NoRillyI'mFine.

It's been a Very Interesting Few Days.

First, there was an unexpected 12-hour shift at work last Saturday, which was so hideously awful that I couldn't even blog about it. I ended up on the phone with The Crazy (big boss lady, who actually is not hard to deal with for ME at all, but who hearsay assures me is still utterly Crazy) for nearly two hours, after ALL THREE printers spent the whole day throwing fatal errors every time anyone tried to print any PDF files. The problem turned out to be bad printer drivers (which could have been discovered at any point within the LAST THREE MONTHS that I've been bitching about these errors, but oh well...) and it wasn't resolved til The Guy Who Was The Awesomest Boss I've Ever Had But They Demoted Him drove to work at 8 PM on a Saturday to spend four hours troubleshooting the problem. The man deserves more cookies than the universe has room for; the best I could come up with was an e-mail thanking him for his unrelenting awesomeness.

That was Saturday. On Sunday, I was the recipient of a guilt trip from Mom because (having worked a full week, then 12 hours on Saturday) I was too tired to come over and help her hang her new drapes. I don't like ladders on my best of days, and it was not my best of days. I offered to come over the next day (Monday) or the following Sunday or Monday, but she had plans for all those days. Finally, after one too many sighs of resignation and "I just wish we could have gotten it done, is all," I e-mailed my boss and asked for a day off. So Thursday, instead of going to work, I hung drapes. It was a bit of a hassle, but no more than such things are normally; you know--old hardware frozen in place; wrong-sized screwdrivers; previously-drilled holes just an eighth of an inch too far to use again; climbing off the ladder eighteen-dozen times to change the drill bit; things like that. In the end, though, I have to admit that the drapes looked REALLY excellent.

I've come to a conclusion, though: I would find it much easier to enjoy spending time with my mother if she could just notice and accept when I JUST DON'T FEEL LIKE TALKING, instead of trying to force the issue. She has a hard time with silence, I think, whereas I am fundamentally not a very talkative person, at least not to people I speak to every day; there's just not that much to talk about, really. And just at the moment, my life is dull. Unless the listener understands Wikipedia (Mom: "Is that what they call a 'blog'?"), I can't really talk too much about what I've been doing lately, because other than work, that IS most of what I've been doing lately. Nothing of interest has been happening, so I'd prefer to just be silent, rather than squeezing conversational blood from the turnip of my current activities. Unfortunately, that's just what we did, all day. When we have nothing to talk about, she either tells me all about church, which, in terms of the interest it generates in the listener, is akin to me talking to her about Wikipedia; or she gives me unrequested advice. (My favorite is the "I'd really like to see you get off methadone" conversation, which a)has been had before, ad infinitum and ad nauseam; b)has been disagreed-with most vehemently by both myself and my doctor; c)is based on fallacies which I have discussed and disproven with her many, many times already.) Also, she insisted on driving me home, which I appreciated, but here's the thing: I am prone to motion sickness. I am especially prone to motion sickness when I am a passenger in a car being driven by someone who stops suddenly and makes abrupt moves. It happened the other night in a cab, and it happened Thursday on the way home from Mom's. It almost never progresses to the point of puking, but it's HUGELY uncomfortable. I have explained this to Mom, though I have not attached it to her driving in any way. And even THIS would not be a problem, if, while I am focusing every bit of attention on the effort to keep my stomach contents in place, she did not insist on asking me questions. Trivial questions--but nonetheless, questions requiring answers. When I am car-sick, anything more than a monosyllable is a strain; I've tried to explain this, but she really, REALLY has a problem with silence, and apparently it overrides any and all other considerations. It took me nearly an hour, once I got home, to get back to normal.

Then there's the little matter of the weather here in Chicago. Now, as Firefly rightly reminds me, for this one I have no one to blame but myself; I'm the one who insists on living in such a wacky climate, and so I do sort of lose the right to complain about it. And truly, I'm not usually anti-winter. I love new snow, and I don't mind MODERATELY cold weather--but all we've had for a week now is 35-degree weather and rain, leaving slush and pools of icy water, alternating with single-digit temps and 30-below wind chills. The roads are full of potholes, so when it's warm and rainy, all the curbs and crosswalks are ponds too big to leap; and on the cold mornings when I walk to work, the slush and water on the sidewalks have frozen over, leaving long patches of ice. The visible ice I can avoid, but more than a few times I've come close to butt-planting after stepping on what LOOKED like solid ground. The slush is a different challenge; my old sneakers finally gave up the ghost and lost the glue holding the sole to the upper, so all week they leaked like a sieve. Slightly less-expected, my formerly-waterproof boots sprung a leak as well, so for the last week, no matter which shoes I've worn I've been doomed to walking around with damp socks all day. Finally I broke down, and on my way to work downtown on Friday, I stopped at Payless and bought myself a pair of $16 gym shoes. I figure they'll get me through til sandal season.

Also, just to complete the day's bitchery: my teeth hurt. Badly.

As bleak as this all sounds, I am not unhappy. I actually would prefer being unhappy, I think, because unhappiness implies that there's something that can be done about it. Mostly I think I'm just crabby; the equation for "crabby" goes something like this:

(Cold weather) + (too many Mom conversations) + (slush/snow/toothache/annoyances) + (lack of anything fun to do) = CRABBY.

I think I'm going to talk to my doctor about going back on antidepressants. I'm trying very, very hard, but I just can't get enthusiastic about anything. I have a list of volunteer opportunities I want to try; I have a writing project I want to start working on; I have boxes and boxes of craft supplies and lots of ideas. I have a really wonderful apartment which needs decorating, and I have the desire to do a lot of things...but I have no motivation whatsoever. I mean, ZERO. My initiative is absolutely absent. It's not even that I'm tired; I've used that word for so long to describe this feeling, but it's just shorthand, really--it's not "tired" I'm feeling, it's "de-motivated", "hopeless", "depressed". I can count my blessings til I'm blue in the face, and I'm very thankful for all the good things in my life, but behind that thankfulness, there's a big blank space. I'm not UNhappy; in fact, I'd say that I'm closer to "happy" than I am to "unhappy" (although all the things above make me cranky, they'd make ANYONE cranky, I think). But I am empty inside, dulled. Some of it is loneliness--but again, though I want to be around people theoretically, my motivation to do anything about it--to call Cowgirl and Debbi and plan a girls' night, or anything like that--is pretty much missing. It's like someone pressed my "off" switch, and I can't find the "on". To me, this is really the clearest evidence I've had that something biochemical must be going on here; I WANT to do stuff, I recognize the REASONS I have to be happy--but I can't actually make it happen. It's a strange, strange feeling, and I'd very much like it to go away.