Two weeks since I've thought about writing. I've been exhausted. I still am. But I was thinking about funerals and I wanted to write it down.

Funerals--of the everyone arriving in a car, walking through the grass to the gravsite, someone listening to the end of something on the radio. My friend Will's a few years ago was like that. My cousin's husband's, around the same time. My gradnmother's. the year I got married. The kind with a meal in a restaurant's private room afterward. With a funeral parlor. "Sherry and small talk".

The last two memorials I attended were at the same bar, in the same private room. It was just over a year ago I was at the last funeral I was at. It ended with a conga line of several of us, dressed in a variety of death drag--me in Gaiman Sandman. I put spouse in a Lyft with a dubious driver, went on to our more familiar local with my closests, and then made my way home later.

I can't imagine more of the first kind in my future. Except my father. That's what he'd want. Not so my mother. She'd want no viewing (sorry, Mom, you'll get at least a family-only. I will want to say goodbye), no speeches, and absolutely no cemetary. But all the friends, when that starts, now we've come through this (assuming we have--one more friend is COVID-positive this week, but at least three more are vaccinated) will surely be the backroom of a bar, conga line, shots variety.

I still hope mine is a garden party, with one of my besties, rolling up in a Rolls or Bentley, trunk packed with champagne and lobster.

This is a stress valley. i hope the next climb is not too steep.

The movie Clue and Columbo reruns have ferried me through a lot of grief.

I was  talking to someone about myself. And I said "yes, but I can deal with the corpse without damage to myself" and it's true. I'm not being dramatic or spinning wild yarns about heists and crimespree movies. I'm talking about people dying at home.

I can compartmentalize and I can cope. I may not be great with details but I am good with logistics and I can handle crises.

Even this tired. 

It's snowing again. There haven't been any trash pickups and there's a scary icefall on the corner of the building, but otherwise, we're fine. Our house is built for it; the city has infrastructure (if a hateful bully of a mayor who can't manage them); we've got good clothes, a kitchen full of food and no special needs.

I miss biking in it but I'm never going to get my fender.

The world is a horror.

Everything is too much. So i broke my "no frivolous spending in February" plan for supplies for a fanciful showgirl headpiece for an online gathering scheduled later this month. I feel pretty conflicted about the spending part, but not at all conflicted about the hours I spent drafting the pattern pieces. I have not been focused like that on anything in what feels like years--and probably is actually close to a year.

I read some costuming blogs; looked at a few vintage hat patterns; looked at some vintage hats. Measured my head and just started drawing on butcher paper and pinning things to the wig head (which is smaller than my head). I changed direction two or three times, but I think I have a plan now. And maybe some overly-ambitious further plans.

But it felt good.

I am end-of-the-rope. My hair is a horror. i can't reliably get groceries I need for things I'd like to make. I still can't get fenders for my bike. Everything I touch at work explodes. The cat's health is failing. I miss my friends. I never get a chance to be alone. I miss bars. I miss restaurants. I miss my parents. 

I'm tired of clicking on headlines or texts or emails promising to tell me how, where and when to vaccinated only to learn I can't, no-one knows, good luck and be patient. 

I'm sick of this ineffectual, limp Congress. I'm sick of my incompetent, wealth-chasing mayor. 

I'm tired; I can't sleep. I'm bored; I can't read occupy myself. I'm drinking too much. Eating too much. Spending too much (how? I can't leave the house!). My temper is short. My humor is spent. My patience is absent.

i'm just like everyone else. 

I watched Queersighted: Queer Fear on the Criterion Channel tonight and then The Seventh Victim. Which I had not seen since college. I wished Farihah Zaman had had more time to explore her thesis about the exchange of objects standing in for kisses in Code movies and how the man in the love triangle stands in for lesbian kisses in the films. I'll have to look up her essays or more of her criticisms at least.

Wow. It's unfamiliar. having my head filled with something . . .maybe not frivolous, but not dire, not political, not pandemic. My father has gotten his vaccine--I was unclear from mom's note whether she had hers too, or just an appointment. My in-laws, too, have appointments. It's telling, isn't it, that I already know more people who've been vaccinated than who have been ill, who have died.

So there, it's never far from my thoughts, but it's getting less oppressive.

I can't imagine my household will be vaccinated before the fall. But that means, maybe, hoidays with my parents and my sister, and maybe, if there's still such thing as snow, skiing next season.

I have a very ambitious reading list. I, like others I know, have not been able to make my brain read since 2016. I envy the people who are not having this problem.

