My heart has been pretty bashed around this December and I'm spending New Year's Eve thinking that it's time to pronounce it broken. 

If all of this pain cauterizes my heart into never being able to feel love or loss again, that will be very good indeed.

Merry Christmas!

The good news:  The shortest day of the year.

The bad news:  The longest night.

I am clearly en route to hell in a handbasket.

Snow that's been falling since before sunlight is piling on top of almost a foot of snow that fell earlier in the week.  With hours and miles of shopping for Christmas still to do, what am I doing this second to the last Saturday before the holidays?

I'm sitting in my house eating peppermint ice cream, that's what I'm doing.  I may be headed for an uncomfortable future, but I must say I'm enjoying the on flight food.

It's been a while since I took a look at things with the keyboard under my fingers.  When I write as I think my keyboard is a kind of ouija board.  It's not other spirits that speak through the movement of my hands, but my spirit that feels more free to communicate.    I think I feel a kind of distance from the words if I don't say them aloud but rather have them appear with only key rattling to accompany them.  For some reason, this creepy imagery persists and I think the keys rattle like dry bones.  This doesn't really sound like me--more keyboard voodoo.

What thoughts are being channeled in this session?  Well, for one thing I'm listening to bleak music.  This is not a happy soundtrack;  Joan Armatrading's "Physical Pain" speaks for me at the moment and I won't admit to listening to the next one on the list.

Sometimes I think of how I felt about life in February of 2004 when I started blogging and I wonder what happened to that even-dispositioned woman who found joy in the chaos in her life.  It could have been drudgery that's inseperable from keeping house for a family of six, it could have been driving ten hours in a day, only to get up after a bad night's sleep and drive another ten hours, it could have been the most puzzling and frustrating behavior on the part of one of my children;  there was a surplus of stress, but in it all I had a feeling that everything would work out and that it could all be handled.  I was calm, capable, and even though there were some sorrows here, there was plenty of life to relish here and I felt joy and gratitude.

My keyboard is failing me.  Emotions that are kept inside me aren't being released through my fingers tonight.  They crowd my mind, they constrict my heart.  Maybe they'll ease up tomorrow.  Maybe there will be a story or a joke, maybe a picture will speak so well that I won't need words at all.

I miss balance.  I wish the world was still 2004.

I am endeavoring to consider loneliness a useful resource.  It seems that being on my own so much could be mentally restructured into being thought of as having free time.

I can't honestly say that this is pleasant--it stings.

I wonder why people in such unpowerful positions are so rude about doing their jobs. 

In the past couple of days I've had to do business with clerks in governmental offices and though their jobs are purely public contact--I would have thought they were even considered public service--there was not a smile or scrap of unasked for, but helpful information offered by any of them.  Had I been presenting them with a complaint or unusual request, I would understand the wall they create with cold expression and officious tone, but the papers I requested and filed were very ordinary.  They were actually part of helping the county workforce out and one set was filed with an agency that is tax-funded to train workers to get and perform jobs ably.  When I was handed the wrong paperwork at that office by Tweedledee and I filled it out and as directed, handed it to Tweedledum,  who stood right next to the first fellow, T-dum said, "Those aren't the right papers" as if I was stupid and as if she hadn't been there to see T-dee make the error in the first place.  I poitely took the second set, filled them out, and handed them in to the silent T-dee.  She might have told me then that my nephew's coverage was immediately in effect, but didn't until I asked when I might expect to hear the agency's decision. 

It's no comfort to know that the taxes I pay to support her agency keep the Tweedles on the job, bungling with bored eyes that never looked below the space immediately above my head.  I wonder how their lives feel;  I try, but can't imagine what those jobs mean to them.