Already not coping
Close to tears. I’ve just come back from Mardy Hell, the huge shopping centre near here built on an old steel works. Ate in Burger King(!) having had little all day, and I’m on a real come-down from a social binge yesterday.
I had a lovely week in Poland with M____’s parents and lots of old friends. Drank a lot and had a good time. I daydreamed a lot, but not as much as I might have. I even started to think again, as in Italy, that perhaps much of my problems have gone away having taken a tablet a month or so, or more, back that time I was searching around for ADHD remedies on the internet. It was an anti-fungal preparation designed to eradicate thrush in women and their partners. Certainly, several times I slept better than I had after beer before, though I had some pretty unpleasant nightmares (one involved a doodlebug-style bomb flying overhead of me and a girl at work I am often most gauche and apergic with, its engine cutting out and then exploding nearby). I didn’t sleep after cheese (or wine, which coincided with eating the cheese and white-bread toast at the wine bar).
Back now I can’t deal with not having time for writing, and with the worry of now moving into this house so imminently where I will have so many more responsibilities, and so much less time for writing. I have also had too little sleep, and, having been invited for a few beers after work yesterday, and then drinking through to one in the morning, haven’t been following my diet well at all. Today I can’t concentrate. M_____ sat with me in Burger King and saw that I was down. I had been a little fractious, taking exception to something she said I believed to be wrong (that Temple Grandin is profoundly autistic as opposed to aspergic, and then drifting off into my own world. She asked me, as she sometimes does, to tell her something, and I couldn’t. I have been back a mere day and we have seen each other for a very short period of time and she said at one point that I already can’t stand to be with her.
I have had no time for myself today and already at one, two o’clock with a friend still here - a guy I call my best friend who I have seen so seldom since coming back from teaching in Poland - I was feeling the weekend slipping away.
Add to that the fact that this stupid blog is becoming another huge distraction in my life. So far zero readers and yet it is, like learning Polish before it, a huge inelastic demand on my time and energy (inelastic because, like Polish, writing it off would mean another completely failed project, something that would depress me hugely).
I will have a large garden in the new house, and I will have to cook in a lovely kitchen. I will have a room of one’s own, but no time to be in it.
I have just logged on to the computer to see my e-mails. An old friend has written to me on Facebook. I haven’t seen her for years, but I resent so much the demand on my time. It may depress me now that I am writing all this pointless crap - this food diary that is supposed to focus a little of my attention on food so that I may stabilise my life and write, but which is taking so much away from that very end, but as a travesty - but once people start writing and demanding my time I’m only going to feel the worse. That’s the paradox of relationships for people like me - and I count Kafka as one of them - we demand love, need love, to be loved and even to love, but feel so often, perhaps for the most part of the time but when we are feeling most wounded, that the best way of expressing this love is to be left alone, forgiven, yes, understood, yes, but left the hell alone.
Yesterday: lots of beer, a little fishpie, coffee with sugar
Morning: a pear, underripe, bananarice milkshake with spirulina, orange juice and water
early afternoon: corn bread with peanut butter
coffee x 2, strong, with sugar
Burger King “Angus meal” with chips and orange juice*
Reveries, impatient, depressed!
*interestingly, one of the house parents who is not usually into the nutritional side of things thinks that orange juice sets off one of his students who also is set off by milk and, as he remembered the other day while I was eating with him, gluten.
