Swirling into autumn

I have a few started entries... I also have a lot of thoughts spiraling around in a fuzzy halo, but they never seem to make it to the page. This past week and a half has been laughably BAD. So bad. I can almost laugh about it today, but oh it was bad. It included a large (and seemingly impossible) tax debt from 1998 that I did NOT know about until last Wednesday, a few midterms, an over-flowing washing machine (and therefore a flooded kitchen, which was unfortunately where our camping equipment was sitting ... soggy), a big fight with Adrien and ... stepping on a tack. There are a few other things making my heart ache too... things that don't easily spill out in words.
I really just want to be luxuriating in my favourite season; I want to crunch through brittle leaves and wear all my scarves and eat pumpkin pie everyday. I want to curl around a cup of tea and read Jeanette Winterson's new book: Stone Gods (even though it isn't out in Canada yet) or Joanne Harris's sort of sequel to Chocolat, The Lollipop Shoes or my book-club book Plan B by Anne Lamott, or any of several dozen other books I have laying in wait on my teetering shelves like Kafka On The Shore or Hidden Connections or Our Lady of the Lost and Found. My books, they are calling to me. Or I want to take a walk in the grey twilight, listening to Red Mars on audio-book by Kim Stanley Robinson,winking at jack-o-lanterns. Or splashing on a canvas with a paintbox full of red, brown, amber and gold to celebrate the season, or else a paintbox oozing with summery greens, blues purples to remember the seasons past. I want to do these things, but alas I am (STILL/always?/forever...) a student. So I have midterms and papers to avoid. And I am absolutely addicted to selfPITY. I am. I so am. It is hard to truly indulge in one's loves in life when one is busy with the moping and the sniveling and the sobbing. I wish I could let go of that part of me that seems to so glory in the mean reds. I wish I could discard the drama queen. It is exhausting.
Instead of doing the things I want to do, and instead of doing the things I should be doing, I wind up escaping into the oh-so-reassuring land of tele-vision. I don't even OWN a tv and yet, and yet there is the internet. I download my crack. It isn't (all) bad tv, so at least there's that. But still. What a waste of time. I know why I do it, I know that it is a relief to set down my own worries and woes for 30mins while I watch Nancy struggle with much more entertaining and scary troubles on Weeds. I know that I want to live in Eureka and muse on sticky scientific conundrums rather than my own bureaucratic balls of red tape. Oh Bones! Anthropology has never been sexier! Of course it makes sense to want to zone out, forget, let go, stop the swirling darts of angry thoughts. It is shelter from the storm of LIFE. Sometimes life is looking at wildflowers with a magnifying glass, or getting your hair brushed by your boyfriend or swimming in an icy lake or breathing in your cat's purring voice or eating sushi. But sometimes life is a suck-fest. And sometimes it is too much for me to cope with all at once. So I have to shelve everything and then dole it out slowly, one crappy thing at a time. I think what happens sometimes is that, since the world OUT THERE doesn't respect this need of mine, since it continues to send the good the bad and the ugly, regardless of where I am in my nasty inventory, I sometimes get such a backlog of SUCK that I need to close up completely. My inner shelves get full. There is no more room here for that sucky thing, so you will have to wait my friend. I may be ready to think about your little problem next week. But not this week. Not the week with the tax thing and the flooding and the tack in my foot. Nope. Right now I need to balance all this stuff with something lovely. Something simple. Something seasonal.
So I will hang with my pals Tegan & Sarah, Feist, The Be Good Tanyas, The Shins, Badly Drawn Boy and whoever else is hiding in itunes and I will light some incense to mask the scent of SUCK in the air and I will drink spiced tea and I will study and I will get through the midterms. And then I will go to the farmer's market on the weekend and I will make pie.