some good things

Writing this post with my brand new laptop as my ten year old mac book has been stuttering and unreliable for months and stopped recognizing the keyboard and touchpad about a week ago. VERY EXCITED. I plan to totally write all kinds of stuff now that I have a proper computer again. The tablet is okay, but it's not the REAL THING.

Still muddling through as a working person. It's brutal sometimes but I am doing it, albeit at about three quarters--okay maybe half?? capacity.  I am finally off prednisone and can see my cheekbones again.  My digestive system is slightly better as I have not yacked in the work trash can in two weeks. It is still, however, more or less in ruins so we will see what the GI doctor says next week.

Watching: just finished season two of The Blacklist.

Reading: The Light Between Oceans which is okay but I keep setting it aside to sleep ZZZZZZ.

Cooking: absolutely nothing because gut problems and I am too exhausted to cope with dirty dishes.

system failure

I have been gluten free for a week now and I would totally cut a b&*$@ for a waffle.

The unpleasantness of living in this angry body never stops.

Not even sure if it's helping because I had an apple the other day and I felt like DYING afterwards.

***

Why I am not writing:

I am tired like deep deep inside my bone marrow and cell nuclei and my hair follicles.  I am distracted by my other responsibilities like managing things for people who still need me and dragging myself to work even though my body is on fire and trying to prep non allergic foods when all I want to do is sleep as the dishes pile up but I don't have the stamina to wash them and netflix is calling me and I am just too exhausted to read books anymore and I want to be my old self again but somehow this no longer seems possible.

I want to wear a beautiful dress and go on a cemetery tour at midnight and drink a summery cocktail and go to the movies and eat buttered popcorn and travel and write a kickass horror novel and learn how to apply winged eyeliner. I want an uncertain future that   seems like really really cool shit might still happen like everything is just rollercoasters and cake with bits of ordinary in between.

***

This message has been brought to you by almost an entire year of system failure.

surfacing

Gradually returning from extended dreamwalking in that unpleasant parallel plane of existence I visit when I am sick. Less shaky today having consumed one quarter of a sandwich last night without DYING. Also: chamomile tea is lovely and soothing.

I was so sick I was TOO SICK TO READ.

Let's add another stellar trip to the ER to my growing record although this was the most benign so far although I do not recommend dehydration it is very very awful to retch nonstop until all that comes out is some kind of foamy mucous again and again until it feels like someone cleaned out your stomach with a garden rake.

Maybe I need to start taking vitamins and change my diet to pricey organic superfoods. Maybe I need acupuncture or a voodoo priestess to lift whatever curse has been placed on my tired, sad body. I am beginning to feel that I'll try anything level of desperation to feel well and whole and energetic.

This totally has to start getting better. I am so overdue for a period of relative good health.

@% $#&*!!

Still too sick to eat and the parasitic alien fetus that lives in my gut rejected the chocolate milkshake I made which makes me frustrated because aliens love milkshakes and everybody knows that. I am driving myself crazy with worry because I think flu? Ulcer? Failure of vital internal organs?   I don't fucking know but it's not normal to feel this bad for at least 10 solid days and not be able to eat as under normal circumstances I like food so very much. So far I can only tolerate jello and Gatorade.  Drag, dudes.

suckage

Fever, chills and nausea persist. Worked a whopping three hours today and had to call it quits by 9 a.m. Cancelled PT and went to bed. Attempted to eat some noodle soup which my body cruelly rejected. I do not know if this is flu or side effects of medication but I am totally miserable and want to give up this losing fight with my malfunctioning body.

dammitdammitdammitdammitdammit

#sicklife

The totally crap thing about  having a chronic illness is there is not a single day that goes by where you do not obsess about how you feel. I'm sure this is counterproductive but when you feel like someone has been beating you with brass knuckles and cast iron skillets all night and great clumps of hair slide down your back in the shower and you wake up feeling like you are going to vomit unless you hold very still and don't move it is hard to think about anything else.

I spend almost every spare moment sleeping after work and usually on my entire day off too.  I am often too tired to read for very long and it is difficult to stay awake to watch a 90 minute movie. The truth is this last year has been unbelievably sucky and I want to complain about it so I will do it here because it's my blog and I'll bitch if I want to.

I am thinking about buying a pretty pill bag instead of using that plastic SMTWThFS case. This is how I treat myself these days. Ha!

I had PT today and my therapist dug around in my knee forEVER and it hurt so bad I had the shakes afterwards.

