I can’t sleep. I’ve tried. I’ll try again soon, but I thought that while I was up anyway I’d stop concentrating on trying to sleep (“why aren’t you asleep… SLEEP WOMAN… please… pretty please?… you’re so tired…” wasn’t really helping anything) and I’d start concentrating on anything else that came to hand.

My laptop came to hand.

Not that I have much to say.

…

My sister put a wedding dress on hold. I’ve seen a picture, and I couldn’t believe how beautiful she looked in it. And even if she doesn’t end up buying that particular dress, that style of dress will be stunning on her.

…

Today was pretty awful, but not for any good reason. Nothing bad happened to me. I was just tired and cranky and felt really crummy and was late getting to work. Then drama happened, followed by more drama, followed by new and different drama, and all of it was smashed into a day when I only had two and a half unscheduled hours at work. And while none of the drama happened to me, actually, that didn’t seem to matter to my mood. Moods are not reasonable things, and today mine decided that it’d been a while since my last full-out funk and that it was time to make up for lost time. Not fun.

…

I spent most of today cold and shivery. I really should come to terms with the fact that it’s not summer any more and start wearing fall clothes. But I think I need some new fall clothes, and I don’t want to go shopping.

…

Things weren’t all bad today. Some people I respect paid me some pretty flattering compliments, and they did so when they thought I wouldn’t find out. Which made things much more flattering. I also topped 600 subscribers to my professional blog for the first time, and I discovered that it had been assigned yet again as required reading in a graduate course. That’s both very cool and very intimidating. So yeah, it wasn’t all bad today.

…

There’s a spider that’s been building it’s nest across the patio door all summer. Every day I open the door to water the potted plants. Every day this rips her nest apart. Every day she repairs it. She doesn’t even seem to be very surprised by the process, or care that if she moved 3 inches to the left, her life would suddenly be so much less tiring.

…

Tomorrow is a new day, and a Friday at that. Maybe I’ll build my nest 3 inches to the left tomorrow.

I wish I knew what to hope for. I’ve been waiting six weeks for tomorrow, and now I realize that not only am I unsure that I’ll learn anything of substance, but I’m also not sure whether to hope that they’ll find out what’s been making me feel crummy or that they’ll find out that nothing’s wrong. Either way seems depressing. And so I’m caught sitting here and worrying about tomorrow.

I also wish I knew how to keep myself afloat while feeling crummy. Currently I just withdraw, which is stupid because then I’m lonely and feel crummy. But I haven’t mastered the trick of being social just then without also being whiny and completely self-absorbed, so I’m caught sitting on the sidelines, unfit for company and unfit to be alone.

Thank goodness for friends who’ll come sit with me anyway. And send me virtual chocolate. And tell me not to worry about tomorrow until tomorrow. And generally be good friends.

And that, fair reader, was the designated whine for today.

Today, I got something that I’ve been craving for a long time. I got a day of just hanging out with a friend. Nothing compares with the luxury of being able to just drift through a day, talk about everything and nothing, and look up in surprise to find that the entire afternoon has flown by.

‘Tis the season to debate politics, or rather, I wish it were. Unfortunately, debate never seems to work out well. Even people who should know better end up making fun of which ever side is the Other Side, or assuming that supporters of the Other Side are stupid, or assuming that they know which side people are on (or that they’ve even picked a side) based on bits and pieces that they know about that person.

I hate this.

Four years ago somebody assumed he knew which side I was on, wouldn’t believe me when I explained why I was as yet undecided, got defensive when I wouldn’t listen to his hype and hyperbole, and hasn’t spoken to me since. That same election cycle, I spent a very confusing day visiting with two different groups of people, each of whom confidently talked about “our candidate” as if they knew which one I’d picked and, you guessed it, each group had me pegged for a different candidate.

I hate this.

Talking “the issues” is even more fraught because everyone assumes that if you support one position on one issue, they know which position of Every Other Issue Under The Sun will be. Which leads them directly to an assumption of which candidate you support. Which lands us all in the same kettle of fish.

I hate this.

You may wonder why I don’t just claim a side and proclaim it, sweeping aside unfounded assumptions with one swell foop. Well, first of all, this is because I’m not Republican or Democratic. I’ve voted almost exactly half and half. But more importantly, it’s because as soon as I choose and declare support for one side, people will immediately assume that I agree with that side’s stance on the major issues. And usually I don’t. I’ve never seen a candidate that I agreed with on all the major issues. And so here again I get socked by assumptions.

I hate this.

My coping strategy is to refrain from talking politics at all. Ever. With anyone but my immediate family (and even then only in extremely small doses). I just won’t. It’s not worth the angst.

So, um, yeah. Close to two years ago, I pulled a muscle in my inner thigh. Nothing too odd in that. I’ve done that many a time. I even expected that this one would take longer than usual to heal because back when I used to be a ballet dancer (many moons ago, let me tell you… especially in dancer years) I’d felt a similar explosion of white-hot pain when I tore a muscle in my calf. That had taken months to heal, so I settled in for the long haul.

I waited, stretched ever so carefully, waited, tried heat, waited, tried ice, waited, settled on careful stretching again, waited some more… nothing. Six months later I still couldn’t sit on the floor and move my leg more than about 10 degrees to the side of center. 10 degrees! But as long as I didn’t stretch that leg out to the side (and really, how often do you get the urge to stretch your leg to the side in a day) I felt no discomfort.

Fast forward to this spring. By this time I was kind of embarrassed to ask anyone about this becuase I knew all they’d do is scold me for not coming in earlier and then tell me that I’d irreparably damaged something. (If that last bit doesn’t sound entirely rational, just remember that I have a rather irrational fear of doctors and everything will make a little more sense.) But when I had my yearly physical, I mentioned to my doctor that this had been going on and she referred me to physical therapy (without any scolding).

This brings us all the way to today when the physical therapist spent over an hour trying to figure out what was wrong with my leg. I tell you, it takes some muscle to be a physical therapist! She stretched me and pulled on me and had me pull on her and stretched me some more, and determined that I had “full range of motion.” I almost laughed. How could that be? Thoughout the session I’d been frustrated by how stiff I was, but apparently she’d gone through the whole thing thinking I was flexible. She finally believed me when she measured the angles of stretch in the uninjured leg.

75 degrees to the side in the left leg (my historically less flexible leg, and the one I blew out when I was 12)… 40 degrees in my right leg. That’s when she ordered ultrasound therapy.