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dragonlady7via http://ift.tt/2fnItkZ:
I keep getting approximately thirty seconds a day to sit down and look at the Internet or think about my life and choices. This is how you stave off depression: zero downtime. You still feel lowkey awful but without any introspection you don’t have time for self-hatred. It’s effective, though exhausting.
I had a few moments this morning, when I’d woken up and needed to pee and had gone out in the 42-degree weather to pee in the woods because the woods are less creepy than the outhouse but Jesus Christ I’m awake now, I’m awake, and I got my computer out and climbed back into my bed and got in my blanket fort, and the damn computer died because the battery got cold enough to go from 76% to 0% instantly. Disconcerting! I snuggled it for a while, but I knew that wasn’t going to recharge it.
(Sidenote: some vintage film cameras had battery holders for cold weather that were designed to be outside the camera, connected by wires, held inside the photographer’s mitten to stay warm. Expressly designed for this purpose. Fascinating, no?)
I wasn’t cold at all, but I think that’s because I looked like an inverse Princess and the Pea, with the blankets piled on top of me. I wish I could get a picture but I can’t, it’s impossible to convey. I have two air mattresses (one flat), a quilt on top of and underneath the good air mattress, an eggcrate foam mattress pad and a quilted mattress pad, then one more quilt for good measure, a fitted sheet, then a flat sheet, then another flat sheet, then a Vellux blanket (one of those velvet-foam thingies), a down comforter in a flannel duvet cover, a heavy cotton blanket, a light poofy comforter I mostly pull up over my head to be the blanket-fort face section (with breathing tunnel, and a long enough one gives you the sweet spot of enough air but not too cold), and then on top of that I have a woven blanket of probably polyester, and a hand-knitted afghan of the fluffiest synthetic acrylic wool you’ve ever seen.
You can’t tell if I’m in the bed or not. I’m not cold even if it’s 42 out. It makes it real hard to get up in the morning, though. (And I’m wearing long underwear, two pairs of socks, flannel pants, a tank top, a bra camisole, a long-sleeve t-shirt, a cashmere sweater (there’s a story), and then a hooded sweatshirt over the top of that. Comfy, but you also can’t tell if that’s me in my clothes or a snowman.
Flattering winter fashion. (I’m wearing that many layers today, and it’s only awkward because indoors, my b-i-l has the heat up because his childhood best friend is visiting with his wife and two kids, one like 8 and one 10 months, and they’re from the South and have no tolerance for the cold. So it’s 75 in here and I’m dying but you can’t casually strip off the long underwear under your jeans every time you take your boots off.
Anyway. Yesterday we got the delivery of the balsam greens imported from Canada to make the holiday wreaths and swag and roping and kissing balls (if you’re from New England, you know what that is, if you’re not, you just got a really weird visual, right? They’re just little spheres of greenery people like to hang on their porches.)
I spent the day cutting up greens and assembling wreaths. There’s a little Bluetooth speaker thing that I like to set up out there and use my phone to play Google Play playlists. So during the day yesterday, while I was alone, I played mariachi and Mexican folk music, and thought about the poor man who was killed nearby and how far from home he was (he’d lived in the area a while, but the roommate they killed when he came home to the murder scene was only 23, the first victim’s cousin, and had only just come up from their hometown in Mexico quite recently). Maybe there was some gang thing or other involved in it, nobody’s saying anything, but you think about young men uprooted from their communities like that, and I don’t know, it just all seems horrible. It made me think about that bit in Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, which I haven’t read in many years– something about how in moments of extremity, a creature’s distress is proportional to how far from home they are, and how on Earth you’re rarely aware of it because you can’t be more than a few thousand miles away, but Ford Prefect was from wherever he was from and it was noticeable and baffling to Arthur Dent. I’ve always sort of thought of that, myself, living a couple hundred miles from my family– it’s not much, but it’s something. How much worse, for these young men so far from home. Whatever they were involved in (and the second boy, only 23, how deeply involved could he have been?), nobody deserves to be bludgeoned to death with a hammer.
Anyway. We discuss often whether the farm is haunted, after so many years of continuous use. If it is, the ghosts are nice. I thought, poor Cristian Gonzales Hernandez, I hope he has gone to rest, but if he hasn’t, I serenaded him with Lola Beltrán and kind thoughts for him and his doubly-bereaved family.
More cheerfully, in the evening, middle-little sister had made plans with a Disappointing Dude which fell through and so she showed up, dressed to go to a bar and decide whether or not to sleep with a dude, and instead got to work with me, trimming greenery and teaching me about pop songs. We had to find her additional clothing, she didn’t even have a pair of socks. I put her in Baby(Farm) Sister’s farm boots, because those things are so insulated, but Middle-Little has actual petite girl-sized feet (ok, size 8) and FarmSister has size 11 feet, so it was unmitigatedly hilarious. I also had to loan her a sweatshirt, but since it was one of her castoffs to begin with it was extra entertaining.