I spent the rest of the day on the couch.

For now this is more of my-living-with-chronic-illness blog instead of my poetry blog so let's just roll with it, okay?

Julyness

I find it nearly impossible to do anything mostly because a 40 hour work week takes everything I have to give and there is nothing left no energy to write or to make wonderful things like homemade bread or to dream but I am trying to be useful and productive blahblahblah.

This week was feverish and there were chills and nausea and headaches and my knees and ankles are still jacked up and I spent my day off sleeping and I was too tired to even watch anything on netflix or whatever.

Today was better. I made a short trip to the store and I made sandwiches and a fresh pitcher of iced tea and I am reading In Cold Blood and I am reading Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell. This has been a weird summer because I have to stay out of the sun. I am grateful for all my books today. I have become an indoor cat.

Today feels like a collapsed sinking drooping balloon just sad as fuck.

about nothing in particular

Sometimes I miss the previous version of myself with her thick thick hair (my hair is thinning rapidly on these wicked pills) and her creative energy driving her to write something every day and doodle fairy tale pictures on index cards but she is asleep inside the slow moving automaton I am now.

I was off this weekend which was lovely and I made banana bread for M's birthday cake by request and I made little buttermilk biscuits with self rising flour because that is all self rising flour is good for and they were light and crisp and buttery and I could have eaten my weight in those little bastards.

I am binge watching The Blacklist on netflix starring a very weathered looking James Spader and all of the characters are morally ambiguous not just the criminals and I eat the episodes like those little red candy fish.

I need to give up on everthing I do so I can endlessly watch crime dramas and consume many varieties of homemade biscuits. I tire of you, real grownup world.

letters from the dreamspace

Last night I had a dream that my son was thirteen years old and he had chubby dimpled wrists like a baby and we were staying in a cottage near the ocean and we sat in the grassy spaces just beyond the sand and we watched the boats and then we danced in the living room. This was a good dream and not an anxiety dream which happens only rarely.

this:

I am thinking about how people want so many things, like trips to Hawaii or a kitchen remodel or a glamorous pair of shoes and all I want is a.) lots of sleep and b.) pain relief. No really. That's it.

I read some monster poems on Saturday at Uncharted Books and it was the first time I felt well enough to go to a reading in at least a year so it was nice to feel a little like my old self almost although not quite because I felt like hell the next day even though I wasn't really on my feet for more than a few minutes at a time. Still it was good to read and to listen and to go someplace other than a.) work or b.) a doctor's office or physical therapy.

I am off tomorrow and I want to write and bake french bread or almond poppyseed cake and maybe draw pictures of insects and tragic women but I will probably sleep and go to PT and go to the pharmacy and sleep some more and make dinner and go to sleep again.

It was so much harder than I expected it to be this back to work thing and I was exhausted  by 12:30 but I made it through an 8 hour day and then I came home and made baked ziti with garlic bread and it was a good day until my face broke out in an angry little autoimmune rash and my ankles swelled up like tennis balls but I have this compulsion to show my body that I am the boss.

I watched a horror movie called The Babadook on Netflix and it was not bad: both creepy and effective.

I finished reading The Magicians and need to move on to a new book.

I hope I can keep myself going and do ALL THE THINGS.

meanwhile, inside the confessional booth

Back to work tomorrow! Feels so normal. 

Dreamt of playing basketball with a wet washcloth instead of a ball and it kept wrapping itself around my fingers and this made it really difficult to get it through the damn hoop as you might well imagine.  Boring frustration dream.

My jaw is flaring up again but I outsmart it by taking very small bites of everything.

The house is full of baked goods because every possible emotion inspires me to make cookies and cakes and more banana bread.

I have not felt much like writing lately. I think this has been the longest time that I've not really been an active participant in poetryworld. I just want to draw pictures of bees and make pots and pots of homemade tomato soup and watch horror movies and take naps.

I am tired and my joints ache like crazy but I am oddly happy today.

Today

Today I wear a little black box to decrypt the secrets of the rock-hard charcoal briquette that is my tiny, evil heart or perhaps there are no secrets to be revealed except that it beats at the same rate as a hummingbird for no reason whatsoever. I am the queen of hearts, a mysterious arrhythmia. 

