Tuesday, December 10, 2002

'Tis the Season to Be Sickly...



Ugh. Did anyone get the number of that truck? And could someone get it to come back and finish the job? Apparently running me over and then backing up and running me over again didn't quite do me in completely.

I do not have time for this. I'm supposed to be packing and moving things. I was supposed to have my entire kitchen moved by this point, and be halfway through sorting my clothes into "keep" and "send to Goodwill" piles. Instead, I'm laying on the couch playing the Hot/Cold game. I'm hot, so I open the balcony doors. I'm cold, so I close them and grab a blanket. Repeat ad infinitum. And my head's all stuffed up. I feel like that little kid on the cold commercial that tells his mom that only one side of his nose is working.

I know it's not the flu, since I got a flu shot this year. It's not the same bug that Zappagirl is currently battling. I'm not coughing, and I don't seem to have any chest congestion. I just can't breathe, am sneezing frequently, and have no energy whatsoever. Standing up makes me dizzy. And while this is a cheap high, it's not the optimal condition to be in when packing wine glasses.

So, as much as I hated to do it, I called in sick today. Now I know that's what sick days are for, but I have been guilting myself about this all day. (Well, the few hours that I was conscious - I slept a lot today.) Somewhere in my head, I decided that calling in sick for a cold was a complete cop-out, and sick days should be for major illnesses (that last for a day or two). According to my screwed up moral code, I should have just stopped at Walgreens on the way to work and spent the day at my desk in a Dayquil-induced daze. Instead I was a whiny little baby and called in over a case of the sniffles and a fever.

(And yes, I do have a fever. I just checked - I'm currently simmering at 99.6, and I'm usually closer to 98 degrees even. By the way, glass thermometers are evil. I had a digital one at some point, but it seems to have wandered off. I have a new respect for my mother at the moment, because trying to hold the stupid thing under my tongue for the required five minutes was a complete pain in the butt. Trying to convince a child to do this constitutes a small miracle.)

And to make matters worse, I wasted the entire day by sleeping. Yes, I know this is my body trying to tell me to slow down and stop stressing, but this loss of valuable time when I need it the most just makes me more stressed. Stress is compounded by more stress, and it just makes me angry and depressed.

The time of the year isn't helping matters much. I have really come to dislike the winter holiday season, and I'm not sure why. Maybe it's the commercialism and residual retail syndrome. All of the stores have had their decorations up for at least a month, all of the advertisements on television have been telling me that spending a lot of money is the best way to celebrate, and Best Buy keeps telling me what a valuable customer I am and keeps sending me invitations to preferred customer weekends that have neither the time nor funds to visit. And while I don't blindly buy into the "spend money and buy the love of your friends and family" thing (no pun intended), it makes me feel bad that I declared my monetary problems more important than everyone else's and postponed the exchanging of gifts until February. I'm not even going to make cookies this year, and this is another Catch 22 for me. See, I make a pretty good batch of holiday cookies, and it's become a pride thing that's ballooned out of control. It's now gotten to the point that I end up making something like 12 dozen sugar cookies and 16 dozen Russian tea cakes, and it ceases to be a fun way to spend an evening and more of a twelve hour ordeal that I can't even do in my own kitchen since I don't have enough counter space for the cooling racks, let alone the numerous cookie tins to be distributed. (Mom usually volunteers her kitchen, and after about six dozen or so cookies, we're getting on each other nerves.) But as ridiculous as the whole production number is, the thought of not making cookies is almost as bad. At this point, the cookies are like the presents: delayed until a later date.

I don't know. I've noticed I have a tendency to get depressed and discouraged during this time of the year. (You know, more than I usually am.) The weather starts to change, the temperature starts to drop, and my spirits follow suit. The majority of crappy times in my life tend to happen at the end of the year, and I've never quite figured out if this is just a random thing. Maybe it's the subconscious looking back over the last twelve months and not being entirely happy with the way things went, wondering why I couldn't have handled things differently here and there. Like I said earlier, I hold myself to a rather strange moral code, and I'm rather self-critical and self-abusive towards myself. Adding in the stress of no time, no money, and a change in residence makes matters worse. Some days I'm better than others, but with the compromised health and resulting day of slack, today hasn't been a good one. And that just makes things worse.

(This is usually the point where I diagnose myself with Seasonal Affective Disorder, simply because it has a better ring to it than dysthymia. Of course, that doesn't make sense, since I avoid daylight in the non-winter months. I'm not a licensed mental health professional, but I play one on TV.)

Ick. I almost don't want to post this because it's so depressing, but I want to feel like I accomplished something. Sleeping and making tomato soup doesn't count as productive.

Tuesday, December 03, 2002

Cleaning House



For those of you who don't know yet, I'm moving.

Don't look at me like that. I know that I had said in the past that I would probably never move. The hassle of moving eight years ago is still pretty fresh in my mind. I'd had a falling out with my roommate back then, and after a few tries to solve the disagreements amicably (one of which Rosencrantz attempted her best to moderate), she'd given me notice around Thanksgiving that she wanted me out by the end of the year. (Mind you, she was all but unemployed, had dropped the two college classes she was taking because they were too stressful for her, and was living off her parents for everything. She seldom did dishes or cleaned the litter box. All she seemed to do was lie on the couch in her grey sweatpants and chain smoke while she watched TV. But her name was on the lease, and her mother was still willing to pay her bills, so I was the one who got the heave-ho.)

