Colour Your World

Every time I think about blogging, I have to ask myself, what the hell am I doing? Why do I consistently find ways to avoid something that's really good for me, something that I do fairly well, something that I can literally do sitting on my ass in my kitchen, something that can easily take under half an hour? 

The preceding question could fairly equally be applied to playing the piano (big piece of furniture one room over, somehow turns invisible when I walk past) and exercising (not the sitting on my ass part, but you get me.). I would almost certainly feel better if I did these things far more regularly. Why do I not do them? Do I hate myself? 

Anyways. To just lay out a little of the stuff whirling around in my mind lately. Painting the main floor walls. When we moved in here, I was determined that we weren't going to have walls that were builder's white. I wanted colour, deeply saturated, more than one. We painted the family room a medium blue, the kitchen a sunny yellow, the living room an orangey terra cotta, and the entrance a deep green. I wished slightly that the family room blue was darker and the entrance green was more sage than kelly, but on the whole I was happy (it turns out, sort of weirdly, that the entrance was the exact green of East Nepean Little League, which launched Angus on a few fairly amazing adventures, so that's kind of neat). A few years later we repainted the family room a sort of café au lait. I wished we had extended that colour into the kitchen (in my mind we did, and I'm shocked every time I rediscover that the kitchen is still yellow), but again, I was happy. 

Lately, I suddenly feel a strong need to have fewer and calmer colours. I go and visit Zarah, who gets to make all the decorating decisions for herself since her cheating-ass husband left, and I sit reading among the soothing neutrals and the understated decor that flows naturally from room to room and feel a kind of tranquillity I almost never do at home. I think of a blogger I used to read who was pregnant after the stillbirth of her first baby, and she was repainting her kitchen and living room from a gorgeous range of saffron and honey and amber - like a Middle Eastern spice market - to white and off-white. I thought she was nuts. I loved the old colours. I didn't understand how different experiences and states of mind can result in just really wanting to be surrounded by different colours.

I followed Rachel Held Evans on Twitter. I own one of her books, haven't yet read it, but she seemed like a really remarkable person (her Twitter bio begins with "Doubt-filled believer", which really resonates with me). Fairly soon before she died far too young, she was tweeting about painting a new house, or maybe repainting her house. She said she loved warm, rich colours like yellow, orange and red, that she "hated every sad, gray page of the Pottery Barn catalog". I smiled, because I remembered thinking the exact same thing. That she never got to redecorate her house, or reach the age when she would long for soothing neutrals, if she ever would, is absolutely in the minutest of minutiae in the vast tragedy of her death for her family and friends and followers. But I still think of it, and it makes looking at paint chips and trying out simulation programs seem freighted with privilege and implications, and makes it seem both less and more important than it actually is.

Is this rather a lot to lay on a few buckets of Kendall Charcoal, Balboa Mist or Metropolitan Gray? Why yes, it well may be. I'm at a time in my life, and in the life of the world, where almost everything sets off a cascade of thoughts about privilege and mortality. Our days are not unlimited. So I'm going to do my best to write more - here at least once a week, and if I fall off the wagon, feel free to call me on it. And I will drag my recalcitrant ass to the gym (buckle up, Pammy, we're going back in). And I will play my stupid piano. And I will try very hard not to procrastinate too much on clearing out some junk and painting my house some happy colours that are perfect for this point in my journey. 

Apparently My Brain Thinks Size Doesn't Matter

I have a bit of a bad habit, when buying things online, of not paying attention to measurements. Height. Weight. Quantity. I have no good excuse - I feel like there's something slightly wrong with my processing ability on computer screens, so I feel like I'm reading everything over and over but somehow I still manage to miss things, but I have no proof of this. Maybe I'm just careless. It's usually not a huge problem. I ordered a ceramic house and a little vase from artist friends online and both were surprisingly, adorably tiny when they arrived. No problem, they were still lovely.

I had a doors and windows calendar that I really liked last year, so I ordered the new version this year. Turns out it was, um, not full-sized. Eve killed herself laughing at my tiny calendar. The day squares were a little smaller, but I still made it work. It doesn't match my picture in size like the other one did, but oh well.