Today is earth day-birthday and my kid is twenty five and I will make a pan of gingerbread for his birthday cake as this is the request made EVERY YEAR since forever.  I have made fresh ginger cakes and gingerbread with stout and chocolate gingerbread but today is simply Joy of Cooking plain, dark, spicy gingerbread.  I have a whole stick of butter softening on the counter right now.  The only question is do I garnish with orange peel as recommended in the OLD Joy (the one with instructions on how to skin a muskrat and a recipe for Tomato Soup Cake--so retro!) or with candied ginger as recommended in the NEW Joy (which is a completely different animal, as cookbooks go). 

Today I broke the protective box for my cellular phone. A bad omen? Or good luck as my phone itself is unscathed?

Today I woke up achy and STIFF AS HELL.

Today I will sneak up to my Secret Rapunzel Tower Room and write a poem about something random.

Tuesday Randomness

This morning I slept & slept while listening to the house creak & lean in the heavy wind.  My bed might be one of my favorite places the dark quiet room the pillows & big down comforter it is so freaking peaceful. I think I return to REAL LIFE next week (and probably a buttload of paperwork) barring any new & hellish medical crisis so I am getting ALL THE SLEEP. 

I think I might actually need one of those old lady pill boxes. I am going to bedazzle it with stickers & colorful rhinestones.

My leg is very angry today which might be a reaction to PT yesterday or med changes or my adventures dreamwalking in the underworld.

Reading: The Magicians

Cooking: maybe some giant muffins the size of my head maybe double chocolate which actually makes them cupcakes if you want to get fussy about it.  I wish I had a lemon meringue pie but this would be far too labor intensive.  Maybe soup if I feel ambitious but I do not feel particularly ambitious and of course my leg is very fucking angry today indeed. 

maybe you should write yourself a love letter

It is very strange to have to THINK about walking as in heel-toe-push-off-lift-leg-bend-knee because I have been DRAGGING this leg around for so long and it still has less than half of its flexion or close to approximately half anyway.  M will stop me and say lift your foot bend your knee and he sounds just like the physical therapist so HA.

Yesterday I made a big pot of thin thin spaghetti with garlic and herbs and Z and I ate it for dinner and cooking it made me sweaty almost to the tips of my hair even though I wore a bag of frozen peas on my neck while working in the kitchen.  Then we watched Guardians of the Galaxy which was really fun and it is nice that my very grown up kid still hangs out with me occasionally, even on a Saturday night.  Next week he will be twenty five and this makes me both happy and melancholy.  It feels like I was just tripping on legos and playing board games and taking him to the park and then we crossed the tesseract and here we are.

I am making him a pan of gingerbread for his birthday cake this week.  Maybe some chocolate cupcakes too, because why not?

time time time see what's become of me

***

Dearest darling self,

I want you to remember to have coffee on the front porch remember to bend your knee to listen to the crickets with the windows open to read old science fiction novels and new books of speculative fiction and remember to watch the rain and remember to take the time to doodle something on a note card and to color neatly between the lines if it pleases you.  Remember to eat your soup out of your most beautiful antique bowl or your favorite mug with a big round spoon.  Remember to listen to rice sizzle in hot oil in your wok or to listen to the Pixies or to watch Buffy reruns when you are too tired to do anything else.  Remember to write a poem about monsters or aliens or fairy princesses if you feel the need to say things in figurative language and remember to read what other people are writing about for the sheer pleasure of it.  Remember to call your mother in law and say thank you to text your sister just to say hello to worry less and find the quiet spaces tucked into your days that ask to be filled with nothing and rest when you need to rest and find the energy for your most important tasks and know that it's enough that you folded the socks and then took a nap.  I want you to remember to draw hearts in red ink in the margins of your grocery list and to wear a swirly skirt for no reason even if you are going to be home all day.  Remember to be kind to yourself and to everyone else too even the crows and the stray dogs and the random neighborhood children who think you are a scary witch with a limp and stare like hungry jackals.  All of these things are both real and unreal and wholly beautiful even in the dark.  Remember to let the fireflies light on your wrist without shaking them off immediately.  

Love,
Me

&&&

Having a restful Saturday & trying not to be totally weird but I am still off & have the shakes & superfast superfast heartbeart that feels like DOOM.  I keep waking up every morning though so it cannot be as bad as it seems. 

Sometimes I sit very still with an icepack on my neck & try not to explode into some kind of cellular ooze or whatever.

My son grocery shopped for me & brought me a lovely pineapple which I cannot wait to cut up & eat probably in one sitting & I also have strawberries & more bananas so I might make more banana themed baked goods this week in the name of comfort & joy & easily digestible foodstuffs.