I keep getting approximately thirty seconds a day to sit down and look at the Internet or think about my life and choices. This is how you stave off depression: zero downtime. You still feel lowkey awful but without any introspection you don’t have time for self-hatred. It’s effective, though exhausting.
I had a few moments this morning, when I’d woken up and needed to pee and had gone out in the 42-degree weather to pee in the woods because the woods are less creepy than the outhouse but Jesus Christ I’m awake now, I’m awake, and I got my computer out and climbed back into my bed and got in my blanket fort, and the damn computer died because the battery got cold enough to go from 76% to 0% instantly. Disconcerting! I snuggled it for a while, but I knew that wasn’t going to recharge it.
(Sidenote: some vintage film cameras had battery holders for cold weather that were designed to be outside the camera, connected by wires, held inside the photographer’s mitten to stay warm. Expressly designed for this purpose. Fascinating, no?)
I wasn’t cold at all, but I think that’s because I looked like an inverse Princess and the Pea, with the blankets piled on top of me. I wish I could get a picture but I can’t, it’s impossible to convey. I have two air mattresses (one flat), a quilt on top of and underneath the good air mattress, an eggcrate foam mattress pad and a quilted mattress pad, then one more quilt for good measure, a fitted sheet, then a flat sheet, then another flat sheet, then a Vellux blanket (one of those velvet-foam thingies), a down comforter in a flannel duvet cover, a heavy cotton blanket, a light poofy comforter I mostly pull up over my head to be the blanket-fort face section (with breathing tunnel, and a long enough one gives you the sweet spot of enough air but not too cold), and then on top of that I have a woven blanket of probably polyester, and a hand-knitted afghan of the fluffiest synthetic acrylic wool you’ve ever seen.
You can’t tell if I’m in the bed or not. I’m not cold even if it’s 42 out. It makes it real hard to get up in the morning, though. (And I’m wearing long underwear, two pairs of socks, flannel pants, a tank top, a bra camisole, a long-sleeve t-shirt, a cashmere sweater (there’s a story), and then a hooded sweatshirt over the top of that. Comfy, but you also can’t tell if that’s me in my clothes or a snowman.
Flattering winter fashion. (I’m wearing that many layers today, and it’s only awkward because indoors, my b-i-l has the heat up because his childhood best friend is visiting with his wife and two kids, one like 8 and one 10 months, and they’re from the South and have no tolerance for the cold. So it’s 75 in here and I’m dying but you can’t casually strip off the long underwear under your jeans every time you take your boots off.
Anyway. Yesterday we got the delivery of the balsam greens imported from Canada to make the holiday wreaths and swag and roping and kissing balls (if you’re from New England, you know what that is, if you’re not, you just got a really weird visual, right? They’re just little spheres of greenery people like to hang on their porches.)
I spent the day cutting up greens and assembling wreaths. There’s a little Bluetooth speaker thing that I like to set up out there and use my phone to play Google Play playlists. So during the day yesterday, while I was alone, I played mariachi and Mexican folk music, and thought about the poor man who was killed nearby and how far from home he was (he’d lived in the area a while, but the roommate they killed when he came home to the murder scene was only 23, the first victim’s cousin, and had only just come up from their hometown in Mexico quite recently). Maybe there was some gang thing or other involved in it, nobody’s saying anything, but you think about young men uprooted from their communities like that, and I don’t know, it just all seems horrible. It made me think about that bit in Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, which I haven’t read in many years– something about how in moments of extremity, a creature’s distress is proportional to how far from home they are, and how on Earth you’re rarely aware of it because you can’t be more than a few thousand miles away, but Ford Prefect was from wherever he was from and it was noticeable and baffling to Arthur Dent. I’ve always sort of thought of that, myself, living a couple hundred miles from my family– it’s not much, but it’s something. How much worse, for these young men so far from home. Whatever they were involved in (and the second boy, only 23, how deeply involved could he have been?), nobody deserves to be bludgeoned to death with a hammer.
Anyway. We discuss often whether the farm is haunted, after so many years of continuous use. If it is, the ghosts are nice. I thought, poor Cristian Gonzales Hernandez, I hope he has gone to rest, but if he hasn’t, I serenaded him with Lola Beltrán and kind thoughts for him and his doubly-bereaved family.
More cheerfully, in the evening, middle-little sister had made plans with a Disappointing Dude which fell through and so she showed up, dressed to go to a bar and decide whether or not to sleep with a dude, and instead got to work with me, trimming greenery and teaching me about pop songs. We had to find her additional clothing, she didn’t even have a pair of socks. I put her in Baby(Farm) Sister’s farm boots, because those things are so insulated, but Middle-Little has actual petite girl-sized feet (ok, size 8) and FarmSister has size 11 feet, so it was unmitigatedly hilarious. I also had to loan her a sweatshirt, but since it was one of her castoffs to begin with it was extra entertaining.
