Virtual drought breaks and I worry about dirty laundry (and Actual drought breaks all over clean washing)

I’ve gone a bit cold on blogging at the moment. It’s a combination of factors contributing, including lots of work on, which translates as many in-front-of-screen hours, a sense of unease about my motives for blogging (like me, look at me, approve of me), slightly aware that maybe it’s not a great idea to blog to all and sundry what you wouldn’t talk about to all and sundry, and feeling a bit self protective of the details of my life but not quite sure what else to write about if not that (’so, a man walks into a bar). Und so weiter..
So, a man walks into a bar.

I finished knitting my scarf last night – double rib, autumn colours, nice and soft, with good stretch and bounce. I’m thinking about adding tassles.

(I worked long hours last week, and struggled with feeling ‘poor me’ and on the other hand remembering ‘hey, you chose this, and in some ways, you made these hours by biting off too much, not being willing to scale back outputs, not delegating more’ and at the same time feeling ever so slightly terribly self-important and excited to be just caught up in the fabulous flow of events and thinking and deadline meeting. I really did work too much, and one night got a scant few hours sleep as a late night butted into a pre-out of the city workshop early start, and while my body came through with the goods needed to smile and think and facilitate for 3 hours, I felt like I’d been wrung out of zest and awakeness for a few days afterwards. Am finding I just don’t bounce back from nights with only a few hours sleep like I once did (who knew that at 31 you’d start to feel older?)
Don’t seem as good at this work-life balance thing as I might like, made harder by finding my work fascinating at times, and by feeling compelled to be good enough at everything I get handed, even when it’s new, out of my comfort zone or I do it with little support. My model is to immerse myself in it, try to do it to the level that I am happy with it, rather than what is actually required or what would be just good enough. I like to learn the nuances and how everything fits together and I find it almost painful to have to engage with a new set of ideas or field without getting to explore all the gaps and contradictions, the flows, the relationships between ideas. I hate the thought of skimming over or misinterpreting bodies of thought, I like to feel like I know them all the way through. This means I often feel anxious about new work until I’ve got to that level of understanding, means I work longer than I might, strictly speaking need to, and probably drives other people slightly batty at times. On the other hand I sometimes wonder how people can live with such patchy approximations and poorly thought out logic that they seem quite happy with.)

Had a very strong craving, which I followed up on, for tomato soup out of a can (well, heated on the stove as per the instructions, but originally out of the can) with grilled cheese on toast for dinner tonight.

(Family issues are rolling along as a constant companion these past weeks. It’s not anything urgent or right now, for the most part, just unpacking and understanding relationships and impacts, taking a good hard look at myself, and sometimes a less hard look at myself. Have read a range of family therapy texts, both those written for patients and those written for therapists, just to get a nice balance of perspectives. Sometimes thinking about this stuff brings things close to the surface and I feel quite tender and also despair at how much work I feel like I need to do to be the kind of person I’d like to be. Other times it feels relieving because I have words to describe the situations/s and feel less like I am just a fruit loop and instead am able to understand possible relationships between past factors and current ones, and also to know that other people have been in similar situations and made progress. Sometimes I cry and feel like I am just broken and will never be fixed, and on those days it’s hard to keep up appearances and go and be social and chatty at work, to keep things rolling along. Lots of work on boundaries and assertiveness amongst other fun stuff. And the more I do it the more I can see how poorly developed those skills are in me, and that can be really hard to deal with at times. On the up side, at least I’ve stopped worrying about whether my therapist likes me, whether he’s having an awful time having to listen to me, whether I’m telling him too much and whether it’s emotional baggage that will impact on his life, whether there’s a ‘proper’ way to do sessions and maybe I’m not doing it, whether I’m being selfish and self-serving by being there, and whether I’m just being attention seeking and melodramatic. At least now I do think, almost all the time, that it’s a hard but healthy thing to be doing.)

A man on the street facing a woman with a cockaspanial and another women patting the dog. The dog is ecstatic and both head and tail are wagging at the attention. Man says just as I walk past ‘I’m beautiful. I get washed twice a week’ and for a full beat I think ‘crazy man talking to these women’ then recalculate as the women laugh and he keeps on talking, realizing that he is the co-owner of the dog, and is speaking on behalf of the dog, in his sing song ‘girl’ and ‘dog’ voice.


[Act 1, Scene 1 – washing line, in the dark, while cat goes to the toilet in freshly raked compost]
Housemate: Well I don’t know about this rain they talked about.
Me: Nah, it hasn’t happened yet.
Housemate: It’s very still, there’s no wind to.. you know
Me: Yeah
Housemate:.. you know woosh it in, like ‘it’s coming’
Me: nah. Although there are clouds, quite high up. White.
Housemate: yeah.
Me: I hope it doesn’t though, this isn’t quite dry, I don’t want to bring it in yet.
Housemate: Nah.
[Scene 2 – five minutes later, inside, escalating sound reveals itself as steady rain beginning.]
Me: “…”