Well, it's here, the year our baby will be born. As part of what appears to be a significant minority, we did little to celebrate the New Year except to welcome it for obviously important reasons - with an innocuous toast of Dr. Pepper at midnight - an hour which I have not seen for some time indeed. I seem to be much more the 4-6 a.m. type lately, that second trip of the night to the loo is killing me and I lie awake for a few hours after as my mind gets going about, well, everything.
I'm having trouble shaking a pervasive set of the blues, the ones which I think typically envelope me at this time of the year. Not only am I a relative grinch about the whole Christmas season thing, resenting the commercialism and the general frenzy, but living in a condo means I must also dread New Year's Eve as it has been a nightmare for years. We have had some of the world's least courtesous neighbours; last year Neil the diminutive and highly inconsiderate neighbour above us had a party whose highlights included floor firecrackers and what can only have been a mosh pit - directly above our bedroom. We were dreading this year, literally cringing at every sound from above us. Finally, around 9 p.m. it started with a low and invasive bass that continued to rise until we finally figured out that it was our new neighbours downstairs instead. We'd already endured their Christmas party and the drunken reverie on the balcony - "like, you know, houseboating is so awesome, except that, like, because there were guys there, we like, couldn't really walk around in our underwear, it was like, so strange!" It's so frustrating to sit there and have to endure the rudeness of other people who have not yet clued into the fact that they do not live in freestanding homes. It made it that much more despressing that we didn;t get that house. All things considered though, they shut it down to a dull roar by 12:30, just as I was getting ready to go downstairs. If only we'd have had the sub-floor ready, I would have been happy to start installing the floors around 9 a.m. this morning.
As for the renos, we have pulled up the carpet from the den - now affectionately called 'baby's room' - and I couldn't have been happier to get that hideous eyesore out of my life - what idiot thiought that white carpet what a good idea I will never know... In any case, Ez worked dutifully to paint it in a beautiful sunny yellow that he picked out (lemon pound cake to be exact) and it looks so bright and wonderful. We're changing the light fixture and it is like a different room completely and I cannot wait to see it with the rich mahogany floors we've bought. The hardest part of the whole thing is just finding where to put everything in the meantime - this is a small place to say the least.
I suppose that is part of the depression I'm fighting. despite my true belief that living in small spaces is the inconvenient truth of future living in terms of its clearly smaller environmental footprint, I still long for a space of our own where we don;t need a storage space and we don't have to deal with whatever arbitrarioly annoying asshole happens to impose their lives upon ours. I wonder sometimes how we will ever move up, but then I have a tendency to live in the difficulty of things --I know, I'm working on it.
It's tough right now though, just getting through December. It's a month that I tend to despise, slow and boring and really a dead month with respect to work and hoping to work, and I just genearlly have to endure the time until life starts again and I feel like I am part of the world again. I always feel like I'm stuck in a horrible, lethargic limbo at this time of the year. I keep asking myself what I can be doing to get rolling, to move forward, to recreate myself and become something again - and I have to remind myself that I am starting something new, the most important job that I'll ever have. And it's not at all that I don't recognize that, it's just that I struggle with the transition from being obsessed with moving upward in my career and the decisions I have made to give my child the best life I think I can for it, including the country in which it is raised; its environment, both physcial and socia-spiritual. It's hard for me to think about giving up on my dreams in so many ways, but I suppose until I meet them, how can I feel like the sacrifice was worth it? I think (and hope sincerely) that when I finally see that tiny face, those little feet which have been steadily thrusting themselves into further and further parts of my interior, when I look into those eyes, I will know why I have done everything I have ever done in my life. It will all make sense - if only for a brief moment in time.
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