I'm late. I was all geared up to finally, FI-NA-LLLLLY, let out a sigh of relief and give a warm, if very late, welcome to 2011. Something along the lines of: "Hey two thousand and eleven! I'm ready for you now". This was supposed to happen after I finished my seminar paper and felt fit as fiddle.
But then. Things just did not work out.
The short version is, I had two independent medical situations unfortunately superimposed… well, they were dependent in that one is a long-term chronic maintenance issue – my admittedly gender-neutral but still somewhat hysterical Crohn's inflicted Colon – which can not be treated before I take care of a totally uncalled for gynecological situation, which in turn is just going on and on, as these situations are wont to do. AND THEN, just when things seemed to be getting back on track (it was of course a gynecological illusion at that point) I got sick with a flu-like cold (I got the flu vaccine for HEAVEN'S SAKE. Much good that did me) and was totally out, out of school and business and life for a WHOLE week. If I may be so daring as to quote (but humbly!) from my facebook status:
"Double-you.Tee.Eff. I have a fever. What am I, 8?!? I have a life to attend to, I can't be sick all the time!"
(Whence the inevitable email from my father, asking what Double-you.Tee.Eff means. Here's a hint, dad: WT stands for What the.)
To which one of my grad student friends replied "I was sick all the time when I was in coursework. Literally out for at least a week every quarter… It comes with the territory!" A professor also concurred today that winter term is the bottomless pit of the wretched quarter system.
In any case, the problem now is that I'm almost OK, and should be back to work full blast but am just not sure exactly where to start with the catching up, and the caring about it enough to fight the urge to crawl back into bed and sleep a good ten hours per night like I forgot I could but heartily recommend to all my loved-ones!
The long version is: a mess.
Slightly long version is that winter break sucked tremendously and winter term is refusing to take off in any remotely non-depressing way. There was a time, however, when a new year seemed to be near, hence a bout of severely gloomy resolutions I wrote in that dreaded twilight zone between winter break, which had already proved kinda mostly awful, and winter term. I feel somewhat removed from it now, but it is still a sort of lump in my throat. So here goes:
New Year's Resolutions.
No. 1: Not feel like I SUCK SO BAD. AT EVERYTHING. Including life.
No. 2: FLY LESS.
Since neither of these are going to happen in the near future or at least the coming year, here is a tentative no. 3: maybe I could at least, please, suck less at flying, and the inevitable outcome of flying - not being at home, in my daily routine, a situation that at times coincides with what other people would deem VACATION. (Other times it is better known as VISIT BACK HOME. I do not think I will get remarkably good at that activity for as long as I live.)
I would explain, but I feel so damn pathetic and whining. Which is kind of a No. 4: GET OVER IT. But since lately, at least this last year, IT inescapably feels like the death of my big sister, a thing which is just in general NOT SUPPOSED TO HAPPEN, maybe not until you're 78, I find it kinda hard to shake IT off.
And I was never very good at taking things, or um, life, easy. Nope. I pretty much had a slight nervous breakdown when I was 14 years old and it seemed just too much to keep practicing piano and going to the toughest, most professional ballet school in Israel every day after school as well as being a straight A student (a feat which, guess who, c'mon guess, guess who could do it all? Ding-Ding-Ding-Ding!!!! THAT's RIGHT!!!!!!!! my sister). I had already left the serious classical piano teacher and started seeing a young, cool tutor, who was supposed to teach me how to read chords – somehow I didn't manage even to get that far, though I do clearly remember doing pretty hard hearing exercises of the kind that were basic first-year music academy training, that's what my tutor said, and I remember crying at her place, being very upset about stuff, something to the effect of, oh I don't know, LIFE SUCKS or I SUCK AT LIFE, I was lonely and miserable and I was 14 and I did not wear a bra yet!!! COULD LIFE BE WORSE I ASK YOU. NO. NOOOOO. and I'm pretty sure she was kind of astonished at how bad I was taking it but she tried to give me perspective which I doubt you can do when speaking to a young teenager, but well. And I also remember my mother, right around that time, saying I quit piano because I didn't feel like practicing, and that When Something is HARD, I DO NOT DO IT, as in, a general rule on how I live, and hey Mom, sorry to be so blunt, I know you are among the only 4.5 people who read this but, really? Is that what you really thought? Do you still think it? Because I think choosing to stay at ballet was a much tougher thing to do, and it was H.A.R.D for me to be there not only because I had (have, have, of course I still have) Crohn's and everything body-related was a problem and a struggle, but because I seriously. SERIOUSLY. sucked at it. Maybe that is the only thing I was ever really, emphatically, NOT GOOD AT, but that is the truth. I could not dance. At least not in the standards expected and required at THAT PLACE, aka BALLET SCHOOL (complete with anorexia and terrorizing tight lipped madams). Not compared to all the other young aspiring ballerinas. No, I was one of the very few ugly ducklings around, the unfortunate not blessed with TURN OUT, you can press on that link but I assure you that it pretty much means that you will never ever be graceful and look anything but miserable and pathetic when you are trying to bourree en pointe. (Bourree is what she's doing with her feet. Her arms and hands are also a phenomenal ballet exemplar, the quintessential swanlike figure.)
