There are few days that an order of fried pickles and a cherry limeade cannot make better.

This day is no exception.

Thanks to Sheila of Coffee and Shoes for the virtual beer:

And for taking me out at lunch for said fried pickles and frosty beverages while we debated and bemoaned the Cassandras of today’s US economy.   And for hauling my temporarily-handicapped-ass all over kingdom come and back.  Because I sure as HELL know that it isn’t for my sad sack company lately.  I have to agree with her, even in my current depressed state – down with the pessimists!

I will pass this on to the following:

To Amy-Renee at Pinkwings and Bambi at Sun in a Purple Sky – neither update their blogs much (and when A-R does, she does it on private MySpace and you can’t see it, na-na-na.)  I happen to know that both of them could seriously use a beer, and I am hoping that A-R and I will be remedying that situation this very weekend (well, with mojitos, anyway).

To Shep at Do Something! Life has been so hectic that he owes me a picture, so I KNOW he must need a beer.

To Charlotte at Two Mice and a Cracker – the new job is keeping her offline and away from us, and I am pretty damned sure she needs it.  If it didn’t break all kinds of stupid Southern interstate liquor laws, I would be boxing up a case of frosty adult beverages and sending them to her.  We miss you!

Lastly, to Dierdre at Scream of Continuousness and her husband Martin, who are about to become parents for the very first time.  The good Lord knows, as well as all the rest of us parents looking back, that they probably need that beer most of all.

I had a very bad thing happen to me a couple of months ago. A very bad thing related to my scientific career. It does not affect my current position, so don’t worry about me. I am still upset enough that I don’t even want to type the details, but it boils down to this:

Somebody recently MADE their career off the bleached bones of my research.

And they didn’t credit me.

This kind of academic research-jacking happens all the time. This was made particularly painful because if I had been able to continue pursuing the research program that Katrina cut short, they wouldn’t have gotten away with it.

BUT, here’s the silver lining.

In the midst of my crazy-making episode over it, I called my very best friend, in the middle of her own issues, and she listened and devoted the exactly appropriate amount of righteous indignation and sympathy on my behalf.  Even though this is way out of her area of expertise. Even though she was in the middle of a social engagement.

It occurs to me that I don’t thank her for her friendship nearly enough.

Amy-Renee:

Thanks, girlfriend, with all my love.

My son, who has barely noticed my existence since his Mimi showed up to help out during my infirmity, picked this morning to suddenly decide that he simply could not handle his life without his mommy. While I had been feeling a bit cut out, and can’t say the newfound attention is entirely unwanted, the timing is awkward. His Mimi is going back home this weekend, and he will not have the undivided and doting attention he has had for the last three weeks. It naturally follows that he will be going back to preschool this Monday.

This morning I got a preview of what is in store, and it ain’t pretty. Harry, in his Thomas jammies was crying “Mommy, I want to go WITH you, I want to GO!), clinging to my legs and my hands as I was trying, unsuccessfully, to crutch my way through the garage to the car. I am already running late because he woke up wanting to cuddle with Mommy and I am a total softie-wimp and could not keep myself from acquiescing to the point where Kris and I were both throwing on clothes and shoes while going out the door. I am trying to tell him that it is okay and I will only be gone a little while today, all the time trying to hold back tears myself and resisting the screaming urge to simply call in sick. Heartsick. Homesick. IwannastaywithmyBabysick.

There are those out there that will throw the “simple” solution of being a stay-at-home mom at me. Sometimes I get weary of the unspoken assumption that those of us who do work outside the home are doing so because we aren’t committed enough to researching the rearrangement of our lives that will enable us to do so, that time with our children is traded away to the desire for the bigger house and the nice cars and the yearly vacations to resorts. Well, please, don’t think I have never entertained the idea. But my time with my son has a different price tag – and the price tag is security for his future.

I live in a modest house. I buy my cars used. I shop for clothes on bargain racks. I horde business flier miles and bum rooms in the time shares of friends for vacations. I cut coupons, I buy bulk. I don’t drive when I don’t need to. I likely spend too much on restaurants than I should and more on my hobbies than I like, but I shun all other entertainments; no concert tickets that aren’t freebies. Most movies are seen in the dollar movie house.

I fully expect that within the next ten years I will be supporting at least one of my parents. Through a combination of bad luck and poor planning, my mother and stepfather are living paycheck to paycheck with no cushion against retirement other than a failing social security system. I will almost certainly be among those who are raising their children and caring for their parents at the same time. This is not the future I want for my son, an only child that will bear the burden of elderly parents alone.

