Mood swings
Had various invitations to Thanksgiving dinner for today, but although they were tempting, I ended up declining all of them. For a variety of reasons, but the main one was that I'd decided that this weekend I was going to make significant progress on various projects at home, most especially dealing with my father's books. (Also magazine stuff, like editing; also trying to catch up on various email and journal activity; also submitting a story of my own; also a host of other assorted projects.)
And I knew that if I spent today socializing, then it would be easy to spend the rest of the weekend socializing, and Sunday night would roll around and I would've once again failed to get anything useful done, and I would be stressed.
So I decided to forgo most of this weekend's social activity in favor of staying home and being productive. We'll see how it goes.
On Monday a colleague innocently asked what I was doing for Thanksgiving, and I told her I was going to stay home and deal with my father's books, and mentioned something about the smoke damage, and she asked why smoke damage, and I realized that she didn't know about the whole mess. So rather than tell the story, I pointed her to my summary journal entry, but also mentioned that there was more in my journal's "Death" category archives, which made me realize that there were a bunch of entries about Peter that I hadn't tagged with category names. So I went and tagged them, which involved re-reading a bunch of them, which got me all mopey and sad.
Kam came over that night and we watched Howl's Moving Castle, which was mostly just about the right fluffiness level for my mood. I thought the movie was just as odd as the book, but I think I liked it slightly more--it contained about 80% of the characters and incidents in the book, kind of thrown together in a blender with some of Miyazaki's usual obsessions (flying; clouds, smoke, and steam; war; environmental impact; the effect on outward form of inward feelings and actions; etc). There were some delightful moments, and plenty of just weird ones.
Anyway, so I've spent much of the past couple days alternating between happy-and-cheerful and glum-and-maudlin. On the downside, been missing various distant friends quite a bit. On the upside, been listening to good music, reading good books, spending time with cool people, and even making progress on my spam-fighting project.
And then there are mixes of those things--the other night, in the midst of working on dealing with spam issues for echoschildren.org and hwaet.org, "When the Wind Changes" came up in my iTunes rotation:
When the wind changes we still feel the breaks;
The hurt that was dozing rolls over and wakes...
And so on. I couldn't cope with listening to the rest of it right then, though I still love the song.
Today so far I'm alternating between dealing with domain/website/email issues (have sorta kinda finally learned what MX and A records are, in the process of breaking and then (I hope) fixing echoschildren.org and hwaet.org) and unpacking book boxes. I was thinking of stopping by various people's places to say hi and chat, though not to stay for dinner, but that's not gonna happen; it would require leaving the house.
Fortunately, dealing with the books themselves is still not especially emotionally difficult. As long as I don't think too much about it.
I know today's the day when one's supposed to post about all the things they're thankful for, but I think I'm not up to that either right now. Instead, I'll close with the last verse of "When the Wind Changes":
First fruits of harvest are sweet in my mouth.
We've love; we have laughter; the wind's in the south;
But sorrow is waiting, by autumn concealed,
As rain makes uneasy a bone long since healed.