gray | Psychobabble

I haven’t blogged in over a month. I’ve been all over the place. I feel scattered – everywhere at once. In an effort to “get things done” I start one task and then pause that and start another until I’m simultaneously trying to do several while none of them get finished and I end up forgetting what the first task was. Indeed, I started reading an article and then decided I should blog.

I feel lost. Every day is the same, and now that we’re past Christmas and New Year’s here in Oregon, it’s all the same gray, wet shit. My therapeutic happy light used to combat SAD needs to be, like, turbo charged cuz it’s not cutting it. I often don’t know what day it is. I have a million nitty gritty things to do that are made harder by Covid restrictions and trying to not get sick. Returns to retail stores. Repairing my car’s tire (AGAIN!). Relying on whatever substitutions our grocery store pickup offers us, which is sometimes bizarre.

The political junk is unreal. I told my husband the other day that I had the vague thought about needing to finish that one book about the attempted coup because I wanted to know how it ended before I realized…oh yeah. Not a book.

And then Oregon schools are just now moving in the direction of opening up and I’m pissed. We’ve been in lockdown more or less for 10 months now, and we have several vaccines in the pipeline (if you follow Oregon news, our government is slow as fuck getting those needles into people’s arms for some reason) and the government, school boards JUST NOW are making decisions to open up. Hey, I know! We’ve waited 10 months to try and flatten the curve and that didn’t work so you know what we should do?! Open the fuck up so that we can perpetuate community spread at the height of Oregon’s case numbers and deaths after the holiday surge. High five!

Oh, and I’m doing Whole 30 again so there’s that. All this fucking rabbit food had better kick in and make me feel better because it’s a goddamn miracle I didn’t reach for the mint chocolate chip on January 6th.

One good thing to end on – I randomly decided to mention a lifelong dream of mine to the members of my moms group – that I want to learn the piano at some point. I have zero musical experience. I don’t know how to read music. Never owned an instrument. I sing a lot and was in choir once, but I learned the songs by ear. Aaaaanyway, what comes up on my Facebook feed just days after I make this comment? A local piano teacher offering zoom classes for adult beginners. THAT’S ME! There was no way I couldn’t not NOT do it. So the teacher actually helped me spend a chunk of my Christmas money to buy a used keyboard and I signed up for the class……and it starts in two days!! I’m super excited and intimidated and nervous, but hey. It’s Covid and it’s zoom so it’s convenient and I’m not doing anything better besides drooling at Amos’ abs on The Expanse (ANYONE ELSE?! Dear lord don’t get me started.)

So there you have it.

Happy rambling 2021, you guys. May you feel safe and loved and relatively sane. Ish.

In response to The Daily Post’s writing prompt: “Local Color.”

A world devoid of color…I immediately thought of two things: the book The Giver and my current surroundings. If you’ve never read The Giver, then do it. Do it now. (And don’t watch the movie, I beg you. They butchered one of the best books ever written.) After thinking about that book, I looked outside. It’s Northern Oregon in November. The light has almost fully left the sky for the day. It’s starting to rain for a stretch that’s supposed to last several days. It’s gray. All shades of gray; monochromatic yuck. I wrote about this recently, so I’ll stop launching into that again.

My response to the prompt was automatic. The sky, of course. In a world where only one thing gets to keep its color, I’d choose the sky. It’s one thing, but it’s everywhere. I don’t always get to see it, but above the clouds of gray depressed muck, it’s there.

Now, the prompt implied that I could assign only one color to my chosen object, but I am tweaking this because blogging. I declare that the sky will get to change colors as it would normally. From washed-out, faded, shy baby blue to brilliant, deep blues to fiery (Fun Fact – I just now learned how to spell fiery. Hot damn.) oranges and reds and yellows to the darkest midnight purples and blacks.

In my world, if the world must be all gray, we get to keep the sky.

We get to keep all of it.