An inescapable property of reality

That was the first chapter. The second chapter is next. It is loosely related to the first, but this isn't some perfectly sequential masterpiece of order where every segue makes sense.

For the sake of trust building, the third chapter will follow the second. But then we will jump directly to chapter five, do you understand? No chapter four. Why? Because sometimes thing don't go like they should. This is an inescapable property of reality, which we all must learn to accept. There just isn't enough power in the universe for everybody to have all of it.

Anyway, the numbering structure will continue as normal thereafter. This was a charitable decision on my part, and we should take a moment to appreciate the fact that I did not explore the full extent of my power. And believe me, I could have. I could have made these chapters be any number I wanted. I could have invented a totally unrecognizable number system based on snake pictures. Shit, I could've called them all chapter 2 and refused to acknowledge that I did that.

But we are civilized, friendly people, and sometimes it is best to restrain ourselves.

When I heard Allie Brosh had a new book out, I got myself a copy the next day. Solutions and Other Problems is a lightning flash across my reality, momentarily illuminating things you'd forgotten were there and bathing everything in an aura of horror, triggering you to anticipate some heart-stopping clap of doom that doesn't come. But the lightning flickers and everything glimmers with eerie beauty.

One day the world ends, and the next morning you get up and get on with it. Wait, I don't think I'm talking about the book anymore. 

But I laughed. Loudly. At children being weird, and relationships being weird, and cats being cats, and weird neighbours, and drug trips.

I actually didn't do a good job of reading the book as I zipped through in a haze of emotional despondency due to sleeplessness and overwork. I need to read this again.

Yup, good book. Even if there is no chapter four.

NPR Interview 
The Strand event

Surviving is something to do

The ways of the heart cannot be explained. It does what it wants.

This morning I woke up and allowed myself a moment of wistfulness, I watched the hazy morning light through the curtains and thought of him, just for a second, how he'd commented on the view of naked me in the foreground with the light through the billowing curtains, and I thought how I miss waking up with someone, I haven't done that in years, I'd like that, not every day but once in a while, say, on a lazy weekend. 

But it's Wednesday and I woke up with the cat, she waits for me to put my feet on the floor before asking me to feed her, and already I'm thinking about work. I've enjoyed an extra long weekend, so I'm ready for it. I allow myself the time to enjoy the coffee, not simply consume it, and I do a German lesson, a 225-day streak.

I work steadily, productively. I join the online meditation group for a session at noon, it succeeds only in helping my mind wander. (What novel can I get for my mother? I don't know anything about historical romance. Some vaguely literary options cross my mind, but it turns out they're not available in Polish.)

I turn on the TV and despair that the US Supreme Court nominee refuses to comment on hypotheticals, and our reality consists of hypotheticals. Cigarettes cause cancer because it says so on the package, but human impact on climate change is hypothetical. 

The inspection on my mother's house comes back indicating potential mould in the attic, and the buyers are concerned. I wonder about the teenage years I spent in the room with door to attic and if the mould seeped into me then. I google remedies, for the house, that is, and costs. Any mould deep in my brain had better lie undisturbed.

After weeks of seemingly no news of the plague in the outside world, suddenly there is news, lots of it, none of it good. In Europe, record highs, school interruptions, partial lockdowns. Paris is closed.

I exchange sexy messages with a man I've never met who lives half a world away. I tell the man I've never touched how much I miss the possibility of touching him. I believe my words to be true.

Is any of this real? 

I work steadily, productively, for hours more, but I stop at a reasonable hour, before I'm finished. As is typical, I haven't even started the one thing I expected I would do today.

I watch a couple episodes of Dark (having watched the first season upon its release, I've had to rewatch it before seeing the rest of the series) and wish I could travel back 33 years, or maybe a year ahead, or maybe two months ago. My heart believes in free will, but some days it contradicts itself. I think about how random my life is with its occasional infuriating perfection.

I'm reading Solutions and Other Problems, by Allie Brosh, and it makes me laugh in the way you laugh when if you didn't laugh you would cry.

But, as long as you aren't dead, you need something to do. And surviving is something to do.

One step closer to ruining my entire life

I discovered the Hyperbole and Half webcomic blog several years ago and thought it was one of the funniest things I'd ever read. No hyperbole.

And now there's a book: Hyperbole and a Half: Unfortunate Situations, Flawed Coping Mechanisms, Mayhem, and Other Things That Happened, by Allie Brosh. Yay!

So I bought it for my other half at Christmas. (Am I the hyperbole, and is he the half? Are we together a hyperbole, and the child is a half? Half what?)

It's a tradition that I get him a graphic novel at Christmas (I wonder if he realizes that), and this year I thought the book should be funny, and this book is very funny, even though in tackling depression as a subject it's no less serious than the memoirs, journalistic experiences, and apocalyptic dystopias I've gotten for him in the past.

But I don't think he likes it. I can't tell if it hits too close to home to be funny or if it's too foreign to strike a chord. Maybe because he's not really a dog person (though, nor am I). After thumbing though it he told me, "It's very female."

?#!?

I really don't know what to make of his comment. I don't know what to make of him. (Do you?)

Anyway, I whiled away an afternoon with this book. It was far more enjoyable than vacuuming or doing laundry.

Most people can motivate themselves to do things simply by knowing that those things need to be done. But not me. For me, motivation is this horrible, scary game where I try to make myself do something while I actively avoid doing it. If I win, I have to do something I don't want to do. If I lose, I'm one step closer to ruining my entire life. And I never know whether I'm going to win or lose until the last second.

It's funny (did I say that already?), and sweet. And it all sounds very genuine and sincere. And it reminds me of my own childhood, even though Allie's anecdotes are nothing like anything that happened to me as a child.



Interview. "Good comedy has a lot in common with good horror."
The making of Hyperbole and a Half — in pictures.