Performance Anxiety

My left eye is twitching. It has been twitching for days. I woke up this morning with a headache that felt like a hangover; connected somehow to my stomach, making me feel nauseated at both the thought of food and the thought of no food. I am not pregnant. And I didn’t get drunk last night. I haven’t been drunk in a long time, mostly because I have felt like utter, thieving crap for the past three weeks. Three weeks! On August 23rd I wrote that post about how I felt like crap for five days, and that was two weeks ago.

On Thursday after our trip to the PNE I finally got a cold. After two weeks of exciting almost-cold foreshadowing. Seriously, my life does not need to be like a bad mystery novel. It could be like either a good mystery novel or a bad romance. Ba ba ba bad romance. I would not mind it if my life was like a Lady Gaga video. But this other stuff. This ongoing malaise. Oh. The vapours have consumed me again. Please make your own peanut butter sandwich, dude.

I stare at the computer and have nothing to say. My child is starting kindergarten. My other child will be starting preschool. I am fine with this, with all of it. I have lists. Things are getting done. Things are written down, crossed off. Hoorah. I am meeting people and forgetting their names and hoping their children don’t bite, while my eye twitches and I look deranged and sort of like a zombie.

I am reading The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. I have been looking for it — halfheartedly, yes, because I tend to forget things I am looking for — in the library for a while, and all the while it was at the Cameron branch of the Burnaby Library. Exactly. You didn’t know it was there — okay, most of you probably did because I have a disproportionate amount of readers who are local librarians but come on, let me have the joke — and neither does anyone else, which is why they have all the hipster lit. I got two other books, names of which escape me because they are upstairs and I am downstairs and the children are in the middle, playing with their toys and best friend, both of which books are hipster books. McSweeney’s artful book jacket. Etc.

It’s a great book. I am really enjoying it. That is my review.

I have been getting more sleep, eating healthily, taking all my vitamins. Why am I so sick? Why can’t I get it together? Is it transfered stress? Am I really stressed and not seeing it? All the things — the canker sores, did I mention the canker sores? — and the twitching and the broken immune system, all of this is stress related maybe? I am just so good at hiding stress from the world I can also hide it from myself? Is this a marketable skill?

I don’t know. I have been keeping a journal a long time. I am very fucking introspective. I have been writing in this stupid blog for 8 years. EIGHT YEARS. What’s left to explore. What deep crevice of my psyche is waiting patiently for the Q-tip of analysis?

I haven’t been writing. I could have written all this stuff, the stuff up there, days ago. Weeks ago. But I didn’t want to. I wanted to wait until something better came along to write about. I wrote some fiction in my private fiction places. It was all dumb. I wrote in my journal in a pink ball point pen because it was the only colour I could find. But the longer I go without writing, the worse I feel about the not-writing. So here, I’m writing. UNIVERSE. I’M WRITING. Maybe tomorrow I will feel better.

I am going to read my book now. Oh wait, hit publish. Then go read my book.