(no subject)
Let's try thinking, or at least writing, about anything else.
* It is the new year, so we have to start contemplating the layoff scythe. My boss confided: our group was left off of an org chart for a new project. Of course she saw the org chart because... she was in the meeting for the new project. So she is paranoid and now I have the unease and confusion that comes when you know shit is coming down the pike. Everything I have heard since they told us there would be layoffs seems to argue against us being let go. But you never do know.
* My brother is having some kind of slow-moving nervous breakdown. My sister-in-law called the other night (you know, that night) and said that he can barely move; he is lying on the floor clutching a stuffed animal. He is also heavily drinking again. They are supposed to move to Serbia in a couple of weeks so this is not really great timing.
I don't know. He has never done much of a job letting me into his emotional state, so it is hard to help. He never told me about his trip to rehab and I am not sure if he knows that I know. It was one of those "sure, don't worry about one drink a day" kinds of rehab so it doesn't really surprise anyone that he fell off the wagon. We did a Zoom call on his birthday and he was clearly drinking the whole time.
I am also sure that part of the problem is paralysis from early retirement. He spent 15 years bitching about his job and then refusing to get another because he'd have to "actually work" (as he put it) and he was so focused on how great it would be to retire early with full benefits. Well, now he's retired, and they literally don't leave the apartment, so all he is doing is sitting there watching the world burn down. Dude has super high blood pressure and, apparently, my mom's anxiety.
My brother has also always had this bizarre childishness and refusal to deal with the future - bizarre for someone who worked as an international banker around the world. He knows how to be mature and solve things; he just doesn't want to for himself. I saw all these things coming years ago but assumed he would figure them out somehow.
I'll be honest, too: we have never been close because he was violently abusive to me when we were younger. It is hard to forget, even though I know he does regret it.
Well, this all just makes it hard to figure out what should happen next. E (who is more gracious than I) offered for him to come here and perhaps he will. We are also scrambling to find therapists etc. he could talk to.
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I am reading Gershom Scholem's Walter Benjamin: A Story of a Friendship. It is a weird little book, but kind of absorbing. I love Scholem and wish I understood Benjamin, like, at all. I had a Facebook conversation with a historian friend and she confessed to the same thing.
So this book is entirely like, "We talked late into the night about our deep feelings about 12 German writers [who nobody has ever heard of since 1930] and our sympathy with the [German political faction nobody has ever heard of], which was to mark our generation so profoundly." Then every so often someone like Kafka or Rilke will wander through for a sentence. It is a deep exercise in feeling ignorant. I guess on some level I still want to imagine a world where people can be penniless, brilliant luftmenschen. It is as comforting a myth as any.