Muggy

Do people in non-humid climes know what muggy is? It seems like a word I've known all my life.

When I was a kid, we didn't have air conditioning (or cable, an answering machine or a microwave).

We did have a really enormous metal fan that took up the entire window at the top of the stairs, with metal bars that covered the front in concentric circles. It was no where close to being child safe. As a child I would give myself the heebie-jeebies by standing in front of it and imaging what would happen if I slipped my fingers inside the bars while the industrial size fan, big enough to power a small plane, noisily buzzed. Then I'd slide down the wooden railing to the living room below. Cause that's how we did back then.

At night, the whole neighborhood would sit on their front stoop, fan themselves and yell across the street to each other while trying to catch the occasional breeze. Ah, the 70's.

Anyway, today is really muggy. Here's a definition of muggy, if you want. But really it's like someone threw a warm, wet blanket over you and held you down. UGH.

I also found out today that a dear man from church is dying. Now the weather is matching my mood. I'm mad, mad at myself, for not getting to know him better, not spending more time with him. He is a wise and kindly person, I think I could have learned a lot from him. And now it's too late. That makes me feel sort of the same way, like I was blind sided by a big layer of hot fog and it's settled down over my whole being. And I had a fight with the husband, a discussion that turned hotter by the minute because neither of us backs down. I'm so tired of doing everything, including working on things. Couldn't I just have a day or two on autopilot, where everything is nice and lovely and goes the way it should.

So I laid down in a dark, hot room with the fan blowing on me and contemplated my existence. And I really missed my grandparents. I wish I could have known them as an adult. A middle-aged adult, not the selfish, always in an emergency, always busy snot of a 20 year old that I was then. I think by the time my grandma and I started to get to know each other, she was dying and it was too late. She knew, though, she finally knew what I was all about before she went, and accepted me, so that's something.

It all goes so fast. Sorry to be a downer, but it does. I am now at the age where I can look back and see things I should have done DECADES ago. God, I was so depressed. Why is life so complicated? Why do we fight? Why do we have to lose something before we see what it means to us? But, as usual, I got up, figured out some stuff I needed to do and did it, ate and drank something and got back to the business of living, muggy or no.

I'm reading Nabukov, Invitation to a Beheading, which is probably not what I need to be reading. I already feel like the world is contrived and artificial, I don't need help from him.

Like I went to a baby shower yesterday, which seem about as staged as a Catholic mass. Everyone enters, pregnant mom arrives, everyone yells surprise. Greetings continue, then the organized, slightly frantic friend will make various announcements: time to eat, time to play a shower game, time to open presents. Then cake. That was the best part, I think.

It was lovely, really. And kudos to the mom-to-be, who gets to go home with a lot of schwag. (Most of which I think is unnecessary to raising of young, I mean Diaper Genie-whatever). Maybe I'm just jealous that they are doing it "the right way." Get engaged, get married, work and save, buy a modest house and raise your kids, send them to college, retire and die. Which wouldn't even be such a prison sentence if you could at least enjoy it. Mom-to-be is going back to her low paying job almost immediately. But it doesn't matter-lawyers and doctors, cashiers and waitresses, even Anjelina Jolie I suspect, are all on this treadmill going nowhere. So how am I expected to enjoy a baby shower when I can't even find a Meaning For It All.

So, this morning, full of ennui and self loathing, I went to church. I didn't want to. And the service was pretty tame-regular pastors were not in attendance, student preacher preaching. Lackluster song choices, if I may say so, and one that was so hard to sing that we all just mumbled through it. Bitchy of me, I know, but I was in a critical mood. But I did see one old friend who I gravitated toward and she gave me a big hug and I told her I woke up on the wrong side of bed and she said that that's ok, just straighten it out now. And I got a few more hugs from people who genuinely like me. And I saw that the lady I helped last week when she almost passed out from the heat was back in her pew. They didn't have to admit her after all, just gave her a tune up and sent her home. And another parishioner who I saw in the ER this week was ok. And the wife of another good old guy I took care of a few weeks ago told me that he's going home, there's nothing more to be done and he wants to spend his last days sitting in his chair and looking out his window and that it's ok. And it was ok. Because sometimes ok is enough.

So, I got hugs and a reminder that I am both liked and useful, which is not too shabby for a Sunday morning. I like church. I'm still not sure who I'm praying to or what all the details are, but it is a tonic for those things that can't be fixed by either logic or therapy.

I got back home, still a little irritable (really, now, STILL?), wanting to write and getting interrupted a dozen times with "Mommy, can I...?" Just when I thought I would lose my stack, and S could tell, she went and brought me a sticker. Of a dragonfly, because she knows they are a special to me. And we stuck it on my phone so I can have a substantial reminder that I can't always get what I want, but sometimes I get a gentle and loving reminder not to be such a poop head.

Having a great time at the pitty party, wish you were here

I hate being depressed. I hate, hate, hate, hate it. Please don't confuse its comfortableness nor my tolerance of it, with liking it.

And fuck optimists, while we're on the subject. You people are just fooling yourselves.

All right, it's true, I don't really trust happiness, nor do I perpetually happy people. But in the absence of feeling happy, I'd like to at least feel like I could kick ass and take names. If I don't feel that people like me, it would suffice if I felt that they were in awe of me. Instead, I feel like wet socks that are only slightly moldy. As if, when getting a whiff, a person would say, "Ugh, these socks are wet and moldy," instead of, "Good God! Get a load of these socks! They're absolutely putrid!" It's one thing to be depressed, I don't also want to feel ordinary.

So I will try, for the sake of the happy, scrappy ones, to at least fee

l, if not happy, then ok with some things. I will try to remember that everything does not suck. I have a roof over my head, food in my fridge, 2 girls who adore me and a fine husband. And an adorable pup. Oh, God he is cute, even if he did eat my favorite shoes.

I mean, look at him.....

Fuck. Why am I sad again?