I am being fitted with a cardiac holter next week, which isn't nearly as sexy as it sounds.

Tarot readings continue to suggest a period of respite & a need for balance.  Four of Swords, Temperance, Two of Pentacles... Still I want to believe I can will myself back into semi-normal health and be able to function like I used to, but really, nope.  I am tired of needing so much rest. 

In the interim I am wearing my sunscreen & taking my numerous, numerous & ever-changing regimen of pills (the pharmacy staff totally KNOWS ME now)  & doing my PT exercises for my jacked up leg & this is all I can do so at least I am working on this business.

Pursued by a Bear

There have been far far too many wakes lately.  M has attended four in the last couple of weeks, I think.  He has another tomorrow and so do I.  I don't know why but early spring seems like an especially somber time to make an exit. 

I am uncomfortable around loss and feel awkward.

I am also grateful to still be here and then it seems selfish to think like this.  To say: I woke up this morning I had coffee with cream I called my mom I took a hot shower I took a nap I read something wonderful I paid some bills I sent my kid a funny text and to remember how lovely all this is in part because not everyone gets to enjoy one more day one more book one more cup of chamomile tea. 

It feels like you are being chased by something in a bear suit or something in a black robe carrying a scythe or maybe just a good stiff tornado with your name tumbling in the debris.

***

Random

Making my way though a monster list of phone calls today and OH how I hate that soul-killing device the telephone but it is very satisfying to make an X next to a number on the list and whittle it down.  I am also filing a butt-ton of personal paperwork today and generally getting my home office space in order.

Still feeling a bit off and on respite from the real world.  Slightly less anxious about it than I've been though.  I am thinking that I need to make granola or banana bread or both today because it makes the world seem a little nicer when things are baking and it smells of honey or almonds or bananas or chocolate or whatever and I am all for making things seem lovelier in some small small small way. 

Reading: The Devil's Detective

Watching: Happy Valley

Still sweating like a lumberjack even when I am not doing anything so maybe that's some weird hormonal perimenopausal thing or maybe I will spontaneously burst into flames.

Just to the right of the eye of the storm, here's what's happening:

PT starts Monday for my horrible messed up leg! Considering it hasn't moved in forever, I expect it will be long and torturous, but I am so glad to be working on getting better with walking & driving & etc...

(yay)

I am watching The Fall on Netflix.  I am drawn to the darkest narratives, always.

Still reading Duplex, which is magical.

I might bake today.  I feel almost upbeat.  

Social media is exploding with AWP pictures and posts.  I want to buy ALL YOUR BEAUTIFUL BOOKS.

I shall have to order them from my Secret Rapunzel Tower Room hidden in the Wild Midwest.

Fairy Tales for Grown Ups, Issue #11

Once upon a time you saw a rabbit and knew it was an omen.  Your luck has always been nebulous and hard to catch.  You look for signs in the rocks, fragments of bone in the shape of something violent, but old.  Where are the fairy lights that signal egress?  You are forever lost in this wood, looking for things determined to stay hidden, at least from you.  You started out as a girl, then a duckling, a doe.  Whatever you become it will have spindly legs and seem vulnerable.  You have never been a fox or anything else carnivorous.  This might be fate or choice or simply your nature but there is no way to be sure.  You may visit a witch looking for answers but you will only leave with additional maladies- lesions and fevers, a rash in the shape of a crescent moon. Leave your curses where they lie, or better yet, accept that you are something almost-dangerous in that you are becoming bestial.

***

Feeling Alien(ated)

I dislike the concept of illness-as-identity. It lingers, keeps you separate from the rest of the world, here you are in all your otherness catapulted out of everyday life, the workforce, normal physical productivity.  I am a walking fever, a harbinger.  So you look away.  If I could, I'd look away too.

Last night I dreamt of museum tour groups as an elaborate ruse for alien abductions.  Go on the tour, get implanted with alien mind control device and be complicit in the planetary takeover.  The aliens were humanoid, horned, gold and white, glowing.  Later, I was in a warm, brick-walled kitchen making homemade tortillas on an iron tortilla press.  The juxtaposition of the ordinary and the strange, the familiar and the alien seems thematically significant.

I am currently reading Duplex by Kathryn Davis and it is wonderful so I keep stopping after brief intervals because I don't want it to end.   I am watching X-files reruns which might explain the alien dreams and also iZombie which is more entertaining than I expected.  I don't watch The Walking Dead anymore because I got super bored during season 3 and generally am SO OVER the zombie thing but I like this new show, probably because I need my monsters to be sentient. 

