2010/2011 Whatever

Well, it's New Year's Eve, and I'm in bed sick as a dog. I woke up yesterday with a bad cold or something. Some horrible germ is spreading through my body. Whatever. It seems to be the perfect way to end my horrible year.


I see I have not posted since August. My mother declining has drained me of all the creative energy I usually have. I have not done a thing on my dissertation except to just think about how I haven't done anything. The last couple of years have been full of loss that has sent me into some sort of limboish state. It seems to be one loss after another. And working too many part-time jobs for hardly any money is killing me. I just can't seem to find one job that pays enough, so I keep ending up with too many part-time jobs that pay little, and leave me with no time to work on anything else. I don't know what I'm going to do. I'm so behind in my tuition payments this semester that I'm seriously beginning to wonder if God's plan is for me to drop out of school. I just don't know. And God doesn't seem to be giving me an answer.

I wish my mother lived closer to me, but that is not an option. I've got find a way to not think about (and worry about her) so much. Living with dementia is like living with a cancer or some such chronic disease. Each day a little piece is missing from both of you, and neither of you have any idea if tomorrow will come. You try to squeeze whatever and as much as you can into short phone conversations, and then you think about what was said in those conversations all day--every word and every voice inflection. You also start to question your own mortality and your own purpose. Heck, you question every single thing you ever believed in and still do believe in and whether what you believe in is really what you believe and if it ever was. You also realize who your kindred spirits are. As my grandmother use to say, you can count your real friends on one hand.

This has been one heck of a rotten year. Oh, hell, I'm going to just say it--it has been one heck of a rotten three years. And I feel as though 2011 will be the year I lose my mother, so I don't see it getting much better. I lost my mother's dear friend, Josephine, Thanksgiving week. She was 90. I loved that woman. She was such an inspiration. This is the beginning time of many unwelcomed changes.

I don't know much of anything anymore. But what I do know is that life is hard.