Coffee in a mug from Wyoming, courtesy of the Fire Son, the year he did his EMT certification in Lander, right before Christmas.
After a rainy, soft, autumnal Sunday, the sun is out again today. Our highs this week are all high-70s/low-80s Farenheit, which is Not Bad At All for the time of year. I think we've gotten away with only minimal real heat for the summer --- those weeks in August and early September (how is it not still early September?) when temps were in the mid-to-high 90s, with 100% humidity were unpleasant, but there weren't that many of them. All in all, I'll take the weather here. If I'm tempted by the real snap of autumn already in places like Michigan and Vermont, I really don't want to trade for it, because then you have to take their winter, too.
It's a new week, and a quieter one than last week. Not that I don't have a lot to do. I have essays to write to get ahead, because before I know it, I'm going to be on the road for Memphis. I need to start planning my next poetry course, to record in November, which again will be here before I know it. My house is in desperate need of cleaning --- I'm beginning to feel oppressed by it, in fact, but I don't. have. time. to give to the level of cleaning it needs right now. I'm not sure when I will. I'm starting to spiral, in fact, into paralyzing ADHD overwhelm: I can see all the things that need doing circling over my head like vultures. It's a feeling I hate and am all too familiar with.
So what am I doing about it? Well, for one thing, I've made a classic ADHD move: I broke my purchasing period and bought a dress. This will not solve any of the things that actually need solving, but I have done it, and there it is. Unsurprisingly, I also haven't followed my own plan for a 30-day reward dress. If there's anything you can count on, it's that I will not buy the dress I've been thinking about buying, but a different one. I will plan the work, but will I work the plan? Probably not. I don't know whether I'll want to do a challenge in this new dress or not, but then it occurs to me that in what's left of 2023, I have actually a selection of dresses in which I could do a challenge, if I so desired.
Anyway, you'll find out what it is when it gets here, but it was another Oh, let's just try this one purchase. And it will be my fall/winter dress, though again, as with all my dresses, I think I'll probably be able to wear it year round. So you know it has sleeves, and it's a style I don't already own, but that's all you know.
Do I really need another dress? Uh . . . define need, I guess? I did get paid rather handsomely for some work, and my husband did say, "You should buy something pretty," so there's that. Anyway, I'm kind of jazzed to have something new to wear for the places I'm going in October, even if I already had things to wear those places. I suppose that craving for novelty is something to resist, the idea that the new dress you wear to the symphony with your mother in Memphis, or to the wedding, or to the literary evening, or whatever, is better and nicer than all the not-entirely new things you might have worn. But it's there and real. The pick-me-up effect, if fleeting, is also real.
Relatedly, my Sun colleague was telling me that his daughter, whom I've known since she was small (she's the Fire Son's age), who works for a famous media outlet in New York, had spent some months last year working remotely from Paris. There she had bought herself a $10K wardrobe of clothes, because in the time she had spent in New York, she had observed how people dress in the professional circles in which she moves. She'd saved money during Covid, when nobody could go into the office, by living at home with her parents in South Dakota and banking her New York salary, so had these funds saved up, for travel and other things. And I guess that's what they do in New York: wear ten-thousand-dollar wardrobes of French clothes. I have trouble envisioning spending ten thousand dollars in one place, on clothing --- I have trouble envisioning making decisions about what to buy with whatever money, on the spot. In a store? Are you kidding me?
This, by the way, is not a criticism of her. She's a good smart girl who has to make her way in that world, and it pays on every level to be dressed for it. But it was a reminder to me that people live this way. I don't think I could, ever, and that's not a boast. My particular eccentric values surrounding clothing don't make me a better person. Mostly I'm just relieved to be free of the pressure to rise to a certain level and happy to schlump along being eccentric. On the other hand, I do actually like to buy clothes, just as much as the next person, and I like for them to be good: interesting, flattering, well-crafted, long-lasting, trend-transcending. So on that level I totally understand walking into stores and spending what money you have on the best clothes you can find. I couldn't do precisely that myself, I don't think, and the price point comes as a secondhand shock to me, but I get it.
Anywaaaaaay . . .
Today I need to
get dressed
walk the dog
at least put up two weeks' worth of Sun poems on the website so that I can think about them
make some headway on my Sonnez Les Matines essay, due less than a month from now
clean my downstairs bathroom, because that's one of the things that have been bugging me, and cleaning it will be something.
I think that's enough of a list. I'm tempted to add more possibilities, but let's be real here. There are only so many hours in a day, and I have only so much energy.
