Heresy

I took a night off from the game today, so I'm not going to talk about the game.

Thing is...I sort of lost the plot last night. I'm not even sure what triggered it; it seemed in fact to be a cumulative thing, because on reflection I could feel it inside of me, lurking there waiting for a reason to explode.

I had this sort of uneasy feeling the last couple of days, a sense that I knew I needed to be careful with myself, be calm. What I don't know is why I needed to put effort into that, the basis of my stress.

Or maybe I do.

After reacting far too strongly to some little Alliance shithead, after oversleeping today and missing a work meeting - which sucks because I actually LIKE the woman I work for and her reaction to me missing it wasn't anger, but worry - I realised I'm tired.

I'm just really tired.

Never was too used to the short nights in Scotland, being that I grew up in Texas where night is always dark and day is always too fucking hot, but its also sleeping in the city, the sounds of morning street sweepers, drunk couples screeching at each other as they stumble home, or Joey Chav and his Boomtastic stereo slipping beneath my window as he pub-crawls up the Royal Mile in a car that costs less than the sounds coming from it.

So..yeah..that's probably a big part of it - just tired.

Couple that with a natural biological tendency to be a night owl - I worked afternoons for years when I moved to the UK as I worked for an American company and had to 'mimic' their business hours. For about three years my work schedule was wake up at 10am, be at my desk at 1pm and sit there until 10pm at night, then play a couple of hours of WoW, then go to bed.

Day in - day out. A schedule necessity became a habit, and then a lifestyle only slightly different now in that I don't work such late hours.

And I think this habit has begun to eat at me a bit, and yet I am only now getting to the point where sometimes I feel I want to - or CAN - break it.

I asked myself why I hadn't gone to a movie lately, why things that once held such appeal to me - travelling, walking, camping, even just going for a coffee in the park, or going to a museum - seems to render me utterly noncommital.

And I think I know why - because like my father, I tend to enjoy things more when I can share them, or show them to someone. Just like cooking....where I rarely do for myself, I delight in impressing someone else with it, going over the top even was something I took pride in doing. Cooking to me was performance art and the diner was the audience, but it was a very special kind of art, an art of senses and nourishment and I actually felt quite serious about it for awhile.

When I had my house up North - an 1880s Victorian home that we had renovated when I was still married - I mixed the paint myself for the dining room, a crimson and brown that resulted in a rich warm dark red that was amazing at night. The room had an old fireplace - we restored the plaster ceiling and I filled it with the very same antiques I have now, and took an old antique wooden jewellery crate and, putting the stereo inside of it, drilled a hole thru the back so that music could be played without modern techy gadgets spoiling the look of what ended up a very Gothic Victorian dining room, full of rich tapestries and dark colours and candles.

We'd sometimes have people over for dinner and I'd go thru stacks of CDs to find the right song. I remember quite often I'd pick Billie Holliday or medieval music, depending on the mood, and take time to decant red wine before we drank it so that it aired properly. One of the most elaborate meals I cooked was for his parents - that is my ex-husband....a homemade vichysoisse with homemade bread, seared Highland filet of beef and roasted vegetables, and whisky ice cream, served on my own china and my grandmother's Rosepointe crystal and actual sterling silver flatware. I had picked the local beef by hand and actually marinated it for two days in olive oil and red wine - they were so tender they were almost like melted butter.

It wasn't enough for me to cook for people then, I wanted them to be blown away.

And yet what marred that night - like most every other one in that room - was my then-husband's drinking...be it his crying or anger late in the evening, or spilling wine on the furniture or the velvet tablecloth from Harrod's that I'd bought only one month before, it always came down on a sour note, and nothing I could do, or had already done, seemed to prevent it.

Tired.

The last meal I served there - infinitely more casual - was to friends I knew from WoW - Ghanka and Blacktalon in August last year, shortly before I sold the house. It wasn't the best one I'd ever made but at least it was a happy enough memory of friends enjoying a room that was MEANT to be enjoyed. There was no bleak Scottish pathos, no alcoholic rant, and both men were sweet and appreciative and it just undid a lot of pain in that room.

When I look back on it, it seems almost a different person that served that meal. Whether I was still subsisting on illusions that kept my ego and sense of wellbeing sustained, or I was actually healthier then, I'm not sure.

It would be helpful to me to know if I was, in fact, on the upswing again now, if all this reflection and thought is actually a healthy reaction to a painful past, wanting more in my life now, more people, more activity - or if I'm still in the shadow, sucking my thumb, waiting for something - or someone - to break the cycle when its actually my responsibility.

And when you're tired, its hard to know that - it really is.

__________________
"I wrote the story myself. It's about a girl who lost her reputation and never missed it." - Mae West
Fireflower's Words of Wisdom: http://i200.photobucket.com/albums/a...ompilation.jpg

Elanos

*hugs the woman*