But then, I am kind of tired. Aside from all the physical labor that I've peformed over the last couple of weeks, the Depression is sapping my energy to a great extent; however, I'm not feeling the emotional rollercoaster that usually comes along at this time of the cycle... I guess I'm just too busy to feel unaccountably sad or suddenly giddy. Or maybe I'm becoming accustomed to the rollercoaster and am improving my ability to cope. In fact the only way I can tell I'm depressed is that I want to sleep and/or masturbate all the time. And I do mean all the time... when I'm driving, when I'm eating dinner, when I'm sitting here right now writing this: all I want is an orgasm and a nap.
Despite my lack of energy, the last few days have been filled with a multitude of minor accomplishments... accomplishments so minor that I have to really think about what it is I've spent so much time on this week. I mean, purchasing and installing both a mailbox and a wireless doorbell at the office sound like such simple, quick pastimes... and yet I probably spent eight solid hours on those two problems alone. It took me almost two hours to set up our serenity fountain, having to wash the little stones individually and then adjust the pump over and over again. Then there were phone calls, regarding the telephones and an old ISP we no longer use and finding out how much longer the Post Office is going to take to start forwarding our mail so I don't have to keep visiting the old office every day. Just a thousand little things that don't seem like much, but which suck the life out of me nevertheless.
Then there was almost an entire workday spent shopping for office furniture, where we bought sixteen really nice chairs but couldn't find a conference table to put them around... I envision our next meeting with the board sitting in chairs grouped around a chalk outline of where the table will be when we finally get it. And the more I think about it, the more I like the idea. But as amusing as that image is, I'd rather have a conference table, and am getting very frustrated by my boss's lack of motivation to do what I want. He just hates spending money, is all, even when it's not his.
Then there was a lot of AA stuff... my regular meeting on Tuesday, and then my General Service Meeting on Wednesday (which had a shitload of clerical work involved, copying some handouts and creating a sign-in sheet, as well as just showing up), and then my sponsee asked me specifically to meet him at a Thursday meeting that I occasionally attend. So I guess I'm pretty sober this week.
I decided on a whim to take Friday off... there wasn't anything I had to do at the office that couldn't really wait until Monday (except for everything on my To Do list), and I was tired, and I have comp time up the ying-yang from the extra hours I put in over the move, so I just stayed home and watched one of my new DVDs, Camp.
Movies about incredibly talented young people in the performing arts always exhilarate and depress me. I've shared here before that Billy Elliot always makes me weep buckets and reawakens the dead desire of my youth to become a dancer; and now this movie comes along, all these amazing kids singing and dancing as if it were the easiest thing in the world. It made me want to get up and sing and dance myself... to take dance classes and voice classes and drive myself like a madman up onto a stage to express my joy in song and dance before a crowd of adoring onlookers...
... and when I do get up, and sing like a dying frog and dance like a drunken hippopotamus, I just want to rip my throat out. No matter how many classes I take, I'll never be able to jeté my topheavy, inflexible, and now overweight thirty-six-year-old body across a stage; even if I trained and trained and trained for volume and control and pitch, my voice will never be more than a tinny mediocre instrument. And sometimes that makes me terribly angry and horribly sad.
I accept that these are not the talents that God gave me... and I try to remember that I do have great talents of my own, that I can write and I can think and I can perform the mysterious alchemy that is drag. But, as my sponsor always reminds me, accepting it doesn't mean I have to like it, and some days the burden of the talents I possess seem a poor substitute for the talents I've always wished I had.
Still, it was a wonderful movie. It really captured the wonder of youth, the conviction that everything you do is life-or-death important, that newness to life that makes every low-point unutterably crushing and every triumph heart-burstingly spectacular. And the music was fabulous, and the choreography gorgeous, and the characters (if a tiny bit two-dimensional) completely sympathetic. There was never a moment where I groaned with disbelief (as I did when watching Fame, a film in which gritty realism and Broadway fantasy couldn't quite separate itself out), nor a moment where I found myself rewriting the script in my head.
When I was done lying in a puddle of my own tears and despair in the living room, I took Grandmother down to Southland Mall for an evening of shopping. She is going to be flying to South Carolina next week to attend my nephew's graduation from boot camp, detouring back through Texas to visit her one remaining sister in Hereford, and so needed some new clothes for the trip.
And so there went six hours of my life. Shopping with Grandmother is fun, but it's incredibly tiring as well. She's not a good shopper: she doesn't know how to scan for her size first (and she wears an difficult size, 22WP), then worry about cut and color afterward; she doesn't take my word that there's nothing in that corner of the store that she'd like, she has to go and see for herself (or more precisely I have to laboriously push her wheelchair through the crowded racks so she can come to the same conclusion); and she can't ever quite divorce herself from her prejudices about what fabrics are seemly for a woman of her age and station, refusing point-blank to wear jersey or cotton of any type.
On the other hand, I discovered, while there at the mall, the perfect place to go when I'm feeling fat and ugly: the Food Court. I've been obsessing lately (as I tend to do on my low cycles) over those fifteen extra pounds, worrying about the little rolls of fat under my arms and around my gut, with my self-esteem down in the basement in general and then in the sub-sub-bomb-shelter-basement after watching Camp, and was starting to hate my body; but after a few minutes of sitting there with the Grandmother, eating a Hot Dog on a Stick and sipping lemonade while watching absolute herds of utter heiffers stampeding around me, I felt a little better about myself.
I must admit that I felt vain and shallow for comparing myself in such a manner, denigrating other people's weight problems in order to alleviate the feelings around my own weight problem, but "vain and shallow" felt better at the moment than "fat and ugly." I'll take what I can get, even if it is just a quick-fix.
And now I am preparing to get ready to put myself together for the Living Sober Fall Follies tonight. After all the various dramas over evening gowns and eBay, I finally figured out an outfit that will look good and go with the number I chose and doesn't have to be bought or altered or anything. So that's a worry off my mind... and I have been actively worrying about it all week. The Living Sober Follies is the only show I really look forward to for months in advance, and I always want to bring my A-Game to that show... so I tend to obsess a bit about the fabulousness of my costume and the excellence of my musical selection. But now that it's here, and now that I know what I'm going to wear and what I'm going to perform, I feel I can turn over the outcome and just show up.
But it starts pretty early, I want to be to the hall by 5 p.m., and it's half-past twelve now... figure an hour to get showered and shaved and packed, an hour to get Madasin in Pinole and return to the office, an hour and a half to get into face, and a half-hour to forty-five minutes to get to San Francisco, find parking, and get to the hall at 1800 Market... I guess I'd better get cracking if I'm going to make it. If you're in the SF Bay Area and free tonight, do stop in at the LGBT Community Center this evening at 6:30... it'll be a great show.
Have a super-duper-fantabulous weekend!
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