I worked my way through college and graduate school. While I am proud of hauling myself up by my own bootstraps, the end result is that I have a foreshortened schedule to prepare for my golden years, a preparation that was shared by the late arrival of my son. I walk the tightrope between knowing that my time with my son is more limited than most, and the realization that I cannot, will not, force him to be caring for me during the prime of his life. I also don’t want him to have to make the same choices between school and family, between his child’s future and his parent’s present, that I have had to make. I want to help him on his journey, not the other way around.

I am like every other parent. I want my son to have a better life than I did. Not a more expensive one. A more secure one.

So I work. And I save.

I know it is hard for Harry to understand why his Mommy has to leave him for a while each day – some days it’s hard to make myself understand. Some day I hope I can explain it to him; that I work because I love him so very, very much. And I miss him every moment of the day, more than he will ever know.

Her Bad Mother is one of my favorite bloggers. She has taken a sabbatical recently, and has had a series of guest bloggers. While I miss her writing, the coolest thing about one of your favorite bloggers showcasing some of HER favorite bloggers is that you get to find new favorite blogs – like Black Hockey Jesus, who is screamingly irreverently funny in a Robin-Williams-George-Carlin-love-child kind of way. This is a wonderfully satisfying thing that has led me to waste even more time than I can afford when I should be other things.

But before she took her sabbatical, Her Bad Mother wrote:

Rule #637 for women who blog who want to be taken seriously – that is, to not be referred to as ‘narcissistic brainless lactating cows‘ – is, apparently, this: do not have mental breakdown and threaten to quit blogging or take vacation from blogging or enter blogging rehab somewhere in Arizona or whatever.* Presumably because if you don’t have the balls to keep blogging when you’re feeling mentally and/or emotionally whipped, it just goes to prove that you don’t have balls, period.

Before anyone accuses me of not having balls, I would have to say, in the literal sense, you are correct. However, if this relates to the metaphorical corresponding attitude, I will tell you – walk out onto a field with a stick and a very small shield with the objective of beating the crap out of an opponent with about 50 pounds and 6 inches on you, break your leg doing it, finish the fight, walk off the field on the broken leg and THEN tell me I am lacking in testosterone laden macho-masquerading-as-stupidity. And have I mentioned I have indeed stitched up my own wounds? To break into my more colorful verbal expressions – screw you. I am as dumb as the next guy.

Over the last year, I have been mentally and emotionally whipped. That’s the thing about depression, it takes the fight out of you. It’s increasingly hard to find the bottom of the emotional well that writing draws from. I read through my blogs of the past, and I wonder at a person who had the kind of emotional range, the intensity, even the sense of play, that I apparently did when I started this blog.

I am perilously close again to doing what I do not like to do – blogging about blogging. That is a form of mental masturbation that I have tried to avoid. Instead, I will say that I am blogging about depression, about the gray cloud that descends on your life and seeps out the color. Depression is a slow thief. It does not take away the things in your life that you love. Instead it steals the love itself, leaving the trappings of a life behind, flat and empty and featureless. And in the midst of it, it feels like it will go on forever. Worse, it begins to feel that it has never been any other way than this.

But I know this is not true. I read back to the person I was, even after Katrina took its toll, and I see someone who knew what it meant to squeeze joy out of every moment. That is the person I truly am, the person I have been all of my life, the person who goes to bed after a bad day with the absolute knowledge that the sun will rise on a better one. I am the person who finds joy in the glint of light off the green tree leaves beside the highway, the ephemeral shifting of white clouds against the blue sky, the colored patterns of cars in a parking lot, a caterpillar inching across the back porch. That is the person I have to find again. Depression robs you of your very self and it does it so incrementally that you don’t know it has happened until you wake up and find you are a stranger in your own skin.

This too, will pass. I say it like a mantra every day, but it feels like I am spending my time waiting for that moment, when I will wake from the gray Kansas landscape and find myself magically transported to technicolor Oz. I know I need to stop waiting for the tornado to come and blow it all away, but finding the energy to make my own journey seems so insurmountable that the sheer inertia keeps me bound to this place. I need to haul my bootstraps. I need to kick my ass.

I am just so damned tired.

Between my baby,

And this boy?

Do you Ravelry?

If not, you should.

You’ll thank me later.

You know that stereotype of the “absent minded professor”? The one who shows up to lecture in his bedroom slippers, with the bedhead hair, and the distant, hazy tone in his voice? The one that can hold a completely coherent conversation on string theory and its recent fall from favor in the quest for the unifying paradigm, and yet puts the cat in the fridge instead of out the back door?

I see that person every day in the mirror when I brush my teeth.

