proteanme

I’ve got a cold or some allergy thing and it’s exacerbating the funk I’ve been feeling for the last several weeks.  Nothing is wrong that wasn’t wrong last year. My dad is still dead. Things didn’t work out with this girl I liked. Work is still taking a hit from the recession. I’ve kinda eaten my way through the hardest part of it all, or at least the hardest part thus far, and am having a hard time forgiving myself for the weight gain. For some reason my malaise feels particularly American. I guess it’s the narcissistic part.

Mostly, I’ve been trying not to take it all too seriously – the narcissism and the melancholy. It will come and go. That’s the promise of life, right? Nothing stays the same for long. Except death.  People die and are dead forever, which probably sounds much darker than I feel; I’m not morbid. It’s just knowing now I’ll never know some things about my dad has softened me up, opened me up to the people around me, to whatever’s happening, like noticing spring, which would make RU happy. I’m just not quite ready to advertise it – the opened up part. Lord knows I have worked my ass off at not caring about things. Maybe not worked my ass off, as much as nurtured the traits I’ve inherited. Indifference and detachment appear to have been my legacy. Good stuff got handed down too, but it’s not like things even out, not like exercising to burn off calories.  I’m not sure what my point is here.

The last year has also brought folks into or back into my life, some of whom I figured I just wasn’t gonna find again, like my best friend Tim, who I grew up with. He was like family to me and I feel I’ve got some part of myself back now that we found each other. On Facebook of course. And there’s my dad’s best friend, Joe and his wife, Toy, who knew my dad for 30 years and who Kath and I met for the first time last year. There’s Val and Deborah. There’s Heather and her man Martin, and friends of her’s who I haven’t seen in years, like Lauren, Chris and Judith. And there’s a bunch of folks from Bloomington who I came out with or came out around and who were my fist circle of friends there, most notably Deanne, who I’ve looked for on an off over the last several years and then there she was this winter on FB. Of course. And there’s RU and my sister, both of whom I can’t imagine not having in my life and really don’t want to imagine a life without them.

All of this stuff happened in the last 15 months. It’s hard to get my brain around it. All that got undone and uncovered and torn open. I dunno.