Near the end of the school year, I was exhausted. I was still recovering from a winter of sickness and pain, working in a hot library with years of yuck oozing out of the old carpets was making me feel somewhat unwell, and we were all crawling to the finish line. Matt was away for a few days and instead of going out for groceries and dog food, I indulged in grocery delivery for only the second time ever and ordered dog food from Amazon, although I usually support our neighbourhood independent-owned pet store. I ordered Lucy's regular food and a bag of the oral care stuff, which is her regular food but in giant pellets which are harder to chew so good for her teeth, and which she for some reason thinks is a fantastic treat even though, like I said, still her regular food. The oral care stuff seemed a little expensive, but Matt had only recently discovered it so I didn't know what it should cost, and we only give her a couple of pieces a day, so I thought maybe that's why it was more expensive.

The package was delivered and Eve opened it in the dining room and yelled for me to come look, again killing herself laughing.

So. Oops.

"We only give her four pieces a day!" Eve said. On the bright side, we won't run out of food before we run out of dog. And when my lovely neighbour needs to borrow dog food for her chocolate Lab, I have the perfect solution.

I'd like to say that I learned my lesson, at least for a while.

But later that week, I realized we were out of envelopes.

Randoms

Our cleaner is upstairs vacuuming. Eve is working on a history summative on the couch, and Lucy is lying on the back of the couch growling because of the cleaner. I just shushed her and she gave me this look that says "SORRY for caring about your SAFETY".

A couple of weeks ago I helped with the book fair at my Wednesday school - this would be my twelfth or fourteenth or somewhere around there. At one point there was a lineup of students waiting to pay and as I was getting out a poster for one I said in conversation with the V.P. "do you know how many times I've said 'the posters are five dollars each' in my book fair career?" A little girl in the line said very seriously "HOW MANY?"

I walked around Dow's Lake looking at tulips with a couple of friends on Friday, then walked around the mall for three hours with Eve on Sunday and walked Lucy when we got home and could still walk on Monday, so I think I'm pretty close to back to normal. This doesn't mean my feet are pain free, but I can walk without limping or being in agony, which is a win at this point. One of those frustrating wins that is just getting back to baseline rather than making any advances. Well, that's not true, it's an advance that came after a regression. Now I'm confused, but overall I'm counting it as a win.

My keyboard is disgusting but I'm resisting the urge to clean it without turning off my computer, because I did that once and accidentally changed the keyboard to Swahili or possibly some alien language, and had to hook up a whole other keyboard for a while until it went back to normal. But once I turn my computer off it takes forever to start up again, and my keyboard is really disgusting. Okay hold on, folks, we're doing this.

Hello? Okay. Whew.

Last Friday we were planning to leave for Toronto in the afternoon. Matt came home at lunch and picked up Eve from school on the way. I came down when I was almost ready and he asked what time I wanted to leave. I said "I don't know, whenever we're ready". He said "one-thirty?" I said "whatever, we're driving, it doesn't have to be on the hour or the half hour. Have you even packed?" He said "Well I can go pack in ten minutes." I said "so go pack! What the hell, can you not get ready without a deadline?" and then it dawned on us "oh my god, you can't get ready without a deadline, can you?" When you spend your life on an itinerary that includes frequent air travel, apparently "when we're ready" doesn't really cut it.

I discovered a really good bagged chopped salad with sesame dressing (I have come to the end of the fantasy that I am going to buy greens and ingredients and make my own salads). I ate it for dinner, and I packed it for lunch, and I thought it was going to change my life. I was going to eat it every day, with protein, and lose a million pounds, and feel amazing, and the salad people would hire me to make a commercial and sell their amazing salad.

None of that happened. I bought it two more times. The first time was great. The second time I suddenly found even the thought of it completely revolting.

Cleaning lady is gone. Lucy is looking very smug because she thinks she made her leave. 

Invitation to My Small Pity Party

This winter has been really difficult - mainly physically instead of mentally, which I guess is kind of a nice change? Just after my fibroid surgery I was offered a surgery leave at a school that was a longer commute, and I accepted it just before I got the worst flu of my life. We were supposed to go to Florida for March Break to visit my mother-in-law and her husband at their summer house. I ordered Matt and Eve to go without me and said I'd be fine.

Narrator: She was not fine.