I scrambled for a new place to live, viewing efficiency sized apartments that were able to be designated one bedrooms by virtue of a single well placed wall. All of the complexes listed in the glossy apartment guides were way too pricey, didn't allow pets (or wanted a sizable deposit to cover my kitty), or were particular about the quality of vehicles that might be parked on their property. (I kid you not about this. I knew someone who lived in a complex run by a particular management company, and they sent him a nasty letter when his 10 year old car started to show some rust spots.) One place I looked at was a basement apartment with tile flooring, and when I say "tile" I'm not talking attractive floor laminates. I'm talking the tiny one inch square tiles usually found in a bathroom. The monthly rent was just barely within my affordable range, and I would have been able to get maybe half of my furniture in the apartment. When the resident manager ran through the application process, complete with a hefty application fee and painstaking scrutinization of my credit history (and possibly a full review of my entire life, a blood test, and DNA testing), I politely declined and went out to my car and panicked that I would be ringing in the new year in a cardboard box under a bridge. Luckily, I found the ad for a decent-sized place in Clifton who didn't care that I had an ill-tempered cat, a car that was being held together by bungee cords, and a questionable history with credit cards. I moved in between Christmas and New Years, and have been here ever since.

But after eight years, two car break-ins, the removal of a door lock that I was never given the keys to (leading to Roger Mexico kicking in my door and leaving a big splintered dent when I got locked out), the dismantling of a smoke alarm when I discovered it went off every time I took a shower, the replacement of a toilet that was coming loose from the floor and a garbage disposal that stopped disposing, it's time to move on. There's very little left in Clifton for me anymore. When I moved here, everyone I knew lived in Clifton (or a few minutes away). Now everyone I know has moved. I've gone through numerous next-door neighbors who have played horrible music (Celine Dion) that rattled the picture frames on my walls, have fought loudly with each other on the morning of New Year's Eve (after I'd worked back to back shifts at Best Buy and the Warehouse, and was trying to get a little rest before doing all over again), and let his ferrets run loose in his apartment while he sang Metallica off-key in the shower. I've been stranded in my parking lot during the winter, unable to get up the ice-covered hill that separated me from the rest of the world. (Thank goodness for the corner store, which was open and well-stocked on the day I trudged up the hill through eighteen inches of snow because I was out of cat food and people food. And the fact that they have a good beer selection, carry clove cigarettes, and stock Ben and Jerry's ice cream is a bonus. They're all fabulous people, too. One clerk spotted me a bottle of Liquid Plum'r once when she couldn't find a price for it and I was running tight on funds.)

I serindipitously stumbled into the knowledge of the new apartment when my car was broken into last month. I'd called my mother (she also works at the Zoo), and one of her co-workers walked past after she'd finished talking to me, and asked her what was wrong. Mom explained the car break-in and her co-worker correctly surmised that I lived in Clifton.

"Do you know if she might be looking for a new apartment?" she asked. It seems that Mom's co-worker's mother (who also used to work at the Zoo - in my position, no less) owned a four family unit in the city where I grew up, and was looking for a new tenant. The apartment was cheaper than my current place, and included a garage, storage space in the basement, and free laundry. It was at least worth a look.

My new apartment isn't perfect. The carpet's pretty worn, and the bedroom is considerable smaller. But it's got charm. There are large windows in the living room and dining room that swing out from the building, a (non-functioning) fireplace, and a kitchen that is actually large enough to cook in (with a pantry!). There's a back entrance so I can access the garage without walking around the building, and I've been told that I'm more than welcome to use the yard if I develop a green thumb between now and springtime.

My new landlady is possibly one of the most laid back people I've ever met. Rather than giving me a lengthy application and requesting a fee to check my references, she simply asked if I wanted the apartment and what color I would like to have the rooms painted. Last night I dropped off the check, signed the lease (the first one she's ever had a tenant fill out), and picked up the keys. While I was doing this she showed me the china cabinet that she was giving me and asked if I wanted to put down a security deposit or not. Instead of having to pore through a ten page lease full of legalese trying to determine if I could put up a wallpaper border, I was give the verbal OK to do whatever I wanted with regards to decorating, so I get to play Trading Spaces for the next few months. (More along the lines of Vern's tastes though. There will be no "Magenta! Taupe! Magenta! Taupe! All! Around! The! Room!" in my household, thanks.)

So since I'm having to box up my life and transport it across town, I'm going to be tossing a lot of stuff. I have a tendency to be a bit of a packrat and will hold onto things for the hell of it, thinking maybe someday I might need it again. As a result, I have entirely too much stuff, and I've needed a good excuse to go through it and decide what is essential to me and what is just taking up space for no reason. I plan to be ruthless; I'm trying to be Minimalist Girl to make the move (and my life) less complicated.

And while I'm sorting through crap that I've had since stuffed in desk drawers since I was a teenager, I'm thinking about doing the same thing with me. My need to hold onto junk has long since transcended the bedroom closets and there is no more room in my mental storage space for my emotional bagage. Lately it's been spilling out and making an awful mess. It's time to get rid of some things. Of course, that's easier said than done. I've tried to clean out my physical and mental closets before, to little or no avail. Somewhere along the line I seem to have confused "getting rid of things" with "burying it in a secluded corner and pretending it never existed," and of course, those things never stay buried for long and end up in the way again.

So rather than fighting the crowds at the mall to accumulate more stuff, I'm going to be spending the month ridding my life of excess stuff so I can start the year off right. (Chrismas will be coming a bit late in the Myopic household.) New year, new place, new me. It looks good on paper. We shall see.