Onward and upward

Feeling a little cheerier today. Though I am having a bad outbreak of hives. These things, they seem to have their own schedule. I'm beginning to think it's some kind of weird internal autoimmune thing with me and not any allergen I can pinpoint in some cases - sometimes, yes, I do get 'em after working in the yard, but I haven't done that in quite a few days, and the last time I did, the hives afterward were less than these. And I don't think it's any food item I can pinpoint; I have not eaten anything unusual - not even strawberries, which I suspected at times of doing it to me - in recent days. It's possible they're just on their own clock; I've read that about chronic hives.

I also wonder if my moods track with them - I know yesterday I was having some mild GI system pain before the hives popped (and yes, you can get internal hives, and they can be dangerous except in my case they seem not to be) and felt cranky and sad, and now I wonder if "cranky and sad" is more an early warning system that my immune system is going into overdrive than anything on its own.

I don't know.

I did have to temporarily discontinue reading "Seven Dead" because once again it's at what I would call a "claustrophobic" place - it's really more of a thriller in some ways than a mystery, and when I'm already struggling a little I dislike reading about protagonists being locked in rooms, or there being characters who might be very dangerous, might merely be slightly menacing, or might just be odd, and you can't tell which it is.

I picked up "The Ghost of Thomas Kempe" again last night but even IT got into a sort of sad, speculative place (James thinking about Arnold - a young man who had experienced the ghost before, back in the 1850s, and he could actually "sense" a ghost of the young man who was following him around and being sort of a companion, but now he's learned that Arnold also grew to be a very old man - and in fact is one of the benefactors of the school - and he's thinking how strange it is, thinking about how some day he will be old, and that the old widow who lives near them was once a young girl.

Though then again: that is kind of an interesting thought. I've heard the saying "We are always the same age inside" though I think it's more that we carry around remnants and memories from all the different ages we have been. I KNOW I have that lonely six year old who wishes she had more friends who lived near by hanging out in my psyche, and I regularly make jokes about how I am perpetually 12 because the idea of butts cracks me up, and I think I also have that tentative 16 year old in there, wearing make up for the first time and wondering what impression she's making on the world, and and and.

I think in my case, for some reason, the child I was occupies a bigger place in my psyche than the older ages do, or than those child-memories do for other people. I REMEMBER my young-adulthood, I remember grad school and all....but perhaps because it was by and large a happier time for me (I had a tribe of people who thought and acted like me, I felt understood for once in my life) it didn't make as big an impression on my personality? I mean, I remember it well - I remember goofing with Tim and Joe in the lab (Joe had some kind of Sim-type PC game, where you terraformed the planet, and one of the things was that Gaia would talk back to you if you clicked in a certain place ("Stop poking me!") and I remember Joe doing that over and over and us just roaring with laughter because....I don't know. It sounds stupid now but it was so funny at the time. And I remember when we made plans as a group to meet up and see Forrest Gump when it came out, but one group got delayed by having to wait on a train, and Eric raised one eyebrow and said, "You need to plan for things like trains" and how that kind of became a catchphrase for that cohort, and how we wound up seeing "The Lion King" instead (which I probably actually enjoyed more). And the summer we all worked hard to move departmental stuff into the new building that had been built, and then I found out by some quirk of the tax laws, almost my entire pay wound up going to taxes...

And I remember coming here, though I admit in a way the past nearly-20 years have been a bit of a blur because I've worked so hard, and it's kind of been the same darn thing over and over again ("It's Fall Semester, so this must be Biostats") and I confess there have been some times I've been in the classroom for a class I *always* teach and have caught myself wondering, "Is this fall semester or spring semester now?"

I dunno. The "James realizes Arnold was a whole real person with a whole real life and not some kind of semi-imaginary child figure who can be a pal to him" thing seemed terribly sad to me last night, but maybe now it doesn't seem so.

And yes, as I said, that kid that I was is still with me - the six year old wishing for someone to come and play, the eight year old making elaborate fantasy worlds in her dollhouses and with small toys, the ten year old making doll clothes (I played with toys - mostly stuffed animals, really, rather than dolls - until an embarrassingly late age). Even the teenager who collected dolls because saying "I collect these because I'm interested in the history of 20th century American childhood" sounds more sophisticated than "I like dolls and like going around to antique and resale shops and looking for old ones"

The thing is, I don't quite know what to do with 'em. I don't know that buying more dolls to satisfy my teen-collector who secretly just wants to dress and pose them and give them elaborate backstories, or buying the shiny trinkets that eight year old me wanted but never had any money to buy is necessarily a useful strategy. But I also don't want to figuratively shove them in a closet and make them shut up, or try (somehow) to force them all to grow up so it's just 49-year-old me in my psyche....