This isn’t so much of an issue when I am more, um, self-correcting than I have the ability to be right now. But in my current state of dependency, it has been a source of embarrassment (to me) and annoyance (to everyone else).

Have I ever mentioned that I have four flights of stairs in my house? That it is impossible to access a bathroom in my house without ascending at least one of them?

Oh, yeah. Crutches are a complete blast.

I am capable of ascending and descending the stairs. I am capable of most things, really. But it all requires major planning and orchestration, worthy of a big stage production, and there is a line between what I CAN do, and what I am SUPPOSED to be doing. That line is hard. Hard because I can SEE over it. Hard because I can even cross it. And hard because of the consequences when I do. An aching lower back and strained arms is one thing – but a re-broken or displaced bone is another. And God forbid I fall down the stairs and break the other leg. I don’t even want to contemplate the consequences of that.

But staying on the good girl side of the line means that every person that I live and work with ends up at the mercy of my foggy-headed absentmindedness. Every time I reach the top of the stairs and realize I forgot to put the-absolutely-needed-object-of-the-moment in my backpack, it means somebody with two good legs is going to have to make the trip up and down and relocate the object from one of the many creative and non-intuitive hiding places that I manage to put it down in. If I empty my water glass, somebody else has to make the trip to the kitchen (glass and liquids are very unforgiving to my current state of gracelessness – the combination is a veritable time bomb). If I get into the shower before I pulled out a towel, or the pants I want to wear are in the dryer, someone else has to retrieve them. Contrary to popular belief, being waited on hand and foot is stressful when you aren’t paying the servants. Sometimes I would rather just go thirsty or uncomfortable or bored because asking someone else, for the fiftieth time that day, to fetch whateveritisIneed is just too much angst to bear.

It has taught me two important lessons:

1. The people I live and work with are incredibly patient people.
2. Stairs, as an architectural feature, are highly overrated.

Some of you have noticed a dearth of, for lack of a better term, substance, here at My Level lately. Not that this seems to bother most of you. I have said before – post deep thoughts about human nature and you get crickets chirping. Post about concrete Mexicans, and the world loves you. I suspect it has something to do with the popularity of reality TV, but that’s speculation on my part.

At present the only deep thoughts I am thinking are so introspective and whiny, that it truly would reinforce to the world that bloggers, and specifically mommy-bloggers really are the worst kind of naval gazers. I would add narcissistic, but that would imply a degree of self-regard that I am not sure applies here. Self-examination is closer to my reality at present.

In short, I am tired. I am tired of the unpleasantness in the world that I know exists, the moral outrage that I know I should (and do) feel. I find myself avoiding the news. I know children suffer and die. I know that corruption is bleeding the country. I know stupidity and cruelty and evil exists. I just can’t face it right now with any strength of conviction.

Do you think,’ said Candide, ‘that men have always massacred each other, as they do today? Have they always been liars, cheats, traitors, brigands, weak, flighty, cowardly, envious, gluttonous, drunken, grasping, and vicious, bloody, backbiting, debauched, fanatical, hypocritical, and silly?’ ~ Candide, Voltaire

And knowing the worst that the world has to offer, I have even less time and energy for the petty squabbling that every social circle, small and large, seems to spawn at a by-the-moment rate. I am tired of the trappings of self-importance taken at the expense of others, the subtle put-downs, the shallow posturing. It seems so ridiculous taken in the wide view. I have simply ceased caring who has done what to whom with what blunt social construct. So don’t tell me about them. I don’t care.

What I want right now are very simple things.

To spend time with my son and my husband.

To knit.

To get up at night to pee without a major production that wakes the entire house (impossible in a cast with crutches).

A hot bath. I would sacrifice a small chicken for a hot bath instead of showering on a plastic stool.

People are suffering all around the world much worse than I am. I get that. Really.

I just want to tend my garden.

Optimism is the madness of insisting that all is well when we are miserable. ~Candide, Voltaire.

I crochet.  I learned on my grandmother’s knee when I was seven years old and I have done it on and off all my life.  But put two needles in my hand and I was flummoxed, even though I always WANTED to learn how to knit.

Well, given that I have had a bit of time on my hands (and off my legs), it was a good time to start.  I only needed a bit of inspiration.

And Shep kindly provided that for me.  He mentioned that he wanted a Jayne Cobb hat from the late, great,  Joss Whedon series, Firefly.  Now that I can learn to knit for.

So I present, without further ado, my first knitting project:

Otherwise known as “The hat that swallowed Harry.”

Have I mentioned that Shep has a REALLY big head?

Literally.