I detest reading back through my posts and seeing any that are void of any true content or length, but I really don't have anything worthwhile to post tonight. What's more, the lengthier and more substantial stuff that I'm working to compile and edit and have ready to post are nowhere near ready. At present, the main thing that I'm hoping to have finished is the one thing that seems to be taking me the longest to really get to the spot where I think it will be ready to hit "Publish Post" and get out there into the wonderful world of my readership: it's all about chronic pain, my surgery, the days and nights that followed. Most of it is filled with thoughts and feelings and questions that I was having as I had them, and my intent was to have it all pop up on a daily basis as everything occured. Unfortunately, I'm a bit of a perfectionist and I'm not always pleased with some of my stream-of-consciousness stuff once I go back through and read the lines that I swiftly stamped out and sent up to be read by who-knows-who.
If I have the energy and the wherewithall tomorrow, I think that I'll just go through it all and probably send it through. Earlier, when I took a bit of a break from the extremely uncomfortable (no, it's painful; the position is painful) spot sitting in the black leather executive-style chair that I bought a few years ago and put together myself from the box branded with the words "some assembly required," I wrote a bit in my journal, something that I've also been doing much more of lately (along with reading a bit more religiously in my underlined and highlighted and notated fourth edition of Alcoholics Anonymous, my Just For Today NA daily meditation and the Twenty-Four Hours a Day copy that my aunt gave me for my birthday a few numbers ago [it belonged to my great uncle Felton, Mimi's brother, and it still holds his name and address as it did when he flipped through the pages during his own time of one day at a time a long, long time ago, before I ever thought of putting the first mind- or mood-altering substance past my lips]), about how non-productive I feel while playing this game of waiting for the geniuses to clear me to return to work. I have no doubt that I'd never make it past the first hour of the first shift right now, but that doesn't lower my level of frustration any.
My plan for tomorrow, other than coming to my desk and making the requisite entries on paper and laptop, of cours, is to try to find a happy and pleasant place to just curl up in and relax to read and maybe watch the second and third discs from The Winds of War miniseries that Netflix sent me just before the long weekend. I'm sure that I've got a solid five or six hours of televised entertainment to get through, and that should keep me busy. Not only that, but I still have close to six hundred pages left in The Swarm, and I'm hoping to be totally finished with it at the same time that I'm finished watching this series from Netflix so that I can begin reading Herman Wouk's sequel, War and Remembrance (and the Thomas Tryon, Joyce Carol Oates, and -oh, shit... for the Special People Club: Tess of the D'urbervilles: I probably need to get S squared (if I knew how to make a superscript here, I would, but S squared knows who she is, or if the reference is kind of different, then they know who they are) to light a fire under my feet - no reason that I'm not done with a lot more other than the fact that I'm so easily and regularly distracted by the fact that I just can't seem to get a handle on my pain).
Here I am, only hours short of exactly two weeks since the Swiss-trained geniuses cut into my back to relieve me of the bondage of this condition, and I really don't feel like it's gotten me anywhere. Shouldn't I be better by now? Shouldn't I be able to sleep all the way through the night without getting up to take a Flexaril or narcotic pain relievers so that I can get back to sleep? I keep reminding myself (and hearing Patti Akins's voice from Friday mornings of last fall discussing the difference between most pain and the pain of surgical healing [and when I hear her voice, I remember her tenet that "Sister Margaret says that pain is what the patient says it is,"] and I try to make myself okay with just being where I'm at right now) that everyone recovers differently and that when the geniuses mentioned a recovery that could possibly last only ten days, I must've just latched onto that and didn't hear when (well, really: "if") any of them said that it could last two weeks or three weeks or longer. I can't afford to be out of work for very much longer. If this were one of the trashy rags-to-riches novels that Bijal and Whitney and I passed aroudn in high school, this is where a previously unknown rich relative would make his or her entrance to the life of the protagonist and suddenly lay a magical finger on the situation and take away that one, very significant stressor: the great money worry.
On the other hand, I do have to remember that I did intentionally make the decision to have this done when I did because this is the best and most logical and least financially draining part of the year. As angry as I was when the procedure was cancelled Thanksgiving week, thank Good Orderly Direction that it was because I'd never have been able to return for a final week of lecture and the multiple, consecutive nights of two to three hours of barely sleep between days and nights and agonizing minutes laden with the memorization of body systems and disease processes and stressing to figure out which of the two answers are right and then which of those two answers are the best answer of the two (all otherwise known as "finals week").
Once this is all over, I will have to start worrying about school once again, but only from August until December, and then again from January until May, the month when I will finally receive that very important piece of paper that tells the world that everything I have on my resume and everything I state in an interview is actually true, and they really can hire me for a spot at more than just slightly above the nationwide minimum (which, incidentally, no human being can possibly survive on in 2011).
I'm rambling. No wonder I can't get anywhere with all these private posts that I have saved and go into to edit and then walk away from having made little progress. I get in to make an alteration and I just start running off at the mouth. Stacy and Stephen are always pushing me to read David Sedaris. Although I've read excerpts and bits, I suppose I really ought to pull his stuff out: Stacy tells me that I write along the same lines. Maybe I ought to look at putting everything down into a memoir instead of writing my short stories that pay homage to Poe and O'Henry and Madame Flannery and Shirley (Miss Jackson if you're scary). Some of those suckers that I write are really, really good. But some are bad. More are bad, in fact, because they're fiction, and many times, I'm merely speculating, guessing, trying to create a fictional world that I'm not sure I have a great understanding of. Writers are always encouraged to write what they know, and it seems that when I really write what I know, when I share the funny little anecdotes about life in the days and nights in my garden of nocturnal delights, I get a lot of feedback from some of you who read this stuff even though I really had no idea that anyone read anything I wrote at all.
Although I address a lot of this stuff to an assumed audience, I don't know that I'd continue doing it if I really assumed some composition of an audience. I just think that a couple of people who already know how crazy I am are the ones reading it, so it's fine. I started to put my blog address as my personal webpage when I was creating a resume the other day, and I had to think twice and quickly eliminate that from the page as I realized that a perspective employer might not be so keen on hiring someone who talks a bit frankly about previous drug and alcohol use and random hookups when I was auditioning for Diane Keaton's role in Looking for Mr. Goodbar....or maybe an employer who would read it and still hire me is exactly who I need to be working for... hmmm.
...nah... incredibly doubtful, but it's still a pleasant and appealing idea.
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