It has been an extremely long time since I last posted. I didn’t exactly abandon this blog so much as I forgot I HAD a blog.
Why…? Well, I’ve been in hiding. Not any kind of witness-protection, government-sponsored kind of “official” hiding. More like hiding from the world and everything in it. If you recall (why would you – it’s been 3 years) we received some bad news in early 2008 that we could never have children of our own. It was devastating in a fuck-this-shit-I’m-giving-up kind of way. And giving up looked different for each of us. For me it looked like: bury self in job and wifely tasks. I figured if I could just dig myself a predictable little groove then nothing (good or bad) could ever find me and I’d be safe from future disappointments. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not like I stopped answering the phone or taking vacations. It was more of a mental program to keep me busy so that I didn’t have to think or feel:
8-9am: get up, make coffee, feed cat, kiss husband good-bye as he leaves for work
9am-12pm: work on computer
12-2pm: shower, eat leftovers for lunch, drive to work
2-7pm: work at work
7-9pm: drive to gym, workout while reading iphone, drive home, shower
9-11pm: eat dinner while watching DVR’d shows, work on computer more
11pm-8am: read in bed, sleep
Repeat as needed. On weekends I just replaced work at work with housework and voila! A pattern that allowed me to fill all mental space with work and the other minutia of life. Have I been productive at work – absolutely. They’re delighted with the robot they hired. My boss said yesterday that he wishes modern science had progressed to the point where they could clone me. Have I kept a well run home – yes. Our house and personal finances are tidier than 99% of Americans. (that remaining 1% are people that live in those little mobile 200 square foot homes and own two changes of clothes – oh how I envy them…) But have I really been living the last couple of years? No. I’ve been hiding, afraid to even turn on a radio station for fear of what havoc that unoccupied mental space will wreak.
So what is it that I’m so afraid to think about? How about the final, unassailable realization that despite all our efforts, we have become the local weird-o’s; different enough from the rest of society to no longer take pleasure in any of the things that mankind has created to entertain/distract ourselves from the fact that life is nasty, brutish and short. About the only things that seem to make us crack a smile are old Simpsons reruns, the odd Robot Chicken Sketch, theoatmeal and some old George Carlin videos. The only things that hold our interest are long, complicated movies, work, books and the Internet. We have jobs that are purely academic – we trade purely in ideas – which is pretty different from most of 2011 America.
We don’t have kids so that immediately alienates us from our now child-obsessed culture – oh, and not to mention all our friends who are knee-deep in exactly what they should be at this point in their lives: child rearing. Add all this to the years of trauma we’re both recovering from and well, we don’t feel like we fit in ANYWHERE.
I have a desire to return to the world of the living. I do. But this desire is consistently derailed by the reality that life just keeps getting harder and harder and harder. The easiest way to deal with the mounting difficulty is to lose myself in the program. Lather, rinse, repeat. Lather, rinse, repeat. Put on movie, zone out, go to bed. Turn on computer, surf around, go to bed. Take on more work, look up, years have passed.
