Thursday 13: A Hard Couple of Weeks

It has been a very hard couple of weeks. I have wanted to blog about it, but have also not been sure how I wanted to talk about stuff--some of it is big, some piddly and little, but all of it is making life hard at the moment. If feels very trivial to place these items in a Thursday 13, which is, after all, essentially a blogging game, but it is also one of the easiest ways for me to get at some of the stuff. BY friends, and a few others of you, will note that there is one major aspect of the last 2 weeks missing from the post. Even considering the comments on the list about my dad, I just could not add Andrea's funeral to such a list. The knowledge that I will never hear more of her writing or get to know her better certainly has colored everything else about the past couple of weeks, though.

1) Greta, my wonderful dog, had to have a tumor removed from one of her front legs. The tumor is off at the pathology lab now, and the vet said that we should hear back by tomorrow or Monday. I am, unsurprisingly, very worried about the results.

2) Greta is wearing an Elizabethan collar to keep her from worrying her stitches. I think it makes her depressed.



3) Instead of getting to be with Greta for most of her recovery period, I had to be at my parents' house taking care of my dad. It was really hard to be separated from my puppy while she was in a time of need. It was also hard because of the fear that her time may be limited.

4) Taking care of my dad was really difficult as well. In part, it was hard to see and deal with some of his degeneration, both physical and mental, which is markedly worse than it was when I saw him in January. It was clear, at several points during the week, that he was actually not following the conversation around him particularly well.

5) It is also clear from what he says that he is not fully the person that I knew most of my life--he announced to my mom that he had filled out an application to "America-corps" to go work in the Sudan or Darfur. There are many things that are ridiculous about this plan: he is too frail and in too much pain to go to the grocery store or to sit in the car for a trip to the nearest big city, so he is certainly not in good enough shape to go to a far-way and war-torn country. Even if he was in the physical shape to go, part of being married is that you do not make announcements like this to a spouse. You discuss it first. And lastly, he has not applied. He has probably filled out a card requesting information. Or thought about signing such a card.

6) He is immensely frail. One day, after he had gotten up at 5:30 and decided to do the dishes, he fell on water that had been spilled on the floor. When I came down at 7, having slept through the crash, he had dried blood on his face that he seemed to have forgotten about and he blamed me for having spilled the water, despite the fact that, since this had happened once already that week, I had dried the entire floor on my hands and knees before going to bed. But even without the water, he is clearly unsteady on his feet and pretty consistently ignores the walkers scattered throughout the house.

7) Between the fact that I am an indifferent housekeeper in the first place, the fact that I spent about 2 months in heavy duty exam mode, and then had a month in which I was never home for more than about 4 days at a clip, my house is too messy to have anyone over. It depresses me to be in my house, because of the mess, but the mess is also so extreme that I can't quite figure out what to do about it. (Yesterday, I decided to create manageable tasks, so I cleaned the bathroom, which is both the smallest room and one of the grossest to leave dirty.)

8) Because of my exams, final exams for my friends and our students, and all of the travel, I am feeling fairly isolated. Generally, I like living alone, though I would prefer to live with, say a life partner or my sister, but right now, I am feeling very disconnected from almost everyone.

9) I realize that my sense of isolation is largely about transitions: transitioning back to being here from having been away and being out of the loop with hanging out with local friends, transitioning to a new time of year, when I am not teaching and being forced to see people regularly, transitioning to a stage of my work in which I could well be alone much off the time, etc, but I hate transitions and I hate feeling isolated. They make me depressed and anxious.

10) I really believe in buying locally produced food, but yesterday I went to the farmers market and realized that, at least at this time of year, given rising food causes, I cannot afford to do so. I realize that how we spend money reflects our values and that cheap grocery store lettuce may cost much more in other ways, but my stipend simply won't allow me to buy $4 lettuce from the farmer's market when I can get it for $.89 somewhere else. I feel guilty, because I might be able to shop at the farmer's market, but it would mean no non-essentials at all. While I would be willing to cut out some, I need, for my own well being, to be able to go to coffee shops or buy some yarn now and again. It is very hard to realize that you simply can't get your principles and your budget to align.

11) In between the Big Yellow weekend and going home to care for my dad, I was home for 48 hours. (This was annoying because I had come back to town to do a presentation and the person scheduling had double booked us and canceled me, but I did not know until after buying non-refundable plane tickets.) Anyway, the primary thing of note that happened while I was home was that I got pulled over for having out of date plates. Which I totally did, but I was leaving town in the morning and so had to put off doing anything about it. This meant several things. First, when I got back Monday night, I went through my mail and discovered a subpeona (which I apparently cannot spell) to appear in court in November. The kicker was that this thing did not say WHY I had to go to court, so I spent the whole night worrying, only to find out that it was my chance to challenge the ticket. Which I will not do. What I did do was go get my tags renewed, which meant emissions and finding the DMV and all of that.

12) But by the time I had paid for the tags, I had exhausted my checking and savings accounts. A check is coming from my mom, for the buying of groceries, but otherwise, I have $20 until payday. I am very grateful to my mom for bailing me out, but boy, I dislike needing to be bailed out.

13) I had to spend the entire day doing paperwork for the Insititutional Review Board.