Saturday, May 5, 2012

It won't let me sleep

It's like the opposite of writer's block. It's like writer's overflow.
Even though I'm tired, I've heated my foot up with the heating pad, I've finished the book I started reading on the plane home from Boston (Ruth Reichl--Garlic and Sapphires. One thing I love: reading about things I love doing, ie, eating, also, running, and writing, and up-and-quitting-one's-job and just STOPPING the paycheque-slavery that we of the gainfully employed so lament...)
So I'm up again. I did turn off the light briefly after I talked to Mike, after my next-door neighbour (I often wonder if she sits up against our shared wall, bedroom to bedroom and stills herself to hear sounds she can bristle about. In this case, tonight, it was just me, mewling along the long-distance line to Mike, that must have set her off. She started scratching the wall...or something that sounded like that. Or she's purchased a cat that is more sensitive to sound than she is. No. That can't be right. No living thing could survive in that smoky nest with her). Sorry. Uncharitable. But the scratching was...unnerving. And it had the (desired?) effect of getting me off the phone and making me alert.
F*ck.
I visited my friend (well, blog-friend) Julia (http://www.juliaipsa.com/) and took in her last few thoughtful entries, heard her describe herself as 'humble' (which is exactly how I always think of her, somehow, a very humble person, surrounded by a city full of ego, taking glorious photos and not realizing it) and I returned back to my mantra of "calm".
I very much admire Julia's wonderful attitude towards children and I remind myself of this when I get impatient on the inside as I hear children wail insistently while I am at the library (my cell phone discreetly muted) and when I am in church, trying to find some peace away from my own ego-driven city, or when I am at a restaurant.  I remind myself of how my own niece and nephew talk loudly in Starbucks and how unmoved I am when they do it (biased beyond belief I am. Nepotism at its finest).
And then I move on to a little piece in my head entitled "why I would be a terrible parent" (moody, impatient, surly in the mornings, chardonnay'ed in the evenings, homework bored me the first time 'round, I leave pills all over my apartment in the manner of a kind of Valley of the Dolls existence, I have this fetish for not putting things away yet I abhor mess..) I did that dance for a bit.
Then I turned off the light again and tried to sleep but I feel like the light from the upcoming "super-moon" is starting to invade my room. That, or after sleeping in the pure darkness of a small town in Maine and a beach town in Conneticut last weekend, my circadians are waltzing.  Super-moon is a remarkably uninspired way to describe the moon I think. They interviewed an astronomer on the radio as I drove home who, when pressed about how this years' moon compares to the super-moon of 2011, said "that was a super-super-moon".  Me, in the car, to myself: somebody get this man a thesaurus. I want to call it a "glorious" moon, or an "abundant" moon. A "generous" moon. A gift-of-a-moon. I suppose, though, that if all that we believe and research about full moons is true, there are many professions who are not looking forward to a calm weekend at all thanks to the super-moon. Doctors, nurses, ambulance drivers, police, fire-fighters. And on a Saturday night to boot. Oh God. Despite my haze of calm driving to my mom's this evening I did notice the drivers on the road seemed distracted, the pedestrians misguided, and I had a feeling of....I guess ominous anticipation.
I must have a pill for that somewhere in here.
Back to Julia--I have, I will admit, a strange predeliction to the blogs of New Yorkers. Their lives seems impossibly full ( I tease my friend L. that her weekend-goings-on are enough to fill a whole summer of weekends in my Toronto world of reclusive roof-deck-tanning and the disappearance of my friends into this new role called "motherhood").  New Yorkers' lives seem glamorous. But sometimes I can detect the amount of work they have to put in (not my friend L., she's above all that, and not Julia, she has an identity and a commitment to self that allows her to rise above too), but alot of the others--it's both tiring and thrilling to read about yet another night out, or a brunch with sixteen people (L. had me crying with laughter describing how some New York restaurants have banned cameras becuase of instagram-addicted/blog-hogging scrums photographing their food, that insistent city-driven impulse to document their important selves to the masses). Tiring too to read about workout regimens (who CARES?) and tiring to read people who are obsessed with their appearances to the point where I imagine their vanity to be beyond the realm of my imagination, and that it must be very, very crippling. {Scrum is a word I've just honed into. I love it. I love it with the same intenisty that I hate words like "hubby", "sleeps", as in 'two more sleeps' ugh it's days or nights people, pick one, go with it, "tummy" and "grub". Ick.}

But curiosity gets the better of me and I read torrid entries about why their lives are exceedingly special and I gaze at their often-poached images (L: I'm so confused, tumblr, pinterest,  what's the difference?), showing the country house that is coveted and the necklace that is begging to be bought from a store that steals ideas from artists they don't pay, and wonder: just what is so wrong with these lives they are leading that makes them look so far outside themselves for an answer, a fix?

There must be a pill for that somewhere.

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