I’ve not wanted to talk much about YOPD lately, here or anywhere else, because it’s been kicking my ass in one new and slightly unsettling way, in addition to the old ones.* Since it’s easier to improve your mindset than your motor function, I’ve been trying to stay focused on the things I can change. That means sticking to a new schedule, writing more, being as active as possible, and not tearing my hair out or simmering with resentment when my ‘on’ time is consumed by chores Crankenstein won’t help with.
Almost everything about our current life together seems impractical and unsustainable to me, which in turn leads to feelings of hopelessness that she’s seemingly content with the status quo. But she’s in a bad place with ‘Niles’ and I’m in a bad place with levodopa, so we’re chugging along and (mostly) choosing to laugh instead of squabble. We’ll continue trying to turn our situations around and go from there, lest we end up like the thrice-divorced Bette Davis, who we’ll get to in a minute. First, though, what the hell should I do with my grandma’s charmingly unattractive shalom sign? I put it there because I didn’t want it near the front door, which is where she kept it, but its current spot is in jeopardy as the great office rearrangement continues.
The office keeps getting moved to the bottom of my list of priorities when I have enough ‘on’ time to get things done. Yard work beckons, the basement calls, or there’s tons of cleaning to catch up on, but today I had time to clear out another old bookcase. There’s only one left to go and here it is, mostly stuffed with titles acquired secondhand in my teens and early twenties. The number of Bette Davis books that I own always surprises me, and there’s another on my Kindle. The bottom two in the stack pictured below aren’t about her but everything else is.
Here’s the rest of it for the shelf surveyors among us. There’s little order to it anymore; it’s been invaded by stray books that came back to me after my paternal grandma died (she marked my name on the inside covers after I gifted them to her), an Estelle Getty memoir that I still need to read, a copy of The Killing Joke that I never remember to trade in at the used bookstore, and a few other tomes that don’t fit with its overall themes. What I love most of all is that The Joy of Lesbian Sex, which was relocated from the living room before one of my mother-in-law’s visits, somehow ended up next to The Jewish Catastrophe in Europe.** Papa really would’ve appreciated that.
* It’s nothing catastrophic, my left limbs have just been shakier than usual, which further restricts their usefulness (they’re always slow and rigid) and — more relevantly — heightens my frustration.
** We also have an original Our Bodies, Ourselves and a funny old medical textbook or two about homosexuality. Crankenstein, a former sexual health educator, loves that kind of stuff.