In retrospect, this was not the smartest. My parents are nearby, and my mom sent over chicken soup. But she sent it with my dad, who, being a lot like me, assumed I wanted him to come in, leave the soup on the counter, and leave without checking on me. He was right. I did want that. But I was so delirious with fever that I thought I was doing inventory in a really cool warehouse for most of one day, and too weak to lift my phone at one point, so it probably wasn't a great idea. My sister, when she heard, was not impressed.

It's okay. I survived. Matt and Eve got upgraded to first class because, I don't know, they clearly missed me so much, and Eve felt terribly guilty (not too guilty to eat her warmed-up cashews, fortunately). But just as I was barely recovered, we started five week-ends of travel, to Elmira to see Angus and watch baseball, to Vegas for a friend's fiftieth birthday, to my sister's for Easter, and then more Angus and more baseball. This was all great, but didn't give me any down time. At the same time, the bone spur inflammation in my foot got worse so I was hobbling around in pain and off balance for months.

It takes a toll on a girl, ya know? I'm mostly enumerating this because this week I was so happy that the sun was shining and it was book fair week, and I was hanging out with the super-fun and funny principal and V.P. at my Wednesday school who are just so lovely and have the same twisted sense of humour as me, and we were selling books and stupidly-shaped erasers and five-dollar posters to excited kids, and then I'd come home and be weepily exhausted and unable to face cooking dinner, and I couldn't figure out why. Until I figured out why, and Hannah comfortingly confirmed my theory.

I have a great life. I have privilege out the wazoo. I get frustrated with myself when I can't work a stupid part-time job and at least do the bare minimum at home. Turns out my body doesn't care that I need to demonstrate my love and gratitude by cooking and cleaning and that I'd like to demonstrate my love of fitting into my jeans by walking around the park once in a while. I finally found a good chiropodist and my foot is slowly improving thanks to being horrifyingly jackhammered with a taser wand once a week. Sorry, the technical term is "extracorporeal shockwave therapy". I wonder what would happen if they used it intracorporeally - bet it would make a good horror movie. I've been able to properly walk Lucy a couple of times in the past week. Other than that, I guess I just need some rest.

So I've learned my lesson. This week-end we're.... going to Toronto.

Oh well. Store-bought quiche and peanut butter sandwiches for dinner next week.

Thrills and Agony

Yesterday we drove across the border to watch Angus's team play two games at SUNY Canton. He's had a great year academically, but the team has really struggled and his last outing as pitcher was dismal. He's doing better at shaking it off than in the past, and things will reset in the fall, and it's not the end of the world, but he's exhausted and ready to be home and we're ready for that too. We were there for support rather than entertainment or enjoyment (Angus was likely not going to play at all until the next day), and for the prospect of seeing him for five minutes between games and an hour afterwards.

Things went as expected for the first few hours. It was cold. Really cold. Really fucking cold. We sat huddled in our chairs in winter coats with sleeping bags over us and the wind froze our faces. The other team was mean. We're used to loud, good-natured heckling, but this was something else. Later one, one of our players said that he was so pissed because they had been saying rude things about his sisters - it's a thing, apparently, to look at the other team's players' Instagram accounts and chirp about their families. Did you know this was a thing? I feel simultaneously naive and outraged. There's unsportsmanlike and there's next-level assholery. Two of their coaches got tossed, so there's that at least.

We lost the first game 5-3, which is fine. The first game was seven innings, the second was nine, and about halfway through the second I went to the car to warm up for a bit. We hadn't expected Angus to pitch, and then suddenly Matt texted me that Angus was warming up and we were up by one. For a cowardly moment I almost stayed in the car. It's bad enough when he pitches at the beginning of the game and things go badly - this seemed like an unbearable amount of pressure, and watching him at times like this doesn't feel like I'm watching anything related to how hard he's worked at this, or statistics, or physics - it feels like we're in the grip of capricious forces that just want to fuck with us. Part of me just wanted to wait and be told what happened once it was over. (I've heard that extreme circumstances bring out the best in some people. It would seem that I am not one of those people.)

So I trudged my frozen butt out out from the parking lot and up the hill overlooking the diamond. I paced around like an expectant father in a hospital waiting room in the fifties. I swore a lot.

