| Washing Machines and Other Mundane Things |
[Oct. 7th, 2007|10:19 pm] |
| [ | Current Location |
| | Arcadia | ] |
| [ | music |
| | Mrs. Bartolozzi, Kate Bush | ] |
It was a quiet day at work today. I was recovering from a 5-day case of bronchitis (5 days bedridden), and so was grateful for the lack of crises. About half of my Sundays are like this. The other half are filled with emergency hit-by-cars or bit-by-big-dogs or "emergency" vomiting-for-4-days. Usually 4 show up during the last slot of the evening, when I don't have the time or staff to do anything about it.
I had a moment of disorientation driving to work: a footrace was happening across my beloved St. John's Bridge, with checkpoint volunteers shouting encouragement to the runners tramping past. Sunday. Sunday. I always work on Sundays; others pursue other aspects of their lives. It made me feel like a stranger, peering in through the window on an alien reality -- one that I used to be part of.
Driving home through the drizzling darkness over the mountain on Germantown Road, I could feel the bronchitis squeezing my airways again, with that sick, syrupy feeling like breathing molasses... found myself in a pensive mood, analyzing just how much I'm in a year of DOING, rather than a year of THINKING. Why do these things never happen simultaneously? I'm either experiencing life as hard as I can, or I'm withdrawn, mulling it all over and digesting it through the process of writing, making sense of it all. Listening to Kate Bush's "Mrs. Bartolozzi", I marveled at how she can take a topic so mundane as doing laundry, and create a frame in which sensuality/sexuality and the everyday love in an old marriage are examined through the eyes of someone stepping just outside her pedestrian chores, and looking back from a slightly different viewpoint. Mindless tasks are never truly mindless; the memories and analytical processes wander, freed from the leash of focus. I spend so many of my days concentrating for all I'm worth, and spend the remainder disappearing -- escaping into books, into chores, chasing my tail in circles like the Ourobouros, not looking outward and exploring the world around me. Perhaps I'm on input overload, with the sheer cliff of learning curve sloping ahead of me like Sisyphus' punishment. Perhaps my orbit is just getting tighter, spinning faster and faster and denser and denser until not even light can escape. And I wonder when (or if) I'll start unfolding again, stretching my toes toward new roads, since the way past feels so terribly closed?
The fortune cookie I got with my hastily grabbed won ton soup, on my way home in the rain, said "A fond memory will soon lead to a renewed friendship." I'd love to renew my friendship with my husband, whom I never see anymore, because of his work schedule. I'd love to renew my friendship with my father, whom I haven't heard from since his psychotic break in Minneapolis. I'd love to renew my friendships with so very many people -- distance hangs like a knife over my days, severing the threads of kith and kin, my ties to others, my anchors to this life, this time, this place. Those of you who still bother looking to see if I've written -- I'm here! I think of you often, from the well of my seclusion, and hope there is room in the future to travel a new road with you all... |
|
|
![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}
copper9lives's journal