If I don’t jump off the McCheese hamster wheel tonight, I’m not sure it’ll happen again this month, so here we are.* My writing time this evening was spent working on a review that remains unfinished, like almost everything else in my life lately. The problem isn’t depression, if anyone’s worried about that — the neurologist increased my dosage of Zoloft a couple months ago, which was helpful, and the remaining sadness is predominantly circumstantial and will heal slowly and imperfectly, as our deeper and more jagged scars often do.**
Mostly I think it’s the usual combination of sleep deprivation and neck woes hobbling me; to quote Nora Ephron (not someone I’d normally quote), I feel bad about my neck. Unlike Ephron, my problem isn’t with its appearance; it’s with painful rigidity that’s becoming almost as bad on the right side as it already was on the left. There isn’t much that can be done about it until the next round of Botox, so I’m resigned to another few weeks of misery and don’t want to think too much about it.
That’s how I feel about YOPD in general right now, though this so-called ‘power cutter’ has been a rare bright spot. Perpetually vexed by packaging that wasn’t designed with reduced grip strength or dexterity in mind, I took a chance on this Ryobi cutter during a holiday sale at Home Depot. It cost $40-something and so far it’s been worth it. Slicing cardboard boxes and opening tamper-resistant plastic packaging is easier now, unless the object you’re trying to liberate is a heavy lithium battery for a power tool, in which case you’ll need a samurai sword and the jaws of life to pry it loose.^
Apologies that I don’t have more to share tonight, but I hope to have either a proper post or a review done soon.
* Monday’s entry should’ve been a standalone post but I was so sludge-brained and tired that it was easier to keep it there.
** For the longest time after my childhood surgeries, I could barely glance down at my stomach; its scars — thick and new and vibrantly red — looked too angry, too painful, too grotesque. The biggest measures almost eight inches in length and I was quite certain it only enhanced the Quasimodo effect caused by the nature of my illness and the grim realities of life post-proctocolectomy. I couldn’t imagine ever being comfortable with my body or revealing those scars to anyone, but in time they shrunk (at least in width) and faded; and even if they hadn’t, it wasn’t high on my list of concerns once I’d actually fallen in love. Four years ago they were joined by new scars, all small and none wielding even the slightest emotional power over me.
^ If that sounds like a trivial thing to be excited about, it isn’t — I’m sometimes frustrated nearly to the point of tears when trying to open things that wouldn’t have troubled me in the past.