The rest of this story is triumphant and anticlimactic all at once. He pitched the last inning, went three up three down. We won the game (I'm not even sure what the score was). He got the save. We were dazed and jubilant. The other parents were sweet and gracious (especially the ones whose sons were pitchers). We went back to the hotel and I made giant Caesar salads in immense metal trays for dinner just like a real team mom.

On the way home, Eve texted me that she'd made some really great avocado toast, after screwing it up badly (too much salt, not enough lime, something, I don't know) the last couple times, so she was really excited. Nice that it was a banner day for our family all around.

Still February

I'm still feeling kind of shaky. I'm having trouble figuring out if I'm depressed or if this is just life. Feeling extremely mortal, which isn't necessarily bad. I wrote down a quote once that I can't find now (by this I mean I don't feel like going through my university journals and dying of cringe) - oh, looks like it was from the Bible: "Let us know the brevity of life, that we may grow in wisdom". I understand that knowing that life is relatively short is part of what makes it sweet. If we had all the time in the world, then time would mean nothing. On the other hand, if I can't stop thinking about dying, I don't get a whole lot of living done. As with so many things, balance is key. And I'm feeling a little tippy.

It's so hard, understanding the passing of time even though it's so obvious. Now just feels so... NOW-ish, you know? It's so hard to imagine that things will change materially. When I had babies I would tell myself not to panic about them growing fast - tomorrow they would be almost exactly the same as today. Every time we eat too much and feel uncomfortably full we can't believe we'll ever want to eat again. And every January I get such a passion for cleaning and organizing, and I can't understand how I let things get so untidy and out of control because I can't believe that I ever won't feel like that again. And then a few weeks go by and things get a little busier and suddenly I can't be arsed to care about the shit piling up on the dining room table and the downstairs storage closet is close to organized but not quite finished and all that drive and energy is just gone, and here I am again. So much time goes by, and part of it is linear and part of it is circular. That's okay. I've made six trips to Value Village in the past few weeks, and the storage closet really was a disaster. I went through mountains of the kids' old artwork and threw out a bunch and kept the ones I could still remember them making. 

Eve turned sixteen. It seemed normal that Angus could drive at that age, but it seems bizarre to me that she can. I don't know if it's because she's a girl or because she's my youngest or because she's a foot shorter than he was. 

None of this is terribly insightful or new or well-articulated. I'm just trying to force myself to keep writing. But I'm also trying to go to bed earlier instead of sitting at the computer for hours at night, which is what I'm doing now. So I will leave this without an elegant finish and go slog through a few more pages of The Magic Mountain. 

February

I feel a little strange. I felt good through most of December, then happy but exhausted through the Christmas holidays, then surprisingly chipper through the first part of January, then anxious about my fibroid surgery, then relieved that it was over. Now I feel like winter depression might be creeping in. This week has been tough. Husband is away and the weather has felt intentionally malicious - more snow and extreme cold, followed by a one-day thaw and a bunch of rain that puddled up everywhere because all the drains are covered with ice, and the promise of quickly freezing again and turning the city into a bone-breaking ice rink. Every day there's been some kind of weather warning. Most mornings have been not quite as bad as anticipated, which is nice but would be nicer if I could stop anxious-ing about it all night. There was one morning I could have slept in, but I worried that Eve would fall and break herself trying to get to the bus, so I got up and drove her. It wasn't that bad out, and then I felt like a kid-coddling loser. A very sleepy kid-coddling loser.

It's funny dealing with the younger classes as the school librarian, because I remember the mixed blessing that was library time as a mother. The kids loved going to the library, but trying to keep track of the library books in our swimming-in-books house and trying to remember to send them back on the right day in my swimming-in-chaos brain was a constant battle. There's one girl in grade one whose book has been overdue since September. I keep sending notices and getting no reply. The replacement cost is only five bucks, but I half think they've chosen to just withdraw from the whole pain-in-the-ass situation and honestly, I get it.

I'm having a bit of a harder time with Angus being gone. I think it's just the time of the year, when everything seems frozen and difficult and sad. I'm cleaning out the basement and I keep finding photographs and drawings and things he wrote, and in one way I remember it all so clearly and in another way it feels like it might have been someone else's life. Then I text him and it's a little bit better. It's weird to realize that whether you treasure every moment or not, they still go by, and you're washed up on the shore of the future.

Also, it's Eve's sixteenth birthday today. And I have a dentist appointment. Onward.