* I did get a number of birthday presents from various people - a quilting book, a Snoopy mug, "Nature Obscura" (a book). A friend of mine in Ohio sent me cake she baked and it actually travelled OK! And another friend sent me a box of gifts including a stuffed pig, and some really interesting looking (caffeine-free!) tea, and a jar of jam, and a cool magazine/book, and a mask of insect-print fabric.
Also, my "Princess Luna Loaf" that I ordered for myself as a birthday present came. (I should take photos after I get home for the day and add them in here).
My mom sent me a few small things - a pendant, and a knitting book, and some tea accessories, and she also ordered a jacket from LL Bean for me.
My brother's gift is pending; that is always the way, they are always late with such things, so much that it is kind of a family joke.
* Funny though it still doesn't feel like it was just my birthday. I was a lot less enthused for it than I was in some years past. I hope that doesn't mean I'm losing my ability to celebrate stuff; I felt similarly flat about both Thanksgiving and Christmas. In fact, I think my birthday 2020 was the last thing I actually celebrated with real enjoyment - I went and did a LOT of shopping, even going to the yarn store in Pottsboro, and I think that's the last time I ate in a restaurant.
I hope there are things I feel like celebrating again. I hope my ability to do that isn't permanently gone.
My mom did suggest that if I could get up there in May to see her, she'd bake me a (very belated but whatever) birthday cake. Maybe I could even talk her into either getting a standing rib roast (my absolute favorite) or getting some kind of good carry out food (the best carry out place there closed, but there might be somewhere else good)
But yeah. I am feeling the loss of a whole year of my life right now. And it does feel like I lost a year.
* I'm trying to get a bit of work done for later this week this afternoon but it's coming hard.
* Because: are there certain deaths that hit you harder, even if you might not be as close to the person as to some others you've lost? I feel this way about my friend D.'s pending death - He was a very "big" personality (I mean that in the best possible sense of the word - he was someone who made a room seem warmer and friendlier when he walked into it). It makes me sad to think I'll never hear his voice again. It's just....he was always there, and so full of life, and it's just really jarring to think of him being gone.
Of course the previous death that hit me hardest was my dad's; and in that case it even wasn't totally unexpected by me - he had been in and out of the hospital in the previous several years, his health wasn't good, he had a lot of pain. I remember when I said goodbye the end of May 2019, when I was going home after a visit, I thought "this may be the last time you ever see him" and I was sadly right.
I think that one hit me because of the closeness of the relationship, and of course, I remember how he was when I was growing up - the big strong guy who could fix things and build things and who knew stuff, and it was kind of unpleasant to see him suffering with arthritis so badly in his last years (and then later with congestive heart failure).
Oddly, I don't remember being anywhere NEAR as upset over my maternal grandmother's death, and she was probably the next-closest person I lost. But I was younger then, and I think there was more distance (she was 92) and she had been unwell for even longer than my dad was.
But I have done an awful lot of abyss-gazing and this week has just brought it back. I don't know if the realization being brought home to me that I will die some day (I really need to update my will) is harder, or the fear that everyone I care about will die and I will be all alone. (And it's harder now, oh, so much harder, during the pandemic, when I haven't really met anyone new in over a year (Well, except for my one new colleague) and there are a lot of people I haven't even SEEN because of how strictly they are isolating to avoid COVID). I do worry that when this is over, everyone else will just decide all their "friend slots" are full already, and I will be left all alone, with no one. I know that's emotions and not intellect talking but it's really hard to shut up emotions for me some times.
*It also really sucks when you realize the only prayer you can make for a person is that they have a quick, painless, and "good" death. In D.'s case, he has family all around him, so at least he won't be alone (which is why I haven't pushed to go out to the hospital - I tend to feel if a lot of family is in, it's better not to intrude, especially when I really didn't know him well all THAT long). In Jo's case it sounds like she has friends to sit with her, and like my mom said, apparently she isn't really conscious any more. But it all just sucks so much and it's pushed all my grief buttons all over again.
* I re-started reading "Whisky Galore" after realizing I never finished it (Why? I don't know. Sometimes I get distracted by other things and just put books down). I think I need it right now though - in many ways it's kind of a "quiet" book, and while there is at least one character that dies, it's not horrible, there's no violence really, the main animating event is more "let's get one over on the intrusive government" than anything so very terrible - and there are also a few people in love and trying to finagle how they might marry (during wartime, when there's no booze for a proper celebration) and there are also funny things that happen and it's just....it's kind of that sort of place I might like to live, at least if I had been born and raised there and wasn't an incomer (I think that's the problem in a lot of places: if you're an incomer you will NEVER fit in, no matter what, not the way people who were born and raised somewhere, and as I've moved around more than that in my life, I really have nowhere left that would "claim" me in that way - I don't think the town where I grew up would want me back, the town where my mom lives has changed a lot since I lived there, and down here, well....I'm an incomer.)
The book also has the feel of an Ealing Studios comedy, and I know it was made into a movie (I actually watched part of it - it was early last year I think - and I decided I wanted to read the book, so I ordered a copy - a nice hardback, in fact, that I will probably hang on to after I finish it). Sometimes you need that - sort of a peaceful story that proceeds not too fast, and has a lot of entertaining digressions along the way. (There are many characters in the novel and they all have their story)
* And again I feel that one of the real curses of the pandemic is that close physical contact (except, she says with a bitter laugh, "with members of your own household") is basically forbidden because I feel like I could really use a hug but there's no one I can ask. And yeah, I have been sleeping at night with either my Blahaj shark, or my Squishy Dog, or now Teddy Rex, smashed to my chest because having a little pressure right on my sternum somehow does trigger a bit of the "hug response" and I feel a little better? Maybe?
Maybe people never go back to hugging again (other than their own spouses and kids)? I know some people are rejoicing over "handshaking is dead" but for some of us uncoupled people? We're gonna really suffer touch starvation and I don't know. I haven't even had a haircut in a year and a half except for trimming the ends of my ponytail off when they snagged in a hair tie, and "medical" touch (most recently: getting the COVID vaccine) is so brief and so clinical that it doesn't count. (Also strangers. I don't like strangers touching me, or else I'd consider getting massages from an exercise-therapy type place once it was safe. But it has to be someone I know and trust).
* I dunno, I've read too many thinkpieces by people keen to remake the world in the image they want, and a lot of them are super enthusiastic about "Let's Work From Home forever!" and I guess they must have much bigger houses than I do because for me working from home was a corner of my living room, and it got cluttered fast, and I had nowhere good to store all the papers that teaching tends to generate, and I still have a bookcase full of teaching books at home (now just moved over into my dining room, did that to make space for the tree at Christmas) and also the "let's never touch another person that isn't our spouse or kid!" and it does feel very much like people with certain privileges (a whole separate suite to make into a home office, a family) are going to dictate the world for the rest of us. And yeah, yeah, I know: I probably enjoyed privileges others didn't have for way too long but expanding the circle for everyone doesn't mean cutting some of us out of it, I think.
I also don't want a world where all groceries wind up on our doorsteps once a week, I kind of like going to the store and looking around. Yes, maybe, sometimes it would be nice to have grocery delivery (which my town does not have) but I would not want it for always.
I don't know. Mainly I want to feel less disconnected: less disconnected from other people, from the work I enjoy, from celebrating things, from going out into the world. I don't know when that will come back or even if all of it will. But I am tired of how things are now.
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