Pressure

Welp, I just sat here staring at the blank screen for an hour, periodically clicking away to scroll Twitter and be mad at idiots against masking or idiots denying that racism exists or idiots freaking out over transgender teenagers (there was that one really funny video of an angry turtle, at least). I'm not going to bed without blogging, so ugly and disjointed it will be. 

I am struggling badly. I had a bit of a depression reprieve at the end of March. I hoped I was out of the woods. I have an appointment on Wednesday for a 24-hour blood pressure monitor and a repeat ultrasound on the complex cyst in my breast on Friday, so maybe I'm just anxious. My blood pressure tends to be high in the doctor's office and normal at home, and my dad has white coat syndrome (where your blood pressure is high because you're at the doctor's office having your blood pressure measured - sort of like a Heisenberg particle/wave deal) so we've been assuming it was that, but my doctor said we should do this just to be safe. I feel like I'm going to a deposition where I'm going to be found guilty of committing some kind of crime even though having high blood pressure isn't a crime, or a sign of immorality, and having to take blood pressure medication would actually be a good thing if I do, in fact, have high blood pressure, right?

WOW I just typed high blood pressure so many times. And we haven't even gotten to my boob! I just can't wait to go out at seven a.m. not wearing deodorant to have my boob enthusiastically smushed.

I've been a bit obsessed with Australian mysteries and tv shows lately. I have the impression that they weren't available here as widely until the past few years, but I could be wrong. There's a subscription service called Acorn that I spring for a month of every now and then that has a bunch of shows. I've read through most of Jane Harper and Candice Fox. Right now I'm reading Scrublands by Chris Hammer. I am liking the sense of place and the mystery is compelling, but it's a male protagonist and there's a love interest (naturally) and I just don't know if I can do men writing this kind of thing anymore. He's forty. The woman in question is 29, which is fine, except he keeps talking about how "young and vulnerable" she looks, and how he actually would have guessed she was 21, which, QUIET PART OUT LOUD DUDE? And is he attracted to anything besides her looks, because yeah, we get it, she's beautiful, oh, is she beautiful? once more on how beautiful she is. Especially when she's biting her lip, which she does a lot, that's what women do, right? When they're not hooking their hair behind their ears?

Eve and a friend came to show me this funny meme about Debby Ryan a few years ago, where she's sort of biting her lip and looking up through her eyelashes while tucking her hair behind her ear. We love Debby Ryan, they weren't being mean, but it is a funny meme. I explained to them that the problem is that this is how female romantic interests are often described - tucking hair behind ear, biting lip, looking up through their eyelashes. I guess maybe that kind of thing sounds fetching? But it looks like this:

Eve is home in a week and a half. I can't believe her first year is nearly over (not to mention, uh, Angus's WHOLE ENTIRE COLLEGE DEGREE). Angus will be home at the beginning of June after we go down for his graduation, and he's been accepted to a master's program in health sciences and human performance at Ithaca College, a little closer to home than where he is now. It sounds like a great program for him, and I'm happy of course, although I was kind of hoping he'd be back in Canada next year. On that topic, when we were down in Elmira on our road trip a couple of weeks ago I got a kind of comeuppance from the universe on the way I tend to be wary of Americans who aren't people I know. I know, of course, that many Americans are wonderful people, and I have no defense at all for this... defensiveness, but there it is. So we were leaving the hotel room to drive home, and I was wearing a mask, which many people in the hotel had not been. I wheeled my suitcase into the hallway and saw a couple getting on the elevator a good distance down the hall, and they weren't wearing masks. In the back of my mind I was kind of glad we were too far to run for the elevator so I wouldn't have to deal with their reaction to wearing a mask. We started down the hall, and the man stuck his head out and yelled "y'all coming down? We'll hold it for you." And then they asked why we were there and could not have been lovelier.

So yeah. I'm an asshole. With high blood pressure (or not). And complicated boobs. Maybe I am a complicated boob. 

Shame my kids don't live at home so I didn't buy any fucking Easter chocolate.