Just keep swimming, just keep swimming...

I still don't really know what the hell I'm doing, but the fog has lifted a little, so I'm just going with it, gratefully. My husband is in Poland (he emailed from the plane that he thinks he finally gets my mother, as he was settling down for a six-hour ride with a bunch of hyper-manic 60-plus-year-olds. Yikes). I get my four-day take-home exam at nine tomorrow morning, but I have to go to the school to walk over to the high school with Angus's class at eleven. In the rain, it looks like. When I would much rather just hunker down over the freaking exam for ten hours and get it DONE, but oh well. Matt figured out that if I get zero on the exam I should still get 52 in the course, so it's all gravy. Right?

The whole week-end was pretty much an exercise in survival. Not that there was much to do, but I just felt the constant urge to go curl up around the hard, spiky ball of sad and icky and hopeless and bad that was lodged under my ribcage, and Matt left Saturday morning, and Angus has this creepy sixth sense for when I'm un-okay in ANY POSSIBLE WAY and it stresses him the fuck out, and strangely enough is not terribly comforting for me to have him following me around going 'are you okay? are you okay?', so I was desperate to Maintain My Cover. Because they're smart kids, but if they asked me what was wrong, 'existential despair' was probably not really going to fly as an answer.

So, the old stand-bys (stands-by?): friends' houses, sports, television, video games, junk food, books. They both got invited over somewhere else for a while on Saturday, then Angus came home and I took him to his hockey game (the final: not the final-final, that's what it would be if we won this one, which should have been called the semi-final, I think, but that's what they called the one before it, which should have been...uh... just a game? ANYWAY. He lost, which was awesome because it meant we didn't have to come back on Sunday for the super-ultra-really-really-the-last-one-final final, which he was fine with, and I was more than fine, because if you think it's fun trying to hold your shit together in your own bedroom, try holding it together in a hockey arena. While some asshat keeps blowing a vuvuzela (it's not fucking SOCCER, jackass!). Then we picked up Eve at her friend's place and it was almost bedtime. Sunday I let them fry their brains in the digital medium of their choice while I hid in my room with books and my laptop.

In the late afternoon, someone tweeted about making empanadas. I felt a flicker of interest, which seemed encouraging. I started Googling recipes and making grocery lists and indulging in Cautious Optimism. THEN someone tweeted something from a website I had never heard of. I started clicking.

I sent this to my book club. I was giggling.

Then I saw this. Clearly, onto something good here.

This. Well, I already wasn't doing anything terribly productive, and suddenly I was feeling MUCH better about things.

At this, I was blinded with tears of laughter and gasping desperately for breath, and had to go hide in the bathroom for a while so my kids wouldn't call 911 for medical help.

Then this and this and this. I think this URL should be printed on anti-depressant bottles.

I swallowed enough pills to fell a rhinoceros and slept hard. I got up and took the kids to school. I went home and cleaned up a little (depression doesn't just hurt your mind and body and soul, it also trashes your kitchen) and showered and called Pam. We decided we would go for groceries, and stopped for pulled-pork poutine to fortify ourselves beforehand. 

Nothing puts the lid on a nasty stretch of bad soul road like simple carbs and laughing at people that are EVEN DUMBER THAN ME (yes, I KNOW that it would be more grammatically correct to write 'I', I JUST DON'T FEEL LIKE IT!).