11/4

I have had a backwards kind of day today
not ever knowing what to do or say.
I've twisted everything around
have YOU ever acted in this way?

Said, ' I would like a hup of cot chocolate'
'pace my capers on my desk'
I was trying not to backwards things
I was trying really to do my best!

I promise to turn this day around
but I can't seem to find my way.
For I've made a mess on my desk
in a backwards kind of way

-Linda Winchell

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Sometimes you start a blog when you’re 24, and you write entries about learning to parallel park and how you’ve just figured out how to make iced tea and how you threw up against the side of the Treasury Building after a drunken night with your other 24 year old friends. You write that blog sitting at a desktop computer that in tiny apartment—the first you’ve lived without roommates—and reruns of Dawson’s Creek are in the background and you’re lonely but you like it that way.

And then you close that blog, and move away. Then you move again, and you start a new blog. You’re 26 and sitting in the university library where you’re supposed to be studying for grad school. You meet all of you.

Then almost decade passes, and you’ve moved and moved on and your writing languishes because life overwhelms. You drive to work in the morning, swallowing the Zoloft at a stoplight and washing it down with a McDonalds Diet Coke because this is America, dammit. All you need is a cigarette to throw out the window.

You’re 34 and just were prescribed your first blood pressure medicine. HBP and it’s kissing cousin Anxiety are handed down your maternal family line as if we passed down a quilt that we sometimes like to throw over our heads.

______________________________ 

I accepted my current job from my office telephone, on November 4, 2014. 11/4/14. I’ve written here before about the significance of the numbers 4/11 in my life, and nearly everything about my move somehow incorporated those numbers. I felt like it was meant to be. Even if it’s still hard and strange (doing different kind of work completely) and nothing I really like enough to write home about, it’s a good job. I’m learning a lot. Yesterday, November 4, 2015, everything flipped. I woke up to find that my state had elected Matt Bevin (an uber right wing republican) who has vowed repeatedly to unroll elements of the Affordable Care Act. If those provisions go….well….I’m not sure what my future holds. Ironically, also yesterday, I met the woman who is going to become my new boss.

What’s she like? Oh, she’s exactly like me. Exactly. Personality, background, even looks. And we’re the same age. Naturally, my hackles went up immediately and they’re still up. I told a friend—I’m trying hard to avoid my natural tendency when encountering new people: eyeing them with suspicion. ;) 

It doesn't help that I've had a couple of fuck-up's this week too at work, which makes me feel about two inches tall. It's not like me. But it is on Backwards Day in Backwards Week.

So. That’s been my week. What’s the last year or so been like? Oh, you know, fine. Great at times, actually. I love being back closer to my family although of course a part of me misses DC. I’ll always miss that city the way I’ll always miss my hometown. It’s just part of me; my DNA. My mom was in a very serious car accident almost one year ago today. It was two days after I accepted this job, and she broke her pelvis, every rib and her collarbone. She’s made a pretty damn miraculous recovery, truly. I know she loves me being back. My nieces and nephews do too, although my two younger nephews and my sister moved to California earlier this year. I can’t believe they’re really gone—it is so strange to be in Kentucky, being left. I’m the one always doing the leaving in the family.

Hello from the Other Side. I’ll be back soon J