pit

You know how sometimes you come home from work + fighting class and you sit down on your bed, fulling intending to get up in a few minutes and do some useful things, like maybe brush your teeth and put some dishes in the dishwasher but then suddenly an hour has passed and you are no longer sure that you are capable of getting out of bed again at all and maybe you might just fall asleep right there, sitting up, with your computer on your lap?

I've had that kind of day. Night.

Actually, every day is like that, lately. I'm not sure if it is me or the world or the season or the fact that I never can quite climb out of the hole of everything I should be doing and don't have time to get done.

I don't have any delightful little stories, because there is no time for diversion. Every minute needs to have a purpose, even if that purpose is sitting against the headboard of my bed staring blankly at the wall and trying to remember what it feels like not to have a pit of anxiety in my stomach.

It will get better, because it has to get better, because the days are getting longer, because summer is coming, because these things go in cycles, because two weeks from now I will collapse onto a plane.

It's sad when 18 hours of airplane travel seems like a beacon of restfulness in my future.

bluster

This is bluster. The rain beats on the windows, and the house creaks, and the trees rising high above the house groan in the wind. I hear noises that startle me. I go to bed early - just two days ago this was 8:18 pm - so that I can make it through another day of talk and bargain and dread. The daylight lasted just a little bit longer today. I might make it. I am counting days until the Netherlands and gezellig and tea and boats on the canal, because thinking of that might keep me going through the bluster just long enough to catch that plane.

door frame

Coming home from a conference, I dropped various baggages just inside the front door, and turned around to get the rest of the stuff out of the car.

I pulled the door shut behind me, to keep the warm air in.

Unfortunately, I pulled it shut without first extricating my left pointer finger.

That'll sting.

There was swearing.

It's been about an hour now, and the tingling has dissipated. A blood blister has formed. I can even bend it again.

But wow.

I will remove my finger from the door frame before closing the door next time.

no room for improvement

I had my annual physical yesterday, which was fine. A little blood work, a little "deep breath," and a little chatting with the doctor.

At the end, they gave me a printout about my visit. It had my medications on it, and the doctor's advices. I scanned it and then stopped.

In the middle of the page, there were values and then ranges of average values. Heart rate, blood pressure, weight, etc. All of them were things that one can change. Not easily, but with exercise and/or diet, they can theoretically be changed a little. One can aim for improvement, up or down. Changing them might affect one's health.

Except one, and that was the only one on which I was abnormal.

Apparently I am abnormally tall.

Thanks for telling me, I guess. Except that there isn't much I can do about it, so why bother? It will not improve my health for me to cut off the top of my head or the bottom of my feet, and that is about the only way I am going to make it into the average range on that one.

drink

When the sun came out halfway between Universe City and the coast, I very nearly revolted. I was driving, after all. I could have just kept going, and dragged the whole carload with me to the beach to bask in the sunshine.

It was only because other cars were meeting us that I turned down the side road to the trail along the waterfall.

"I was willing the sun to stay out the whole time we were hiking," I said, after we cut the hike short and started toward the beach.

Usually I love the moss and water of walk along a State of Happiness creek, but not on the first Saturday in March, not when the sky is clearing to that pure shade of blue, not when the sun is actually warm.

We bought wine and cheese and crackers and walked out the rocky jetty to a sheltered spot, in the sun and out of the wind, and there we sat and ate and drank.

"This rock feels perfectly shaped for my butt!" J. said.

"Does that mean you are a hardass?" the other J. said.

A wall of bright white fog billowed in, and we were caught in a world of rock and water. The shore disappeared, until we clambered all the way back over the rocks, whereupon it reappeared in sand and blue sky.

In town, the sky was still blue, but the fog lingered just past the bridge over the mouth of the river. A few tentacles reached into the blue above us.

We stopped for candy. We stopped for coffee. We stopped for a walk. We stopped to drink in the sunshine like dehydrated people gasp for water.

dregs of winter, cont.

Let us just consider February a wash. It is over. Let us forget that it occurred.

My basic strategy is to grit my teeth and hang on until April. April will be better. The sun will shine a little bit more, or at least, the sun when it shines will be stronger.

Summer will arrive, eventually.

I have begun to suspect that one's levels of Vitamin D just continue to go down each year that you live in a place this destitute of direct sunlight. This would explain a lot, including why it took ten years for me to really feel the burden of Mitten winters, and why each winter here seems more exhausting than the last.

HOWEVER.

Random things that rock:

I brought my car in to have its oil changed today, and to have the mechanics dig down into its depths to see if the timing belt has ever been changed, and when I picked it up again, I felt a swell of affection for the little beast. It's so nice to be able to go places. And the timing belt does not need an investment of $400.

Cross-country skiing.

Realizing that the reason my bank account never has money is because the money for my retirement account is coming from my checking account and not, as I thought, my savings account. Even though this means that I am constantly broke, it also means that my savings account is still slowly growing. I thought it was stagnant, or shrinking.

Sleep.

woods

I don't like being in the woods alone. I love being out in nature, in the wind and the sun and the shade, but when I venture into the woods, I prefer that other people be around. You just never know what - or who- might be out there.

It took me most of the afternoon to decide that I actually was going to go climb the little mountain outside town. Alone.

I was relieved when I pulled into the parking lot and found it half full of cars. (Any hiking spot in State of Happiness that is within close proximity to a metropolitan area is going to be full of people on a non-freezing, non-raining day.)

It was perfect: there were just enough people that I walked alone on significant portions of the trail, but I still encountered a person or two going the other direction every few minutes. There was no long, silent stretch to make me nervous.

I walked steadily up to the top. Up on a rock, I sat facing the half-hidden sun, eating my snack of pistachios. And then I turned around and walked back down, cursing myself for wearing shoes I like in the mud, but exhilarated by the fact that I had gone out into the woods without accompaniment.

cotton

Sometimes I'm not sure how we managed to keep warm when I was a teenager in the Mitten. We bought our coats for $50 at Meijer, and they were filled with some fluffy polyester filling. We layered on cotton sweatshirts underneath. I had an ancient pair of wool socks, and sometimes I wore those skiing, usually with other, regular pairs of cotton socks that made my ski boots nearly too tight to close. Our gloves were from Meijer, too, and there was nothing fancy about them, except maybe the fake leather strip across the palm that kept a tow-rope or shovel from destroying them.

Now I bundle in high-tech, wicking gear, and still the wind bites when I leave the shelter to cross-country ski back down to the parking lot. Still my fingers are numb inside my expensive gloves.

On the drive back, I told my car-mates about the red bib-overall snow pants I used from the time we got back from Liberia until after college. They had belonged to my Uncle T., and at some point he left them at my grandma's house. Probably because they had a hole in the knee. I literally wore them for more than a decade, over those old-fashioned waffle-weave long-underwear pants, and over jeans or sweatpants, too.

I remember, one day, over at my friend D.'s house, as we were getting ready to go skiing, putting on the red bib-overall snow pants and looking in the mirror and saying, "I have hips!"

It's funny how that happens, sometime in those teenage years. It was the first time I'd noticed them.