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May 2011

Friday night

I’m back from two nights in Charleston, where I attended a conference, ate well, slept less well, sweated perspired and looked at lots of old and mildewed buildings. I also spent a few hours adjacent to what seemed to be a vaguely flirtatious he-librarian. My ego being somewhat battered and bruised of late, I was rather pleasantly surprised by even the suggestion of someone showing some actual interest, even if I really wasn’t all that interested in return. He made a nice fourth for dinner anyway.

Oh yeah. I also went to Stuckey’s–a real one, not one that’s just a shelf in a truck stop. That and maybe the scallops and grits were the real highlights of this trip, I think. I need to take a better one very soon.

Who knew?

I have a free on-demand cable channel that broadcasts Jewish and Israeli films and other features.

Other discoveries while exploring the “upper end” of the cable box:

  • I kind of like the new Hawaii Five-O. Maybe it’s because it’s so stunningly gorgeous in HD. More likely, though, is that it’s the closest thing to a 1970s cop show on broadcast TV today.
  • Golden Girls reruns look a lot better in standard definition 4×3 than they do in the weird stretched, zoomed version WeHD sends out pretending to be 16×9.
  • OK. That’s all I really discovered. Or at least all I can be bothered to write about.

Changes

Since there haven’t been nearly enough major changes in my life lately, I decided that major changes in my computing environment were in order as well: installing an OS upgrade, reviving the G5 as a audio/video import station, and migrating to a new MobileMe account (divorce, y’know?).

And yesterday, I decided to move my office into the basement. It has several advantages. First, it makes the old office upstairs “show” a lot better (assuming we ever have another showing). Second, the basement (being a basement) is much cooler. Third, I feel a little more comfortable spreading out and working on things down there; I get to feel like I have one spot in the house where I can actually live without feeling like it has to be perpetually “staged”. I guess the stairs provide a little extra exercise, too.

And yes, that’s pretty much all the insight I’m going to provide into my personal life today.

 

Vicious cycle

When you are depressed, you don’t feel like doing things. When you don’t do things, it makes you depressed.

Bad weekend. The breakup is the worst thing that’s ever happened to me. Worse than the cancer. Aside from the sadness and the broken dreams and the realization that the rest of my life isn’t going to play out as I’d expected, there’s an incredible hit to the self-esteem and self-confidence. When you’ve essentially been dumped after ten years, no matter how amicably, there’s no amount of reassurance that can make you stop asking yourself “what the fuck is wrong me that made him need so badly to get rid of me?”

Add to that the fact that the second worst thing that’s ever happened to me has begun to transpire just as I’m dealing with thing number one and you have my current really bad state of mind. The “Mom with dementia” thing. This will eventually have a bigger and longer term impact than thing number one.

I could have dealt with either of these things individually. I could have coped. But both at once is just too fucking much. I feel hopeless, and I find that I don’t have anything to look forward to but misery for the next few years. And I’ll be experiencing it all alone.

Shrink? Anti-depressants don’t seem appropriate.

Help keep me focused and keep after me to keep on living my life. I used the cancer and the year of unemployment in Charlotte as a catalyst to chnage my life. I hope I can do it again.