Also, social media gives me the blues these days, but it is so hard to step away from it.

Oh it is a nice quiet Sunday morning so naturally I am making coffee-vanilla flavored granola in my pajamas and it smells wonderful. It is very hard to seed a vanilla bean pod with unsteady hands but I made that shit happen although there are vanilla bean specks EVERYWHERE.

Not dead, just feels like it

After another semi-long bout of illness (pericarditis, flu and strep) which knocked me on my ass for about ten days I am trying to get motivated to do something other than sleep or lie sleepless.  The world (my tiny little world of dull responsibilities) always implodes when I am immobile.  Yesterday was the first day I felt okay enough to get something done so I started working my way through the giant pile of sickness laundry which is the grossest thing ever.  The fevers peaked and broke for days and days. At one point my fever registered 105.2--no shit.  So there are many sweaty pajamas to wash.  Last week the Everybody-Loves-Raymond-Cardiologist asked, "Do you have any luck at all?"

Nope.

I have not written anything or read anything.  I need something wonderful to read now that I can hold my head upright for more than a minute and I think with a really good book things might look a little better. I am going back to work tomorrow (again) so hopefully I will not feel like hot garbage in the morning. 

I keep thinking I can somehow structure my life so that I am DOING MORE but this is challenging as I find that I need a significant amount of sleep to function (I often go to bed at 7:30 to get up at 5).  It's the creative stuff that gets ignored because somehow it gets pushed down below the bills and the parents and the laundry and work and those things don't go away as my Sisyphean dreams remind me often.  I have written a couple of poems.  Not many.  I don't know how everyone else is so productive.  I know the illness and fatigue are part of it, but sometimes it seems pointless but of course it isn't it's just so hard keep going.  


Not terribly upbeat today, but I might make some soup.  Soup is EVERYTHING.

I have survived a week and a half of work so far and I am exhausted and not reading books or anything except on my breaks and lunch.  I am sleeping too much like nine or ten hours and I want to go to bed by six thirty but I make myself stay up until at least seven.  Basically I work for eight hours and then I come home and collapse.

I dreamed I was walking around with no pain and no limp but I woke up and it wasn't real.

Sometimes my ankles look like elephant stumps. 

I am more burned out than I expected.

BRIEF

Last night I dreamed that my feet were deformed and my toes were twisted and pointing in all different directions which would require surgery and I am sure there was more to the dream but it slipped away as dreams do. 

Back to work this week.  Tired and sore but grateful to feel productive and to be back in the REAL WORLD and hoping everything will be okay. 





I sleep too much.

Confessional Booth, part 1:

1. I have reached that point where I am tempted to take a scissors to my head and cut my own damn hair which never ends well so I am trying to talk myself out of it. 

2. My leg is totally jacked up today and it feels like it belongs to someone else like in that short story by Ray Bradbury ("Fever Dream") where the little boy feels the fever take over his body bit by bit until he disappears and is replaced entirely by the disease.  

3. My soup spoons arrived yesterday and they are beautiful.

Elliptical Orbits and other Esoterica

According to my horoscope today is supposed to be pretty stellar but so far I am unimpressed.  I am supposed to be back in the REAL WORLD of work next week and I am hoping this goes as well as can be expected and therefore we have changed some medication to smack down all the horrible shit my body tries to do to itself.  YEP.  I wrote a poem yesterday and the day before that but they are very random pieces and wouldn't work with my manuscript but that's okay.

Watching: I am getting caught up with American Horror Story Freak Show although so far this is the weakest season and I am a little bored.  Meh.

Reading: Still on The Land of Love and Drowning which is so far just okay.  I am a little disappointed with this one too but there's still time for it to get my attention.  Maybe.

(obviously I don't like anything this week and I am hard to please.)

Cooking: I made some pretty excellent fried tacos with homemade salsa and chicken soup with leeks and yesterday I fried up some breaded pork chops in a cast iron skillet because I am OLD SCHOOL like that sometimes.  The fridge is full of good leftovers this week.  I have not baked at all but I am thinking about chocolate chip cookies with coconut or almond shortbread if I am not too tired this weekend but that's probably just the effing prednisone talking. HA!

Sometimes I want to avoid all of the paperwork and phone calls that dominate my home life these days and I put shit off so I make little bargains with myself like I will make one phone call and organize one file and pick one bill to pay and then I can eat lunch or read or whatever (basically I treat myself like a two year old).  It totally works though.   

