ago.  I know I'm tooting my own horn here, and to those who are reading this who found insight in the above-linked article that I'm heaping with scorn, I'm sorry.  I guess I grew up knowing that convenience stores are money pits and that getting Starbucks is a black hole in your bank account (huh! I guess I learned a few things about frugality from my upbringing after all; we didn't have any money growing up, so my mother shopped very very thriftily), but if you didn't know that, holy shit yes, it's true.  Start shopping at Aldi and stop buying Starbucks.  Also pack your lunch.  (I basically don't eat during the day, so packing my lunch is as easy as keeping a bag of almonds at work.)  You can totally do it.  And once you've done it, you'll feel awesome about having figured your shit out for yourself.  And then you can turn into an asshole braggadocio like me.

God I love being in my thirties.

hello, january

Well, I didn't put on any holiday weight until the last three days.  But I sure made up for lost time.

I feel a profound sense of relief to have arrived at the asceticism of January.  I don't go back to work until Monday, so the next few days still technically fall under "vacation," but they also count as post-holiday, and I eagerly anticipate the post-holiday slimdown - getting up early once again to work out in the mornings (because I didn't get my Christmas tree until the weekend before Christmas, I'm leaving it up a little longer so I can work out by its warm twinkly lights, which somehow make being awake in the dark of a winter morning a comforting experience); eating very little during the day and savoring a big homey dinner (I've been thinking longingly of broiled salmon fillets and potatoes in my delicious all-the-spices marinade); drinking alcohol only on the weekends; and generally sitting around the house wrapped in afghans and reverting to winter hermitude.  It's not just a goal to take off the holiday weight; it's an eagerness to return to the life of sparser eating and regular exercise that I've cultivated over the last couple of years.  I let my fitness routine lapse over the last month because I've been busy, exhausted and completely unmotivated, and also because I think that it's perfectly healthy to let things slide into revelry periodically; and I had a wonderful holiday season, and now I'm excited for life to return to normalcy.

I do love the holidays.  This year's were fun.  Chris came home for a whole week, and we divided the time pretty equally among his family, my family, and just the two of us.  I took the entire time off work from Christmas Eve through January 4th, and got to spend a lot of time relaxing on my own, and enjoying time with Chris.  Maintaining a relationship over distance constitutes a lot of work, obviously, and having him in the same city was a wonderful treat.

So now I have three whole days all to myself before heading back to work, and so far I have spent it paying bills and looking for iPhones on eBay.  The bill paying is going rather well, all things told.  It's nice to have put so much effort into getting my shit together over the last year.  I'm still poor but not quite as desperate.  There's a lovely security to that.

I also have one more semester to go before acquiring my master's degree in education, and a few things to get done before the semester starts.  Apparently taking a two-year hiatus means you have to renew all your PA clearances: fun.  I'll have to dig out my printer and get it connected to the wi-fi, and take a day next week to do some running around.  Also time to put together my portfolio so I can start looking for teaching jobs.

But meantime it's a gorgeous cold and snowy afternoon, there is tea to be made, a kitty to cuddle, and a house to potter about cleaning.  An excellent Friday all in all.