(Rest assured, I did not fare much better in other genres of modern or contemporary dance. There is a myriad of things wrong with my body, but in a nutshell it is weak and un-flexible and that pretty much puts a lid on any dance aspirations one may have.)
THIS IS THE TRUTH, I am not exaggerating, yes, I may have occasionally wrote things on this blog that may have seemed slightly overstated, but may I be knocked down by thunderbolts if I did not simply, objectively, suck at ballet, and so I'm now positive that I picked the surest way to feel constantly disappointed about my body, and so, arguably, staying at THAT horrible PLACE was, perhaps, not the EASY thing to do.
Remember the getting over it part? So yeah, I'm not quite there yet.
And about the Vacationing resolution. Wait.
This post is completely disheveled. Apologies. (We are still before the period of the beginning of the post wherein I realize I'm not only late on the new year's resolutions, but my calendar-alarm to send a check to my proprietor is going off, it is that late in January. DTE! (Which stands for Double-you.Tee.Eff. OBVIOUSLY). Just for your general orientation.) I wrote the above after coming back from a short visit to NYC over Winter Break, which not exactly a break etc etc due to those medical situations which my later me has already divulged above. Frankly, most of the last month has been spent in nauseous anxiety but it seems like the bad part is over now.
So I have not been able to get as much work done over the "Break" as I planned, because I was anxiously, nauseoustically, preoccupied. So, the other night, I was basically doing nothing, and the nothing I was doing was looking over old photographs of, mostly, DH and myself. We've been together for almost, wait, what, seven years?!? no, I think it's actually six but it's fair to say that at this point I have lost track. So, I was flicking through, basically, snippets from my soon to be gone twenties. And you know the really strange thing? I felt like I had no memories of those days that are documented in the photos. It's not as if I don't remember where the picture was taken or what we were doing there, it's just that, I felt this weird estranged feeling, like I could not tell you anything about myself at that time, what my life was, who I was. I'm not sure where that feeling came from or what it means.
But since that happened a week or so after I wrote that totally not-over-it drowning-in-teenage-complexes bit, it got me feeling that I'm stuck somewhere. A time-place pre-sister-death, but not a good place. A time-place where the ambitious race of miserableness was still on between us. And then….. and then, much shit hits the fan… and then basically, SHE DIES. And now, a conundrum: is my life easier or harder than hers now?
Get OVER it. GET OVER IT. Stop competing with your sister. She has already won, and lost, forever. YOU LIVE. GAME OVER.
So. Finally. About that trip to NY. I'm no good at being out of my natural habitat, especially in said preoccupied condition. But sometimes a revelation ensues.
Let's just say that I love dearly the friends that were housing us (don't leave NY! We will miss you sooooo!!!!). But my immune system promptly has a mental breakdown when I see my host change his daughter's admittedly non-poopy diaper and then proceed directly to slice pickles for our lunch without an intervening hand-washing session. Minor incident and an occasion for me to demonstrate restraint of my obsessive-compulsive tendencies. And yet an exhausting feat nonetheless. See, that's why vacations are hard. Being in a place where I'm not the sole carrier- and cleaner-of germs is just too strenuous a task to be holiday-fit.
However, and this will soon make sense, on the days immediately after coming back from NYC, I had that children-song "The itsy-bitsy spider climbed up the water spout…" ringing in my head. And it continues: "DOWN! came the rain DOWN! came the rain and washed the spi-DOWN! came the ra-DOWN!"
WHAT? Yeah. I'll explain: said father-host is also a composer. Which is to say that, among other things, he's very talented music-wise and has a very good ear. And when he sings to his daughter it apparently sometimes goes like this: she, like a 18-month-old genius, is interested in the UP-DOWN part of the song. And so she wants to get to the DOWN! part already, over and over again. And when she sing-shouts Down!, her father responds with the rest of the line. Whenever she sings it, no matter where in the line he is. And the even more mind-blowing thing about it is how this amazing dad modulates his own singing voice to the precise note her Down! hits.
A refracted key-transposed children rhyme. Response-repetition.
This magical musical-interpersonal phenomenon defies description and so I'm not sure if my lame attempt to reproduce it here makes sense. But.
I feel so grateful for having witnessed that intimate moment between father and daughter, a moment of total immersion in being-for-another, parent for child. Which was playful and immediate and songful and not wordy at all like this damn blog. Thank you. You are a family.