I managed to read a good chunk of Jen Howard, Clutter: An Untidy History (Belt Publishing) and the first bit of Joe Allen, People Wasn't Made to Burn (Haymarket Books). And then got fidgety. I dipped in and out of Martin Aston, Facing the Other Way (The Friday Project) and Sasha Petraske, Regarding Cocktails (Phaidon Press). I'd like to read Mexican Gothic (hey! Fiction) and I have a long reading list from an agency we partner with as well as some stuff from a funerary customs class I'm interested to take (but fear I'll be overwhelmed).

So there's my theme, isn't it? I feel so overwhelmingly incompetent all of the time. I'm not sure when it started or how to break out of it. I sometimes think "oh, if i just commit to [giant project], that'll do it," but I am a little smarter than that. I don't know--maybe I could do with a therapist.

Once I had a therapist and it was extremely helpful. Once I had a therapist and it felt unnecessary. Once I had a therapist and it felt like a complete and aggressive waste of time. I feel almost like committing to another one is the same issue of not being able to accomplish anything.

The buzzword in philanthropy these days is "Time, talent or treasure" which of these do people give, to whom, how much, why? I've lost the ability to apply either of the first two and my means for the third are limited. Not just where philanthropy and service are concerned, but also where life is concerned. 

Or perhaps I'm just tired. Perhaps if the rhythm of life gets back to more swithcing among home, not-home, home, society, solitude I'll get capacity back.

It feels like most of the people I work with are 15-20 years younger than I am. You know the term "digital native" to describe people who grew up with ubiquitous personal computer technology? I think of a a lot of these folks as "emotional intelligence natives"--although maybe they're more like the Gen X pre-digital native who were already adolescents with the culture tipped to the point where digital nativity became possible. 

A lot of the language they use and habits they adopt can feel sort of woo and squishy. Starting meetings with pronouns and a check-in queation is still a bit unnatural to me (and in the hands of some people, invasion or eye-rolly!). But there's something about the "duh! obvious!" reaction they have to memes like "if you hate everyone, you're hungry. eat something. if everyone hates you, you're exhausted. rest" and vigorous nods to the truisms of "hurt people hurt people" and "put on your own oxygen mask before helping others" that just feels like a more critical mass of people internalizing the emotional health component to a functioning society than people my own age or older have done.

I'll contrast the "put on your own oxygen mask before helping others" of the slightly younger folks with the "you are not required to set yourself on fire to keep others warm" of my contemporaries. Both recognize the necessity of self-care. But the former contextualizes it in the context of a collective action: help yourself so you are capable of and competent to help others. And the latter stops at reminding you that it's okay to have a duty of self-care. The latter leads to the former as a founding principle.

I was thinking about it the other day in the context of what a lovely world it will be when the majority of people approach life, work, problem-solving, system-designing, other humans from this understanding of emotional-well being as just another aspect of life. But I did not get far into articulating the concept of a native in this mind set. I'm not one, but I know many people who seem to be.

I hope that means little boys grow up giving each other non-ironic hugs.

It's a thing I'd like to talk about with some of my smart friends. 

A friend Instagrammed her journal, mentioning how much she hated writing in it but how much her therapist insisted she do it. 

We had a very big win at work today. But everytime I try to think about it, I put my head down and cry. My organization is good and does good things. But I don't. My last personal project to bear fruit was two years ago and since then, my projects have floundered.

It's the nature of the work and the nature of the field, but I find myself unable to start over with the next thing. I'm making small--if sometimes meaningful--contributions, doing routine and necessary--but not compelling--tasks. Wanting the important and interesting projects to gain traction, but certain I'm incapable of them--regardless of whether I was before.

There's a lot of thinking I need to do here but that's more than I have in me.

I've been sleeping like the dead. This hasn't been the case since the Violent Traumatic Event which almost killed me when I was 20. I don't like it.

It's funny because I had just told a few friends about my theory that people only have one or two dreams, over and over and over again. I say this because I only have one dream--or as far as I can tell I only have the one dream. So I figure we all repeat our dreams, and sometimes we remember them, but focus on the strange details that count as variation.

This week I've been having dreams that bear no resemblance to the dream I always have. It's disconcerting. They are rage-filled, anxious, and full of dead people. None of that is unusual, sadly. But they have unfamiliar settings; unfamliiar features; people I don't see in my dreams. I don't know what to make of it.

Waking up is like coming out of sedation. And that is unusual and also disoncerting. 

I'm not fine, but I'm fine.