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I spent the evening watching O Brother... and eating popcorn (an important part of a balanced diet) and playing with my LJ. Reading some old entries, looking for things to add to my "memories", looking for things I wrote. I'm so amazed that I've been writing here for almost a year; I've been very hard-pressed to be faithful about keeping a journal in the past.

Also, unhappy about how aimless I've been in the last year, because of my health and what's happened in my family. It would be easy to be too hard on myself. I'm just starting to feel better, and even so, I still have to spend a day or two each week in bed because I just hurt so much from head to toe. The little shopping trips of this afternoon wore me out for today... just getting my brows waxed, coming home and resting for a few hours, and taking a short trip to Target took almost all of my energy.

I'm glad that the preliminary treatments seem to be helping, though. Hopefully I will be able to go back to school in the fall, and transfer for winter term. I feel like I'm taking baby steps in that direction. I have bad days, but overall I feel better than I have in quite a while.

Now I'm sleepy. I haven't talked to Tuesday in a while, about a week, and I am missing her and wondering what she's up to. I'm still behind on reading my friends' entries, by the way, by several days. Please forgive. One girl, two eyes, ten fingers, a million ways to procrastinate.

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oof! slept a long time and woke up with killer cramps.

bad dreams last night that i don't feel like detailing. recurrent situations. basically anxiety dreams. at one point half my mother's family descended on us with no warning.

To keep this from being an entirely pointless entry... weirdness is going on with my grandmother. it looks like she's dumping my grandfather... finally. they've been married for 55 years. he has a choice now to do what she wants or to deal with being dumped. it's VERY interesting.

See, my grandparents got married in the 1940s, obviously. My grandmother was an art student in Boston and my grandfather was a guy from Ohio who had been in the Merchant Marine. I have no idea how they met; I don't think it was a particularly fond memory for my grandmother. There is a lot of suspicion in the family that they "had" to get married and that the "anniversary" date is not the actual anniversary, blah blah blah. Whatever the reason, my prim grandmother ended up living in a shack in Ohio. That gradually improved, but the relationship was never good; there were seven kids and my grandfather was constantly out with other women. Apparently, whenever she wanted to leave him, he would threaten her with never seeing her children again.

So since she's been in the hospital (since Mother's Day), with this hip that she broke last fall, she's been on antidepressants, and on a nicotine patch, and she's starting to assert herself. She's changing the power of attorney, taking it away from my grandfather. Now, not only is she willing to look for an apartment in some sort of assisted-care facility, she's eager to do so... and she doesn't care whether or not my grandfather comes with her. She refuses to go back and live in their house: she only has a tiny room off the livingroom, and she hates it. She calls it "the CAVE he's pushed me into." She can't even make it upstairs anymore, so he has the whole upstairs to himself.

My grandfather is very pissed-off. Not only the usual things that someone would feel upon being declared incompetent (his Parkinson's is one reason why the POA is being taken away from him, because it makes his speech virtually unintelligible), but also being dumped by a woman he's been threatening to dump for years, and generally losing control over her.

It's awfully interesting. I hope she keeps her newly-developed backbone.

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catching up on my friends' entries, still... not TOO much further to go... then i can check out the new people.

i snaked this from Chris:

7 Things of Which I am (At Least Mildly) Afraid:
-fear
-pain (like, i'm afraid of cutting myself when slicing veggies)
-another bad breakup; the last few were so awful and drawn-out that i really just want to get married or something so i never have to date again.
-revealing too much too soon & being dissected
-potential for personal mediocrity (that is, never living up to anything near my potential)
-change
-death


7 Things That Make Me Laugh
-silly humor
-funny kid comments ("smeg...ma?")
-feline hijinks
-people doing dumb things, getting ironic comeuppance
-irreverent humor
-me doing something foolish (gotta laugh at oneself, because the alternative is being laughed at and shamefaced and not letting it go...)
-cute things

7 Things That Make Me Cry (Sometimes)
-fights with my mother
-seeing small helpless things getting hurt, IE animal or child abuse
-thinking too hard about situations that made me cry in the past
-relationship problems, when they come up (friends or boys, doesn't matter)
-death of a person or animal who was close to me
-feeling hopeless about my health
-being in lots of pain


7 Things I Love
-animals (cats, dogs, rabbits, etc)
-my mom and dad
-my close friends
-boys
-books
-writing
-music

7 Things I Don't Understand
-extremism
-thoughtlessness / wilful ignorance
-my cat's thought processes
-cruelty
-american culture
-theoretical quantum physics (not for want of trying)
-boys

7 Things on My Desk
-17" Dell monitor
-dragon beanie baby from the Chinese Zodiac collection
-shelf of design books (photoshop, HTML, Illustrator, Dreamweaver, Javascript, blah blah blah)
-several cd travel holders
-tower of zip disks
-stuff to drink (glass of water, favorite mug)
-stack of cute stickers

7 Things About Me
-I am prone to starting collections of things
-I spend too much money on books
-I was physically and emotionally abused as a child
-I used to be obsessed with France, especially Belle Epoque Paris
-I still sing opera in the shower
-I hold grudges but am TRYING to stop. Really. I only have one person left who I totally loathe and I'm even softening towards her, wishing there were ways I could make her life better (aside, obviously, from disappearing). But serious shit has been talked on both sides, so it's probably better just to write that one off entirely. I'm trying not to talk shit about people at all anymore. Even if they're begging for it and doing shit to me. Om.
-I am suspicious and paranoid and do not have much faith in most people (from experience!), so it is hard for me to keep a semi-public online journal.

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I can't decide what to read next. It's not for want of choices, it's more from a surfeit of them.

I finished Welcome to My Planet (Where English is Sometimes Spoken by Shannon Olson this week. The main character is named Shannon Olson. It's billed as a beach read; most of its blurbs are from questionable sources (women's fashion mags), and it's supposed to be funny. I think this was all misleading: while it's not the sort of thing to get rave reviews in the Times Book Review, it's also not a laugh riot. It's a fairly serious book about a young woman, somewhat hapless, trying to navigate her post-collegiate years. It had more depth than I expected, though it's not great literature.

I also finished Einstein's Dreams by Alan Lightman, which I was carting around in my purse for two days. A quick read, more ideas than plot. It's a series of vignettes about the possible functions of time and space. One describes a universe where people have no concept of the future, another describes one in which time is a physical dimension, a third is about a world in which time moves more slowly at higher altitudes, a fourth is a place in which nobody ever dies except by choice. Certainly intriguing and worth rereading. People who like surrealism and Borges might appreciate it. Lightman is a physicist who has taught writing and overseen MIT's humanities program. The book is slight but charming, challenging, and involving.

Books I'm considering reading next: Sputnik Sweetheart, Ulysses, Deus Lo Volt!, House of Leaves, Bee Season, The Amber Spyglass, Time's Arrow, The Chess Garden, or the remainders of several books I've started... I've really been stockpiling, figuring a time would soon come when I wouldn't be able to afford to buy books for a while, so I have a nice backlog of things to read that could keep me occupied for at least several months.

Plans to go out for the evening have just abruptly been called on account of storms, so... I'm going to sit at home and listen to the storm, I suppose, and read whichever book it is that I choose. I could also work on Project Desk.