But I am making a point of eating breakfast, which I haven't been doing (again). I'm having a piece of Lavash flatbread with some of last night's sauteed eggplant and melted cheese, as a wrap, with a glass of kefir. Lunch will probably be more kefir, maybe with some fruit added. Dinner is "eggroll in a bowl" --- ground turkey sauteed with coleslaw mix, with ginger, garlic, sesame oil, and coconut aminos. World's easiest skillet meal, and it is actually good --- and makes plenty of lunch leftovers.
I hope to take an energizing, not an exhausting, walk, and maybe to do some resistance-band workout moves in breaks between other things. I have just been feeling tired lately, due probably to less-solid sleep over the last week, and that contributes to my inaction on so many fronts, and thus to my overwhelm, which drains me even more. So I'm hoping that just getting out and moving in the sunshine will help charge my batteries, and that moving throughout the day in muscle-building ways will continue to help.
LATER:
Well, what I have done, as it turns out, so far today, is walk the dog, then have a little mental-health meltdown over the state of the house. In a fit of pique, I hit the kitchen trashcan with the plastic dustpan, so hard that the dustpan shattered into pieces, and then I had to sweep it up, without a dustpan to put it in. Serves me right, but I had to hit something, and I figured the trashcan could deal with it. I do regret the dustpan, because now I have to go out to the dollar store and buy another one.
One, though not really the only, trigger for this fit of pique was that I needed to cut my fingernails, because once they surpass a certain length, I can't stand the feel of them --- it's a sensory thing, as they say, and boy, is it ever. So then I couldn't find my nail scissors. Somehow this became, in my mind, a figure for all the squalor in which I feel we have been living. My husband doesn't really feel that we're living in squalor, but I feel it. Which one of us is right I don't know and don't really care --- that is, I don't care about being right. I just care about not feeling this way.
Anyway, after hunting around my little organizer baskets for the nail scissors, which do have a particular place to live, but weren't there, I then, in another fit of pique, kicked over the bathroom trash (I promise I don't behave this way as a matter of routine). Of course I didn't have a dustpan to sweep things up with, having broken it, but in the detritus from the bathroom trash I did find the nail scissors, which must have fallen into it. My husband laughed immoderately when I told him, and I didn't kill him with the nail scissors. Maybe things are going to be okay.
In any event, my workout today has been to vacuum and tidy and clean. The bathroom is clean, the windows are without cobwebs, and the baseboards are a lot better than they were. I'm also a little less homicidal, and a little ashamed of having had a tantrum like a two-year-old, over housework that (checks notes) I haven't done. But I did cut my fingernails, so that's better.
And now I'm sitting down to write essays, because deadlines, not nail scissors, are really why I'm stressed out, but first, here is what I have worn for all the admirable deportment which has characterized my Monday so far:
Audrey, with very old thrifted ramie-cotton pullover and Birk Balis. I am comfortable, and I don't look bad. I feel kind of bad, but I don't look it.
MUCH LATER:
Rereading all this, I realize it probably makes no sense. You . . . needed to cut your fingernails, so you smashed the dustpan on the kitchen trashcan and kicked over the bathroom trash? Right. Got that. I'm also not unembarrassed to have written about it, but then I'm not exactly unembarrassed to have done it, as the major interesting thing I did today.
All I can say is: I wasn't mad at anybody, especially. I just hit this point of overwhelm that I don't hit very often, fortunately, and I felt very powerless to do anything about it. Of course, that feeling was a total illusion. Once I got over my little fit of trashcan-specific hostility, I did do something about it. I didn't clean the whole house, but I did make a lot of the downstairs cleaner. Many of the specific things whose griminess was pushing my buttons were, in fact, easy to clean, and I did so, and still got one Sun essay written. I did not get as much of that kind of work done as I had wanted to --- because I was cleaning. Usually I don't get cleaning done because I'm doing that kind of work, so I guess really I was due for a day when I reversed that pattern. And hopefully tomorrow I'll get up, and everything will feel more orderly, and I won't feel like lashing out at all the inanimate objects in my path.
My husband was fairly amused by the whole scene (he also sorted the recycling to get it out of the kitchen before he went to work, which was nice of him). It's worth noting that I really didn't lash out at him. I don't like to lash out at people. Trashcans can take it, and dustpans are replaceable. Besides, he works harder than I do, and neither of us wants to spend our free time cleaning house, if we can possibly help it. So I can hardly blame him for the state of affairs --- which honestly weren't even that bad. Today was just the day. For what? For this, apparently.
PS: That coffee mug was surprisingly on point for the emotional ride of the day.