Ellen – October 10, 2007
Grrr. No full moon, but I’m off on my broomstick due to an accumulation of trivial matters:
- It’s getting cold (36 last night) and each radiator has only two working ribs.
- My computer may freeze any minute; a minor change in my package deal requires it be shut off for a day, service to resume the next day under the new agreement.
- Kotex pissed well short of his litter box. He’s a guy, all right.
- I can’t get hold of my best student to tell her I gave her the wrong dates regarding my absence next week.
- Despite consulting the dictionary, I made some errors in grocery shopping.
- I am expecting a prospective student tomorrow who referred to it as a “trial” lesson.
- Having a seriously bad hair day.
Well, I’m not freezing yet and the building head will solve the heating problem. I can do nothing about the expected temporary Internet cutoff. Guys will be guys, though Kotex’s poor aim reeks. Surely Meg will receive my e-mail about dates and won’t show up Monday. My shopping mistakes are edible, if barely. As far as I’m concerned, the prospective student’s as much on trial as I am, and, let’s face it, almost every day is a bad hair day for me, anyway. I just didn’t expect it to turn out so – neon.
Basically I guess I’m crabby because of a greater problem: my impending trip to Israel. I’ve been here about six weeks and I don’t want to go anywhere. I want to keep on plodding away at this attempt at a new life without interruption. Going to Israel is a major disruption. But because I left my dog, April, at a pet pension for these weeks, unsure the move would be worthwhile, I have to retrieve her.
If this could be simple and rapid. I wish Amos, the pension owner, could meet me at Ben-Gurion Airport’s cargo area, deliver her, and we could fly back in a couple of hours. Instead, due to flight scheduling and a dramatic difference in fares, I’ll be stuck an entire week. I do have some dangling loose ends to tie up, friends to visit, a few errands to run for my friends here, but I don’t want to go. Except for April, whom I can’t live without, I wouldn’t return for at least another year or more. I lived there almost 22 years, made friendships I expect to last the rest of my life…otherwise, I feel like I severed my deep connection the first of September. It’s too soon to look back, let alone be back.
Returning, physically, is nothing but an inconvenient pain in the ass. What I dread is returning to where I was emotionally the weeks prior to moving. I never knew when I’d break into tears, grow fangs or be knocked to my knees by waves of inarticulate fear. It was such a hideously long drawn out farewell to life as I’d known it. If this week won’t represent full regression, I will at best be feeling utterly disoriented, out of place and out of time…much as I felt the first weeks after Bill died. Everything was familiar, but out of focus and discolored.
Bitch, piss, moan. I’m going, that’s it and that’s all. Eventually it will be October 24.
Concerning your remarks about cognitive therapy: I really know nothing about it, but it sounds frighteningly akin to the spoutings of positive thinking gurus. Brings to mind “The Secret” and bubbly little people who chirp that you are as happy as you want to be. Right: we’re depressed because we want to be. Someone on the widow board I still interact with posted a link touting “The Secret” and it was blasted apart by dozens of outraged posters. I wonder what it would be like to have a sunny, positive disposition? Might as well wonder what it would be like to be Madonna. I’ll never know. I have a good friend, another depressive, who is presently grasping at the non-secrets of “The Secret”. It’s buoying her at the moment. I’m bracing myself for the inevitable crash-landing. She hasn’t yet been “saved” at a backwoods revival, but that’s about all she hasn’t tried since giving up recreational drugs decades ago.
The secret is, there is no secret.
Copyright 2007 by Ellen Dlott
