Weekend Note Comfort, Stretch, and Stress
This lovely Sunday afternoon finds me, I’m sad to say, neither comfortable nor stretched, but stressed. Which is to say, overstretched. I couldn’t get out of bed this morning. Kathleen insists that I must have been tired, because I slept through most of the morning. But when I was awake, I was anxious. I’d pull up the blankets and hide.
Hide from what?Â
I can’t have been all that anxious, or I’d never have gone back to sleep. But it was a depressed sort of sleep: sleep as an alternative to dealing with things. And what have I got to deal with? Nothing much. I do have a colonoscopy — my umpteenth — on Wednesday, and that means that I’ll have to fast for most of Tuesday, but that’s a disruption, not a fright. If I’m afraid of anything, it’s of finding out how I’ll feel when I turn on the laptop in the living room and can’t get a wireless signal.
You don’t want to hear about it, and I don’t want to write about it. On the whole, I’ve done fairly well with this project that I call “learning to live with [the unreliability of] Wi-Fi.” But Kathleen is right: I am tired — too tired to cope with thwartation.* I’m tired not because I’ve been staying up late or running laps but because I’ve been stretching my mind since August at least, and my mind is aching for a spell of comfort. For same-old, same-old. A vacation from the learning curve.
Just a vacation, maybe. Last night, after a very productive day, Kathleen and I went to the third and final Itzhak Perlman event at the Museum. As it happened, a violist in the program whom I’d praised after the first concert discovered my page last week, and wrote to thank me. He was playing again last night, so I paid extra attention, and I heard things in Mozart’s C-Major Quintet that had never registered before. After the interval, a very young pianist astonished me by seeming to channel Robert Schumann. Then we had a lovely dinner at the usual post-Museum-concert eatery. It was truly a lucky-to-be-alive evening. Which is great, but…
I find, as I get older, that happiness can become as addictive and tiring as drug abuse. Having been happy by simple good fortune, I crave more of same, only to be reminded that happiness is not available on demand — especially after I’ve shot all my synapses in a few hours of keen delight. So, what I feel today sounds a lot like descriptions of withdrawal. (Regular readers will reflect that last night was not the first time that I’ve been very happy lately. Happiness, in April 2008, came perilously close to feeling normal.)
Although I feel too pooped to count my blessings today, I’m going to give it a try anyway.
As for my inspiration this afternoon, one could ask why does Janet Rae-Dupree’s article, “Can You Become A Creature Of New Habits?“, appear in the Business Section? It’s of rather general interest.
“Frustration” doesn’t seem nearly strong enough a word to describe the irritation and anger that I feel, especially after pouring so much time and money into trying to get a decent signal one room away from the router.