Dept. of Just Keep Swimming

[kaffy_r]

I Got to 15 Days ...

... and then the week that truly was from hell hit me. Last night I lost the last of my spoons. I went to bed without having posted anything. 

Still, I have been better at posting this month than I've been for quite some time. And, hey, I'm getting back up on the bicycle, and posting now, amn't I? Which, when I put it that way, sounds extremely defensive, but then I've been feeling rather defensive for the past 48 or so hours. 

I'm not going to go into all the awfulness of Wednesday through today, at least not today. And certainly, my stress is ongoing, as is the difficult time at work. But tonight, my beloved took me out to our favorite sushi place, and it was so relaxing just to sit and talk with him, drink miso soup and eat chirashi and mackerel jaw, that I don't want to think about anything else.  (BB actually pointed out, when I said that, that it's the only one we go to, but that's not completely true and anyway, even if we did go out to other sushi places, this is the one I think I'd like the most.)'

It's Friday, and I am home, and I'm going to watch something enjoyable with BB, and then I'm going to go to bed and cuddle with him, put my head on his chest, and try to unknot my stomach. 

Comments

[kaffy_r]

You're the second person to mention my use of that contraction, and the second with Hibernian connections. Heh. As I said to Owls, every so often it pops up in my head and seems eminently the right word to use when it does.

I have an unfortunate tendency to beat myself up over everything. Luckily, I have people around me to say "Knock it off!" I am feeling less guilty about the work situation - which doesn't mean it isn't still kind of awful, and doesn't mean that I don't bear some responsibility for the shit I'm currently dealing with, but does mean that I understand it's not ALL MY FAULT WOEZ. That I've been working through the weekend to bring myself some of that balance is making my BB side-eye me significantly, but he understands why I had to do it, in order to feel better about myself.

[shanghaied]

One of my favourite contractions, often used in our household and among our friends, isn't anyone's English as such - it comes from the writings of Terry Pratchett: 'ate'nt' (note spelling) :-)

[kaffy_r]

As in "I ate'nt dead yet!"? I remember hearing that when I was young, so I assume I must have been hearing the same sort of thing Mr. Pratchett incorporated into his stories.

[shanghaied]

As in "I ate'nt dead yet!"?

Dat's der bunny! Although Pratchett's Granny Weatherwax character never used the word 'yet'.

I remember hearing that when I was young, so I assume I must have been hearing the same sort of thing Mr. Pratchett incorporated into his stories.

This puts me in mind of the 19th-century craze for elaborate casket devices, added on (and in) on the off chance that the corpse interred therein wasn't corpse-y enough :-)

[kaffy_r]

This puts me in mind of the 19th-century craze for elaborate casket devices, added on (and in) on the off chance that the corpse interred therein wasn't corpse-y enough

There; that's one of my midnight terrors. I've been one of those who believes there should be a non-dead man's switch in every incinerator, to stop the burn if someone is inside. You can thank one of the later X-Files episodes for that, although the "don't bury me alive" stuff was part and parcel of me much earlier. Thanatophobic? Yup.

[shanghaied]

Blimey, and here I thought I was the Queen of Thanatophobes :P Though my fear is of stopping, not of not stopping after stopping, as 'twere. I've never come across any reason, ever, to think anything happens to us after we die apart from becoming fertiliser - that part I love, but the stopping? After 250 years or so I think I might be ready to turn off the lights, but certainly not before, and as our species' lifespan is nothing like that, I have moments in every day where I freak quietly about being afraid to die. And so it goes.

[kaffy_r]

I have an intermittent believe in some sort of afterlife, and I still/i> hate the idea of stopping. I want to find out what's next. Also, the very concept awakens something primal in me, like death is a large carnivore coming after me and I need to escape it. Not very rational, but there you go; I never pretended to be rational.

[shanghaied]

We're not rational, we're a species of great ape :-)

For my own part, I've never found anything so beautiful, logical and right as the apparent - and provable - fact that all that lives, dies, and is absorbed into the cycle of life and death. That is the true afterlife, as it's unending. We go on and on, in bits. It's only that (also beautiful, and fascinating) collection of electrical impulses and brain furrows - the collection that makes each individual mammal unique for some value of uniqueness - that stops. It's the amazing-but-also-horrible arrogance of Homo sapiens that causes some of us to imagine rainbow bridges and harp-strumming angels and eternal, person-storing Libraries, and some of us to just not want to stop for a very long time :-)