Well it’s been a while. I’d like to say exciting things have happened but mostly I haven’t had the privacy I need to write. Mrs CorC? has been home with holidays and the like.
The Y had its annual pool maintenance and cleaning so swimming opportunities were limited. Couple this with some attitude about what I think optimal swim conditions should be and the result is no swimming. I’m finally working my way back.
Am I the only person out there who has this baseline of sadness, like it’s my factory default setting? When I picture my mother, her face is always sad. She was the archetypal depressive in my life. My life is the legacy of her sadness. I know. It’s crazy. But making it go away ain’t easy.
On the lighter side, my latest obsession is Chinese fountain pens. Jin Hao is a Chinese pen manufacturer and they are selling their fine products dirt cheap on Amazon and Wish. What bites you in the butt, price-wise, is the ink. A bottle of Sheaffer Scrip runs $8-9 a bottle. Grant you, a bottle may last forever; it just seems like a lot.
The cool thing about fountain pens is the fun they bring to cursive writing. It is as if the ideas flow from my brain, down my arm, to my hand, then through my hand to the pen to where the ink puts that idea into words on the paper. Erotic? Maybe. Sensual? Definitely. My journal is filling up.
Writing in cursive is very satisfying and, at the same time, daunting for me. I know I am not alone. I am left-handed. When cursive was introduced into the Third Grade curriculum, it was traumatic, at least to Eight Year Old Me. Those lessons taught me that I was different and that maybe something was wrong with me. I should have paid more attention to Sandy Koufax, I guess. My parents, Thank God, never tried to change me to a righty.
When we were kids, the cool item was the cartridge pen. It was a fountain pen that delivered ink from a plastic cartridge, rather than a refillable ink reservoir. I can imagine, today, a bunch of Third Graders trying to fill ink reservoirs, with spilled ink and ink blots making for a myriad of Rohrschachs all across America. The cool color was peacock blue. Every kid had a peacock blue Sheaffer cartridge pen.
Dorothy and I will hit the Y about 1:30. I am looking forward to it. There are some forms the disability people said they didn’t get that I sent them. So I have to re-fax them. Mrs CorC? is working in Williamsburg so dinner is up in the air as to what I fix, if anything. That’s my day.
like 😉
Ah! A brother south paw! I attended parochial school for half of second grade.
Dang it, didn’t mean to hit send. Besides being left handed I am also a bit of klutz. In parochial school during the 60’s the sisters would whack your hand with a ruler if they caught you using it. My mother, who was bipolar (alternately depressed and manic with an emphasis on depression) finally yanked me out of that school after my hand stayed bruised for more than a month. Upside to that, I can write legibly with both hands. David, between the love of cursive, the sadness, the whole celibate or chaste marriage thing, I think you are my tribe. I wonder , was your mother also an alcoholic?
Adult Child Of Alcoholic. I grew up speaking “Crazy” at home.
We ARE tribe. I am fluent in crazy, I also speak self-doubt. 😉
Yes. We are tribe. My surviving siblings turned out relatively OK. My late brother and I bore the brunt of the nuttiness. My mother would say, in front of her children, no less, that she only wanted two children, but my Dad wanted more. So with four children, the bottom two had a huge resentment and I had survivors’ guilt. I don’t know how my older brother handled it, but drinking worked for me, until it didn’t.
Self-doubt? Yeah. I have a baseline self-confidence of Zero. I’ve been working on self-esteem for most of my adult life. What helps me is just doing stuff. Results be damned.
I am the oldest. My middle brother suffers from some of the most severe anxiety I have ever seen in a living human being. It is debilitating. My youngest brother is really good at denial, but he and I have both discovered the church of just do it, results be damned. The combination of low self esteem and perfectionism crippled me until my late thirties. I still struggle with it but that was when I began to understand the meaning of the phrase feel the fear and do it anyway. Until then I just thought I was the problem. I was suicidal and final went into therapy. It saved my life. I’ve been working on it all since. I understand exactly what you mean when you say you’ve worked most of your adult life on raising your self esteem. Now, most of the time my self esteem is good, maybe 70% of the time. The other 30 is when I stop keeping on top of all the things I do to stay balanced. Over my adult life I have developed a bag of tricks to rival Felix’s.
That’s true for me too. Running in high school helped me. It was something I was good at and took me out of the shadow of my brother. Then depression hit full bore at college. I stopped running and started drinking. I was in this nightmare world from age 18 to age 43. AA saved my life. No question.
oh, and yes, I am a recovering alcoholic and drug abuser.