MaritimePine of Leave
Nov. 8th, 2018 10:30 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ismoI fear I'm falling into the Wellbutrin failure spiral again, so I'm posting even though I have nothing of any interest to report. It's hard to come up with anything cheery to entertain my mother, but it doesn't really matter, because she still can't hear me. Simple questions morph into something quite off-kilter. I have achy joints. We've just had two cold grey days of the kind that you get in winter, when it seems as if it never really got light. Winter is like childbirth. You forget how bad it was last time, and then the ominous signs begin to recur, and you go "oh crap, not this again." I keep reminding myself that we're only six weeks out from the solstice, and then it will start to get better again. But in the meantime, oh dear. Darker and darker . . . which adds to my dread of going to see my mother next week. It becomes almost impossible to get home by dark, ever.
Tra la la . . . in the dark afternoons, I light beeswax candles. They give me something lively to watch, and they smell sweet, like honey. I'm giving in too early! It's not even Thanksgiving yet. Not time to start burning the candles. I'm resisting the Christmas music. Come on, one must have some standards. If it starts snowing, though, all bets are off.
At least I have a fun book to read. I got it from the library, because it's about Rome, so it's research. Four Seasons in Rome, by Anthony Doerr, who got a fellowship and took his wife and infant twins to Rome for a year. He is a novelist, so he really knows how to write, and his little memoir is intimate and charming. I love it when he looks around Rome and describes fountains and delicious things to eat. I love it equally when he tells how the twins scream all night and in the morning he sits in his studio in a stupor and can't imagine writing one sentence. Other people's suffering is always much more fun. Their happiness is also easier to enjoy than one's own, because you can just observe it in its final flower, without paying all the complicated prices they paid to achieve it.
Tra la la . . . in the dark afternoons, I light beeswax candles. They give me something lively to watch, and they smell sweet, like honey. I'm giving in too early! It's not even Thanksgiving yet. Not time to start burning the candles. I'm resisting the Christmas music. Come on, one must have some standards. If it starts snowing, though, all bets are off.
At least I have a fun book to read. I got it from the library, because it's about Rome, so it's research. Four Seasons in Rome, by Anthony Doerr, who got a fellowship and took his wife and infant twins to Rome for a year. He is a novelist, so he really knows how to write, and his little memoir is intimate and charming. I love it when he looks around Rome and describes fountains and delicious things to eat. I love it equally when he tells how the twins scream all night and in the morning he sits in his studio in a stupor and can't imagine writing one sentence. Other people's suffering is always much more fun. Their happiness is also easier to enjoy than one's own, because you can just observe it in its final flower, without paying all the complicated prices they paid to achieve it.