 

TRIAL & ERROR

I drove my car today without dying and I go back to work next week and my new pills are ginormous enough to choke a beluga whale. AND my odds of another allergic reaction are high because of my reaction to that last bad business so I am keeping benadryl in my purse.

Glorious. 

If I had any dreams last night I don't remember them.  The check engine light is still on so the car must see the car doctor and I must see the people doctor tomorrow despite my doctor-o-phobia.  I have contemplated every possible health catastrophe at this point so I am TOTALLY PREPARED THOUGH. 

I am going to make so much soup this week now that I have wonderful things like leeks and parsnips and those little fine soup noodles and even some fresh herbs which are a total splurge in January. 

Both the five of pentacles and the five of wands have made multiple appearances in recent tarot readings.  I am also seeing the eight of swords.  This is a time of relative instability where things have been thrown out of balance and options seem limited.  Perhaps this will evolve in the coming weeks. 

........

Listing:

Dreaming: I was an airline attendant and I was tall and slender with long wavy dark hair.  I spoke Dutch and Chinese and all the passengers on the plane had handmade wooden toys with mechanical parts.

Reading: The Land of Love and Drowning  by Tiphanie Yanique

Writing: About fear and anxiety.  WRITE WHAT YOU KNOW, Y'ALL.

Baking: Simple brownies with cocoa.  I usually melt fancy dark chocolate and make SERIOUS brownies but these were surprisingly good.
 
Watching: Falling snow and ticking clocks.  The check engine light. Also Peaky Blinders on Netflix.

Self-Diagnosing: I believe the clinical term really is Nacho Cheese Lung.

RAMBLE

Last night I dreamt I ran a feminist book club and it had a really cool name that I've already forgotten although I know it began with an M. 

Throat is much less tight and sore and choke-y so while my lungs still feel like they're full of nacho cheese this is a huge improvement.  I tried M's super powerful cough syrup but it was the texture of actual mucous and made me gag so, NOPE. Felt much less exhausted last night and Z took down the tree while I wrapped ornaments and drank some wine and this was good although the family room looks suddenly naked like it always does after that first week of January when the lights and greenery come down. 

I am very very bad a coping with uncertainty for example work issues and health issues and the intersection of these two things and wish I could just sort of fix everything myself and move on to REGULAR LIFE but I tried that already and it was a mess so ugh and whatever. 

I just realized I used to write in short clipped sentences but now I am more comfortable freewriting these long-ass run on sentences so as not to disrupt the flow of thought.  After I ramble here I have been writing poems in the same fashion so this gets me in WRITING mode.  The goal is to have a number of submittable pieces in a couple of months.  I sent out very little in 2014 and 2015 will be the year of poems and stories and other good things. 

Today there should be cake. 

Thinking about Doing

Stayed up past midnight to finish Station Eleven which I really really enjoyed and now I need to figure out what to read next.

I should also stay off the internet because now I think I have a throat infection or something because it is hard to swallow and I wake up feeling like my throat is all closed up but of course it isn't it just aches.  Maybe an aftereffect of hives-hideous rash? I need a malady free day. 

I am perpetually exhausted but I think I might still like to make a tiny intense little chocolate cake to make life feel happier.  Also a really excellent chicken soup would be good but I am without proper vegetables. 

Mostly I think about doing things but then I don't actually do them.

Better Days

Hideous Rash with 101 degree fever and chills finally finally going away.  Horrific. Was so sick I could barely move. While I am bummed about having to discontinue the first DMARD and start over I am glad to be feeling a little less like I have leprosy.  Have survived the non-holidays and the snow is beautiful today.

AND!! I have many books in the queue:

Stone Mattress      Margaret Atwood
Lathe of Heaven      Ursula K. Le Guin
Duplex      Kathryn Davis
Cloud Atlas     David Mitchell
Station Eleven     Emily St John Mandel
The Secret Place    Tana French


Finished watching Black Mirror on Netflix and I need a new obsession.  The White Bear Episode was crazy and my favorite was 15 Million Merits.

***

Dreamt of a house with many living rooms all laid out next to each other like a furniture store in a weird grid of couches and chairs and area rugs.  I was staging the house to be sold and it was quite overwhelming because every time I fixed a room I found two more that needed to be cleaned up and remodeled.  Sisyphean dreams, always recurring in some form or another.