Sleep, love, wishes:
Originally published at . You can comment here or there.
My schedule has gotten wonked around a lot; spent the majority of time when not work or medical busy exhausted and sleeping. This means available time for house paperwork has sludges into the moral equivalent of ‘zzzzzz‘, ‘wha‘ and ‘bzzzooorrk‘. Tonight I’m trying to hack at it and see what I can get done.
The hyperbaric oxygen treatments I’ve been having over the last few weeks seem to be the source of the power drain; as a friend who knew me from 13 years ago when I had a kidney removed reminded me, my body tends to be low-energy and I sleep a lot when doing major major healing. Annoying, though.
Latest annoyance is that my foot bandage has been shredding a lot, especially in bed at night. Makes A Mess, and is *not* conducive to keeping it clean/germ free/protected from damage or pain. Susan got me a couple of ‘legging’ things to use as protection from shredding, but I dunno if they are really going to work well.
Otherwise, plans for the rest of the ‘holiday’ season are moving forward, centered around the 24th, 25th and 31st. It’s been painful to see the earlier parts (Thanksgiving, Mere’s birthday, Sinterklaas, the Family Dinner) cut or reduced down.
(Susan brought me Thanksgiving leftovers in rehab, my time at Mere’s family birthday part was horribly short, but Susan tried her best on those two to to make it work for me, which I greatly appreciate.)
I realized recently that the reason I fight so hard about this stuff is that it’s a Huge Link for me to the seriously nice, fun and memorable parts of my past; most especially my Mom and Granny, but also other wonderful people like my cousins Nancy and Dave and my great-aunt Mary, to Uncle John Lusk and his stepdaughters, and to other folks now long dead.
It’s become a warm, positive way to bring them back to me for a little while, and to share that warmth over to my family here and to close friends. Having this cut feels like a steel hammer dropped on that love and the past, right up there with saying ‘the season is a humbug, we don’t need no tree or special times, don’t need family or love, just sit back and watch the Shopping Channel and dig the prices for zirconium necklaces.’
As if I would ever give a crap about zirconium necklaces, regardless of cost.
Presents, to me, are mostly important from the direction of ‘I’m important enough to you to try and come up with something I’d really like and surprise me with it.’ Not bothering at all on that and just doing a generic gift card, to me, just takes the whole experience to : here’s something because I feel obligated to do something. Now it’s off my checklist.
Kind of makes the whole process something with no heart, no soul and no love and concern.
Yes, I know gift cards work in some cases, like for someone you know that’s helpful and nice, but you don’t know them well enough to be able to figure other stuff out. And, yes, you can do something like that for people whose favorite thing would *be* a gift card for iTunes. But in general, to me, it’s not something I want to get or give.
My family has revolted about me putting a lot of books and DVDs on my wish list, but then, the stuff that’s on there (like an active shortwave antenna) are very techie, or odd (a V for Vendetta outfit or a good maroon Fez), and nothing ‘normal’ like a jigsaw, a autographed football, or a recliner.
I mean, I’m not ‘normal’ in my tastes, likes and dislikes, and have never claimed to be.