Today I picked my year old laptop up from the repair shop. It is actually a year and one month. That is one month out of warranty. The problem wasn’t with the laptop itself, it was with Windows 7, which somehow got so corrupted that I couldn’t even get the computer to boot. This was a problem that, given enough time (like 5 or 6 hours) I probably could have fixed myself. I didn’t have the time. I put in four 12+ hour days and one 10 hour day last week. I was so exhausted that today I spent the first half of the day sleeping. Or half sleeping – that kind of semi-consciousness where you know where you are and kind of what is happening, but where you also fade in and out of dreams and fantasies and where you are never really asleep, but never quite awake either. I’ve grown fond of that state.
I think that is why I haven’t gotten sick this year. Beyond my foot (which still hurts like hell – plantar fasciitis is no picnic) I haven’t had the flu or a cold or anything worse than a migraine, which I can work through, if I have to. Mostly, though, I spend my down days and my weekends sleeping. Lots of sleeping. Because I don’t get a lot during the week.
I’m slowly starting to ease into a pattern. I have my second gym membership. I’ve accepted that I’ll seldom see my friends, that I’ll be more lonely than I was before. I’ve gotten used to working long days – to being one of the last people to leave the building. I’m still depressed. It isn’t just the part where I don’t see my friends (who are like my family, since I don’t have anyone else in my life) but it’s the part where if I’m not at work, I’m alone. I used to go to work, and then go to the gym and spend a few hours most days talking with people and interacting and feeling real. Now I just go to the gym in the mornings, when it is empty, and then I go to work, where I have worked hard to avoid making friends, and then I go to my second gym, where I know nobody, and then home to Dog, who is the only being happy to see me, and mostly because it is dinnertime. I haven’t wanted to make friends at work because it has been so disastrous in the past. I feel that work is a lot like church – a lot of people with very different backgrounds and psychological make-ups in the same place for a single reason. It is a shallow pool from which to draw friends. I have people who I especially like, but there are few that I want to confide in or whose company I would seek outside of the office. And that is a friend – someone I would meet outside the official sanctioned point where we both Must Be.
I do have an emerging crush on a person at the office. This is contiguous with the crush I have at the gym. Very different people they are, but both attractive in their own ways. I will act on neither. No good thing can come from an office romance – even assuming the very unlikely chance that my ephemeral feelings were reciprocated. And nothing will come from my crush at the gym where prettier, fitter, more interesting (and less damaged) candidates abound. So I’m ignoring both. It is for the best. I’m not companion material. My friends (if I were to actually have a chance to talk to them) would tell me that I am just ensuring my own failure. But this is one area where they simply do now know. None of them have been like I have. They all (except one) have mates, and most have families. They do not know (and some of them have never known) what it is like to be alone for as long as I have been alone, or the ways that it changes you. I can see how things will end before they have even started. My one friend at work chides me for this jumping ahead, she says that one must go through the steps or one cannot know how things will really turn out. I still jump ahead. I’m right far too often for my own good, and far too often to go back and actually retrace the steps.
It won’t work. It just won’t.
I get my first tooth pulled on the 3rd of April. I’ll be doing my taxes on the 4th – while under the influence of narcotics. And this next week I’ll try to take a day off to work on my thesis. I’m trying hard to remember that it matters, that I need to keep trying and keep working and keep positive. It’s hard, because the depression says that none of this matters and that I’m just treading water and that I won’t be going anywhere or doing anything or achieving anything – that I’ll just tread water until I give up and die. And why not just skip the part where I work myself to death and die now? But I know that is the depression. I know it. I just don’t know how to countermand it.
The sad fact is that a relationship would probably be good for me now. It’d force some perspective. I had no luck with the dating site – then again, I almost immediately wished I hadn’t done it. I’ve been ignoring it for weeks now. A waste of money, and it is my own fault. But I’m not the kind of person that can be matched up to a stranger. I’m too intimidating, and I’m too much me. I like me, but I can understand why other people might be a bit leery.
I spent a good amount of time with the heavy bag today. I’m so out of shape that it is pathetic. I remember when I could do 6 or 8 three-minute rounds like they were cake, and now I’m about to keel over after 2. And I can’t run because of my foot. So I’m kind of stuck. I need to work out, and I need to work out a lot with the amount of stress I’ve been under lately. But without running, my options are much more limited. I feel a bit stir crazy from it – usually. Today I feel calm. Not as calm as I feel after a fight, but close. The stir crazy will raise its head again tomorrow.
So yeah, that’s me. Middle aged, soon to be toothless, out of shape, overworked, and lonely. This is not how I imagined my adulthood. Somehow, I think things went sideways. I just don’t know where.
SecondHand Saint 