After my father died I wrote that everything felt shockingly real. Everyone else kept talking about how they felt like it hadn’t happened, like everything was surreal, and I couldn’t really relate.

I still can’t. Sometimes my mind wanders and for a while I won’t be thinking about it, and then my mind wanders back and the shock of that reality is gut wrenching. It’s been almost four months now. The other day I was riding in the car and “I’d Love to Change the World” by Ten Years After came on the radio and despite quickly changing the station, I still found myself tearing up in the Costco parking lot.

It wasn’t just that this song was a part of his funeral. That I was ok with. It was the fact that the thought occurred to me that I didn’t think I’d ever heard that song come on the radio, and then I remembered that my dad was listening to that station when he died, and then I did what I’ve spent more time doing the last few months than I have practically anything else. My mind ran over the last few minutes of his life. It’s not a conscious thing, but I think I do it because I feel like if I think it over enough times I’ll be able to change what happened with the power of my mind.

I have elaborate dreams where I save him.

I know how incredibly pathetic this is. How self centered. Apparently I think the whole world revolves around myself, to think I am the key to fixing all of these problems. And the fact that I can’t fix this one thing makes me feel like I can’t do anything at all. How ridiculous.

I’m listening to Billie Holiday and the rain coming down outside. If I didn’t feel like shedding a few tears before, I do now.

I guess I always know I’m not doing well when I start saying things like “my mother was right”, but that’s how I feel today. It’s too bad I don’t drink, I feel like in a movie this is the point where I pour myself a glass of something, sit on my sofa, and mope. I guess I can’t even mope right.

I know that failure is a part of life, that if you ever want to succeed you need to fail about a thousand times first. If you don’t go through this failure the odds of achieving anything worth achieving fall down to nothing.  But I keep failing at things that should be simpler than this. I figure out how to do it better, I figure out how to fix my problems, and then things still don’t work. I feel defective. Everyone else I see seems to have things figured out better than I do.  I know that’s dumb, I know it’s really dumb to look at everyone else because for the most part, I don’t want what they have, anyhow. But still….they wanted things, so they went out and got them. They were somehow adequate when it came to fulfilling their goals, whereas I am not.

And I’m disgusted by the pity party in my head.

Every time I get going on a new project, trying to defy my pattern of failure, I end up seeing the last hour of my father’s life play through my head, or thinking about something I’m still pissed about from my crappy childhood, and end up with my head cradled in my hands trying to shake the ideas out of my head.

My optimism is pretty well being beaten down. My optimism has brought me through an eating disorder, through a time when I wanted to die, out of my parents house. My optimism has gotten me through everything. I keep trying to remind myself that this isn’t bad as all the other things I’ve been through, but it doesn’t feel that way. I guess that’s largely because I don’t feel like the same person anymore. I’m a new person, and this new person doesn’t really know what to do about anything at all.

I went to high school in an extremely isolated small town in the cascade mountains, and I’m using that town for the setting of the novel I’m working on.

I keep looking at the town, staring at the hills, and thinking about what a unique experience it really was to live so far removed from the rest of the world.

The thought occurred to me that I’m going stir crazy, and I immediately wondered how “stir crazy” is actually defined. I found this on wikipedia.

Stir crazy is a phrase that dates to 1908 according to the Oxford English Dictionary^[1] and the online Etymology Dictionary. Used among inmates in prison, it referred to a prisoner who became mentally unbalanced because of prolonged incarceration. It is based upon the slang stir (1851) to mean prison.

It is now used to refer to anyone that becomes restless from being stuck in one place too long, with a similar meaning to cabin fever.

Apparently, I’m using exactly the right term to describe how I feel. I feel stir crazy. I feel incarcerated. I hate that I get this way.

I hate staying in one place for too long. When I was a child we moved every few years, and now in adulthood I feel the urge to pack up and move after about a year in the same place. Even a few months without a nice long drive makes me a little crazy.

The last little road trip we took our car had a fit, we’re trying not to go anywhere until we buy a new one. It hasn’t been that long, but I feel like I could crawl out of my skin. It’s not just something I feel when I think about it, it’s a general all day feeling that makes it hard to sit still and stop myself from running down the road and hopping on a bus to anywhere.

I feel like I should be able to tell myself to stop it, sit still, you should be content with what you have. And then, as soon as I have the thought, I reject the idea completely. I don’t WANT to live like that. Life is a daring adventure or nothing, right?

It just doesn’t make things any easier right now.

I don’t really have any thoughts about what I’m supposed to do about the issue of right now and feeling stir crazy, but I don’t think I’d really rather feel any other way.

Ugh. Ugh. No. I’m so sick of hearing this from seniors at my work. “I’m sure Bob keeps you in line!” First of all, we call him Robert, please. And second of all, where the hell do you get off saying something like that to me? I keep myself in line, thank you.

And, contrary to what you might think, it’s ALWAYS the women. The men, who I do talk to quite a bit, never say anything like that to me.

They are always commenting in some way about my husband keeping in my line, taking care of me, etc. They also comment on my colleagues driving small SUVs, saying that they should be driving a small car and they think those “things” are too big for them to handle.

Recently, one my favorites, who is this amazing woman who has been very accomplished in three different amazing careers was talking with us about her vacations in Mexico and I mentioned that I wanted to go and am working on my Spanish, to which she replied (to Robert) “Oh, you can’t take her there now! You’ve gotta keep her safe.”

The icky feeling that surrounds after hearing something like that is overwhelming.