I'd Rather Be Reading

A book that is. As in non-virtual. As in novel. As in story!

I’m reading Lorna Landvik’s novel, Oh My Stars, this week and having a hard time pulling myself away from it for just about anything else. And to think, this is my first Landvik and she has five novels under her belt before this one and my library system has them all!

There’s other stuff going on which is making it hard for me to post regularly. I flipped my hours to days towards the end of last week in the run-up to my library day on Friday and heading to Grandma’s on Saturday because I had let laundry pile up until we were desperate and I can’t do laundry late night without disturbing the sleep of two people with day jobs. So I slept at Grandma’s Saturday night. Sort of. As much as it is possible to while keeping one ear tuned to a baby monitor and one eye alert for the first sign of window light. Grandma is a dawn riser and so quiet as long as her asthma isn’t activated, she has often gotten herself out to the front room in the mornings without alerting me over the baby monitor even when I’ve been wide awake and listening for it. She tends to forget her walker in the mornings. She can also take it into her head to try to open the blinds so she can see the birds at her several bird feeders or go outside to look for her dog. It is the risk of a fall that is of most concern.

So I’m usually exhausted by the time I get home Sunday afternoon whether I slept any the night before or not. I managed, with the help of an energy drink, to have an online session Sunday night. But I didn’t accomplish much. And since then I’ve been sleeping nights. I keep falling asleep in the evenings after dinner while waiting for my mother-in-law to go to bed. My husband as woken me up in the mornings though, so that I can get online while his mom is at work and I have but I’ve been somewhat desultory about it. Just dabbling.

I was blaming it on fatigue left over from the week-end; on poor diet choices; on laziness even. But I am now considering the possibility that it is emotional. This week marks the one-year anniversary of the week my father died. One year ago today I was on the bus heading to Longview, Washington, having learned the previous Saturday that Dad’s liver was failing. So it was also one year ago today that I shopped for my new laptop in Portland, Oregon with my brother before heading on up to Longview. I fear I have yet to assimilate the complex stew of emotions that fateful juxtaposition imposed--gaining something as necessary and needful as this laptop was to me simultaneously with loosing something as necessary and needful to me as my Dad. To add to the complexity, Dad died in the wee hours of the 24th. My husband’s birthday.

Adding to it all now is my current comparing of last summer’s goals and ambitions for my writing--those which justified buying the laptop--with what I’ve actually accomplished in the past year and finding myself such a long, long way from meeting them. I’m feeling not just inadequate but unworthy. And that leads me to wonder how much of this to blame on my mood disorder and whether I should be worried about that.

As if there isn’t enough to be worried about. What with our Congress about to vote us back into the middle-ages in terms of our stance on human rights and civil rights. And the Pope quoting a medieval emperor to support his stance toward the spiritual leader of some several billion Muslims and then wonders how he could have been so misunderstood. And the North Pole now accessible by sailing boats for the first time in recorded history. (almost a week later I finaly stumbled across that link again)

No wonder I'd rather just curl up with a good story. Even better would be to curl up in it.