Tomorrow afternoon! No more Kafka House!
Twenty-three years ago today, while the President and his wife were presumably on their honeymoon, I started my new life in San Francisco. The whole cross-country road trip has been on my mind more than usual this year because the days of the week line up (5 October was a Monday in 1992 as well) and because my mind works that way. I woke up that morning in Winnemucca, stopped in Vallejo on the way in to call my soon-to-be roomies, and met them at the Market Street Safeway around sundown. I started work two days later.
Interestingly enough, this year also marked my first return visit to Nashville since that trip and my first return trip to San Francisco since 2010. I do not anticipate visiting Kansas City, Denver, nor Winnemucca this year, but one should never rule out things like this.
Other fifth days of October in my past:
- RIP Steve Jobs (2011)
- OSX for Mom (2005)
- Ten Years in San Francisco (2002)
- Amarillo to Gallup (1997)
- Onward to Minnesota (1996)
My series on HGTV has been cancelled. But never fear. I’ve been picked up by The Kafka Channel.
Think maybe I’ll be able to close on the fucking house sometime before Christmas?
Arcade Fire
Neighborhood #2 (Laika) (2005)
It’s looking like we may actually be able to close on the house on Wednesday, which means I will be free of the place at last. That’s about a month later than the original planned closing, and let me make it clear that it has been a month of pure suck.
It has also pretty much eliminated the possibility of my annual Thanksgiving trip to Toronto the first week in October.
Am I bitter? Yes. Yes, I am.
Will no longer owning the house that’s been making my life hell for the past few months help me deal with that bitterness? Yes. Yes, it will.
Honestly, I’m just too damned exhausted and too damned done with it to spend any time getting sentimental…which is likely a good thing. And I’m liking my childhood home a lot better now that I have a much higher proportion of my own furniture in it. Either way, it will be nice having a weekend where I don’t have to move furniture or load boxes into my car. Except for the vacuum cleaner and two lamps, everything is out. I may go somewhere. I may park my ass on the couch and watch movies while eating bon-bons. The possibilities are limitless…
Being optimistic that I may actually close on the house I’m selling this week, I finally moved everything out on Thursday. There are a couple of boxes of odds and ends, and a couple of things for the junkman to pick up — things that Goodwill and Habitat would not take — but generally, it’s pretty much empty. If there were any chance of this turning into something emotional, they were basically negated by all the stress that’s been involved with the repairs and the oil tank.
Since I’ve pretty much been living in my “new” house for two years, I think I underestimated (or was in denial about) how much stuff was still in the “old” one. I’m a little overwhelmed by the influx of stuff. It’s mostly a storage issue, and when I get all my shelving set up I should be fine. There’s also an issue of excessive furniture, but I’m working on that with the consignment shop and with Habitat for Humanity.
So I spent today getting the place habitable. I can’t live with chaos for any length of time and even if I really need to be doing something else, minimizing the chaos is always going to be the first priority. I have to have one living space that’s completely normal, and I have to be able to at least walk through every room. I did manage to get to that point by this afternoon.
And then I made the mistake of driving over to Winston to pick up a few odds and ends. Shouldn’t have done that. I tripped on the curb while carrying a box, and did awful things to my knee. I’ll spare you the picture, but I have a feeling it’s really going to hurt tomorrow. The most fun part of the whole thing was that I didn’t even have anything to dress the wound with, since I’ve already cleared out the house. I had to run to Target with my bloody knee fully exposed and…um…bleeding. That was attractive.
It’ll all be over soon, right?
Random realization upon hitting the ripe old age of “middle” (an ongoing series):
- it is OK to pay movers to handle the big stuff.
- if you don’t ask anyone to help you move, you are absolved of any responsibility to help anyone else move.
- The only reason I still have cable is to keep TCM. Now that I no longer need cable to do that, there is no good reason not to cut the cord.
- Good meatloaf is always worth an extra five-minute drive. Really good meatloaf even merits an extra ten-minute drive.
- Having a job and a boss that you like is an incredibly wonderful thing.
So did anyone else see that weird game show on CNN last night where all the crazy people were ganging up on the one loudmouthed jerk with the bizarre haircut?
I didn’t catch much of it. Who won the new Buick?
Katerine
Mon Coeur Balance (2008)
Too groovy for words…
A timely article as I’m currently pondering whether I’m really getting that much out of the whole therapy thing anymore. A lot of what they talk about seems to be a fair description of how I’ve handled my own life the past few years, which is frankly a lot better than I maybe thought I was dealing with it at the time.
I particularly liked their focus on solutions rather than fig,uring out the genesis of problems and on the idea that no matter what you do, things are pretty much going to suck a lot of the time and the there’s not a hell of a lot you can do about it. Once of the things it took me a while to recognize is that depression is not primarily about feeling sad or hopeless. It’s about how you deal with life and whether your sadness (or anger or bitterness or complete ambivalence or whatever) defines the way you live that life. it’s less about how shitty you feel and more about what you manage to do in spite of how lousy you feel…and that includes recognizing when you need some help with the process.
So this:
So it’s going into accepting what you can’t control, the factors that are out of your hands, and seeing what you can do with what you can control. And learning to be proud of yourself not just for accomplishing what you can, and not beating yourself up for what you can’t. Not seeing yourself as a failure, when you haven’t really failed because it’s not something that you could have controlled in the first place. And admiring your ability to withstand a feeling of rejection, and the frustration and the pain, and keep going on towards a more reasonable goal while being a good person. That’s also what’s emphasized so heavily. Figuring out your own values and sticking to them.
And this:
Our support of profanity isn’t that we think people should get up and scream horrible things at other people, but it’s about helping people to get a sense of humor about what bothers them. As my father said, to take things less personally.
And especially this:
It’s hard to continue to do what you think is important when you’re faced with something shitty on a daily basis. Some people deal with that, and they become shitty to their kids, they become mean to people around them, they get fired from their job because they stop showing up. You deserve to give yourself a pat on the back for living a normal life in adverse circumstances.
In retrospect, I’ve probably accomplished the most with my life during some of the most difficult times when I felt the absolute worst. I’m not sure what the relationship was, or if there even was a relationship, but I suspect having a sense of humor about it all probably didn’t hurt. And if humor was a “defense mechanism” or an “avoidance strategy”, who the fuck cares as long as it kept me alive and kicking?