Skitterpated
I apologize for the paucity of my postings of late. I'm in that unenviable position of having too much to do and unable to do it, having too much to think about and too little of use to say about it. The pacing of events this month is so lurching, so stop-and-go, that it's hard for me to get a grip on what I'm thinking, feeling, doing. I can't say I like it; it reminds me a bit of my first Midwestern spring, which, in its wild temperature swings and rapid oscillations of weather, ran against everything I'd learned about the slow, dignified procession of coastal seasons.
I'm a person who likes to fidget, and bounce around, and DO -- yet at the same time I walk slow, plan methodically, and eat so carefully I'm always the last one at the table. I don't do well shifting between the modes, because when I'm geared up and at high speed, I want to make it last as long as I can before the gas runs out. When I'm at slow speed, it takes a considerable effort to increase the pace. When I'm caught between the two modes, when I'm geared up and stuck in traffic, my mental motor revvs like an over-turboed hot rod.
That's where I am right now. The schedule I'm on for this month requires me to do all my packing for the move this week (and maybe a little bit just before we leave) and to pack and plan for this trip I'm taking with my family. I'm hyper and antsy, and there's little I can do until the boxes arrive. I'm also working against my desire, silly though it be, for my mother and brother to see my apartment as I've been living in it, not as a depersonalized space filled with boxes. I'm tugged both ways, toward the slow pace and away from it, toward manic busy-ness and toward near-apathetic lethargy.
Then, after the mad packing, there is the trip itself, which while it will be fraught with tension (it's both the occasion of strewing my godfather's ashes and of my brother returning to us after a five year absence) will require little of me except to sit in the car and be patient and calm. I plan to get in some photography and some writing, but most of the planning is out of my hands.
Once we return, it's back to the mad dash, with last-minute packing and cleaning filling the two days before we leave for Red State. Even after we arrive, we will be busy with the movers, and with travel, and with settling in, and then it's back here for D's defense. (At least for this there will be two of us to share the burden.)
With all of this in the immediate future, is it any surprise I cannot envision anything past that? I have a grasshopper's mind and an ant's obligations.
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