The weather is perfectly reflecting my mood at the moment, which is a bad sign. Today’s forecast: a cold front of drizzly depression with a heavy cloud cover of indecision. If you’re on the road, things are moving slowly due to the thick fog of doubt and uncertainty. Drive to conditions.
People passing me on the sidewalk as I sludged up Bay Street today must have thought that my headphones were piping in Henryk Gorecki’s Third Symphony (nobody does morose and elegiac like the Polish). In reality, my poor little mp3 player was doing its best to pump chipper vibrations into my brain with an unrelentingly perky playlist of things like Katrina and the Waves’ “Walkin’ on Sunshine” and Bobby McFerrin’s “Don’t Worry, Be Happy”. Whatever it takes to get me to work.
“Lovefool” by the Cardigans was perhaps a poor choice for the ‘Pick Up Your Leaden Feet and Walk’ playlist, as its upbeat tempo and catchy vocals conceal a really poor choice of lyrics for my present mindset. Dear, I fear we’re facing a problem; you love me no longer, I know and maybe there is nothing that I can do to make you do. Mama tells me I shouldn’t bother, that I ought to stick to another man, a man that surely deserves me, but I think you do! So I cry, and I pray and I beg… It gets worse from there, but you get the idea.
I received e-mails from both Justin’s mother and her fiancee yesterday, which have left me with mixed emotions. I have both a burning desire to reply and the knowledge that to do so in haste would be a very bad plan indeed. I know myself too well – writing here, in this journal, I have the awareness of an audience to keep my comments relatively lighthearted and my temper in check. In private correspondence, especially to such an involved party, the temptation to cut loose and divulge some of my more unpleasant feelings about the situation would be irresistable. And Uli and Paul deserve better than that. So I will follow the advice of my good friend
Everyone keeps remarking on how calm I seem. People don’t seem to grasp that I’m in deep denial here. It’s like I’m on an extended sleepover at my Mom’s, but when I go home everything will be okay. I had to register for a new Blockbuster card in Oakville yesterday that required me to give my home address and I just stared dumbstruck at the page for a few minutes, then started giggling hysterically. I don’t know my mother’s postal code. I couldn’t even remember her apartment number. I started to write “no fixed address”, then sobered up and wrote my Weston info, sighing in defeat.
A sizeable deposit of money from Justin showed up in my account two days ago. I haven’t had any correlating correspondence to explain what it is for. It’s about the right amount to cover the cost of our queen-sized mattress which I paid for and he’s sleeping on, but we haven’t discussed anything yet in terms of finances, so I don’t understand what I’m supposed to think this random money shit is all about. Alimony? Payment for services rendered?
I promise, tomorrow I will write about something completely unrelated. Books. Or food. Or running. Whatever it is, it won’t be this.
I have Friday free. Or at least after work Friday. Or tonight – I can totally extricate myself from my stupidomgillneverfinishit online excel course, which I really don’t want to do anyway and is mindnumbingly mindnumbing. Hey! Maybe you wanna come here and do that with me!? 😉
Let me know if you’re up to/wanting to do anything.
*smooch*
Write about whatever you want, sweetie.
…to use ye olde rhetoric for good and not for evil. That said, if it’ll be an outlet, you might draft notes which you have no intention of sending? That’s usually my strategy in similar situations – writing it all out helps me realize what is and isn’t OK to actually send.
Also, on the music side of things, there’s a reasonably well-documented (as much as anything in the field is well-documented) effect out of music therapy called the `iso-principle’, the gist of which is that playing really happy music when you’re feeling like crap often actually has the effect of making you feel worse. If this isn’t happening with your happy-ish playlist, awesome – but if it is, the general iso-principle plan (based on physics, even) is to start with something that reflects your mood, and gradually move up to happier stuff. I wouldn’t necessarily recommend starting with Gorecki – maybe Rachmaninoff? Gotta love those Russians.
Cheers,
C
My father always told me never to write anything down. You can’t take it back and it will come back to haunt you. It’s funny, since he edits correspondance between authors – sometimes some very personal stuff. But he’s very convinced that writing anything down – especially in anger – is a very bad idea. It’s been drummed into my head since I was 12 and he found the diary I used to keep and read the part where I said my mum was a bitch. Ahem – one of the biggest Come To Jesus family meetings ever after that one. This is the reason my LJ is locked down so only about 5 of my good friends can read it. Trauma.
Anyhow, don’t respond right now to the emails. Wait a week. Write about a quarter of what you want to, then edit it for kindness’s sake.
When you’re up to it, you need to start maybe thinking about the financial ramifications of what is going on with Justin. You’re common-law and entitled to half. Not that you would do that, but I don’t want you to get screwed.
I know you’re not calm honey. You’re the calm before the storm. Just keep moving – one foot in front of the other.
Ooo, also, Barber’s Adagio for G string. Talk about cathartic. Ravel’s Pavane pour un enfant defunte. Maybe some Holst (The Planets) for rage? Rite of Spring for chaos.
Not-So-Randomly:
A friend (, but he tends to only use his LJ for posting about events), is looking for a new housemate come January. The place is down at Church & Carlton, and the people are friendly.
Check his LJ- the most recent post is about the roomie search.
I’m not sure if Jan. wouldn’t be too late for you, but I know you were looking.
*hugs*
RE
I must remember that my terrifying command of the English language should be treated like Peter Parker’s spidey-sense and ability to shoot silly-string from his palms
So one day I was roiling, frothing mad and the object of my rage was moving her sister across some states and not really accessible by phone. It takes me a very long time to get mad at someone I care about so she’d never actually seen the temper in action. I wrote it down and got someone else to read it as a precaution, was OK’d and pressed send. My best friend of almost 3 years never got over it, partly because she didn’t believe I had sat down and written it in an hour or so (rather than worked it up over a couple of days) and we are no longer in touch.
But really, I didn’t think it was that bad. (I thought I was being truthful.) And I didn’t get why writing it was so much worse than saying it, particularly when face-to-face (preferable) was not an option. And I won’t do that agian. But I’m curious about what it’s like to get one of those letters…so if you want to be vitriolic and also heard, feel free to send one my way ;>
hugs,
CR