Minor flare-ups
Here's the thing about depression: It's an illness. It's chronic, like arthritis, and some days you feel it worse than other days. And it just comes up on you. You don't know when it's going to happen but you know it will come on and it will stay with you and make you feel strange or sad or in a small funk. For me, it's usually all of the three at once.
It's like that this week and I don't know why. My meds give me the reasoning to think about the right-nows and what-ifs and how comes. They keep depression from taking me over. But it's always with me. I do my best to remember that chemicals and their overflow in my brain affects my mood and that helps.
No. Not really. It just reminds me that all the flaws depression brings to mind when you're down, the nagging doubts -- all the self-blame when I think I'm less than I should be -- maybe it's not my fault after all. That's something, anyway.
Flying off the shelves
My kitchen cabinets fell out of the ceiling this morning. They broke away from the back wall. It's a nightmare.
Since this domestic horror started around 9 a.m. with a shuddering THWOMMMP that had me asking "Hey, what fell?" I've had to take a day off from work that I couldn't really afford to take. And I've been bagging and trashing junk -- I mean, flat-out junk -- that migrated with us during the August 1981 move from our old house in East Point to this house. Just reading that last sentence, I realize how ridiculous it all sounds. Seeing and dealing with it is much worse. Words don't do justice to the sickening feeling you get when you throw out a baby bottle warmer that looks super old... and you realize it was used to warm YOUR baby bottles. In 1972.
But as I was telling a friend this past weekend, you can either look at things in life or you can see through them. I choose to see through this, take the long view, find the silver lining among the black 39-gallon lawn-and-leaf bags littering the linoleum of my kitchen. One, when all this is over my kitchen cabinets will be nice and clean, plus newly reinforced by a real carpenter who knows what he's doing. Two, the trash pick-up guys who have been jerking me over for months on end by either showing up any old day of the week instead of their scheduled pick-up day or, usually, just not swinging by at all, are going to have a big surprise today in the form of a mountain of heavy Glad bags, neatly piled and tied, awaiting them at the curb. Heave ho, buddy.
After this, there's the little matter of that stupid, cheaply-built back shed that's literally falling down. A section of its back wall has chonked into the woods. That's next on my "to-destroy" list.
One nightmare at a time.
The cruelest week
What is it about this particular week in April that spurs such violence here in the U.S.?
Each year I feel a sense of trepidation when the third week of April -- any time from around April 15-21 -- rolls around. And here's why:
April 19, 1993 -- Waco, Texas: Members of Branch Davidians religious sect, led by David Koresh, commit suicide after 51-day siege.
April 19, 1995 -- Oklahoma City: Truck bomb at Murrah Federal Building kills 168. Convicted bomber Timothy McVeigh executed June 11, 2001, for crime.
April 20, 1999 -- Littleton, Colo: Columbine HS shooting massacre leaves two shooters, 12 students and one teacher dead; 24 injured.
And then there's today, now forever etched in our national conscience as the deadliest mass shooting in the nation's history:
April 16, 2007 -- Blacksburg, Va: At least 31 killed, including shooter, at Virginia Tech.
Back in college, one of my favorite English professors once offered our class an explanation of why we should never, ever assume that bizarrely random coincidences "just won't happen" to us. I remember leaning forward, really straining to hear his soft, gentle voice as he recounted for us the day when, as a young professor at the University of Texas, he ran into an old friend he hadn't seen in a while. The guy had experienced a difficult month, our professor said, and Dr. K asked him how he and his family had been holding up since the sad event. "Okay," his friend answered. "As well as you can under these sort of..."
The friend never finished his sentence, Dr. K told us, because that's when the shooting started. Dr. K and his friend were momentarily taken aback; then they started running for cover, just like everyone else in the quad that day.
Charles Whitman killed 15 people, including his mother and wife the night before he began shooting from the University of Texas tower, and wounded 31 others. Dr. K and his friend were lucky that day on August 1, 1966. They survived.
Dr. K wondered how it could be that right then, at that moment, he and his friend were experiencing the horror of a mass killing. And this, coming less than a month after the friend's sister, a nursing student in Chicago, had been killed by mass murderer Richard Speck on July 14.
Like Sunday
Silent and grey, today is. And so am I.
Small steps
Getting back out on the track this morning felt fantastic. It's been over a month and a half since I've NOT been hacking up the odd lung or have been hooked up to an IV in the emergency room and, therefore, able to walk and/or jog like normal.
The bad news? July 4 is the Peachtree Road Race. Not much time left to train. I've never started my training this late in the year and I feel so far behind whatever "schedule" I've always maintained in my head, if not in any sort of actuality.
But today it was enough to get back out there, to breathe like a regular person again without fear of coughing, to respect what it is to be healthy.
Decatur Girl
"What's up with your shirt?"
Two people asked me this today, in various ways phrased nothing like the above, and I'm not sure why. The shirt in question is a dark chocolate brown long-sleeved tee with a single electric blue star on the chest. In the star, the words "
decatur girl" peep out in brown and under the star is the motto "i know hardware," also in electric blue. Cute. It's cute.
Maybe it's something of an enigmatic shirt if you don't know its origin. In Decatur, Georgia, there's a local hardware store that sells Decatur-themed t-shirts. It's sort of a little hometown brand. Walk the Decatur square and you'll likely run into a guy wearing a "Decatur Dad" tee, wrangling about three kids into a Volvo. For moms and coeds (Agnes Scott College is, like, RIGHT there) it's all about the hip "decatur girl" shirts. My niece has a shirt like mine. Actually, I have a shirt like hers; she had one first, I loved it and said I'd like one. So I got one. For Christmas. From her girls, also my nieces.
I'm not a decatur girl -- not in any real sense. Not by virtue of location (I don't live there) or philosophy (I'm not a liberal, although many of my good friends are). But my cool shirt -- one of my faves -- came to me via decatur girls so I'll wear their lone star emblem and be happy.
But really? I don't know hardware.
An unremarkable day
Today I went to work, worked, drove home and am now getting ready to go to bed so that tomorrow I can do it all again. I didn't cough, though. And my stomach flu appears to be gone.
Paul Westerberg sings "A good day is any day that you're alive." I'd like to add that it's nice, however, when you have a day that doesn't include illness after you've been sick for a long, long time.
Continuance
My bronchitis is gone. It's been replaced by a horrible stomach flu that landed me in the ER for seven hours this past Wednesday when I passed out at my house from dehydration.
When does this stop? All I want is to be well again.
