Alive and Well-ish.

Recently I have been paralyzed by the sheer enormity of the things on my mind. And yet I’ve had nothing interesting to say—not that my customary posts about unlucky dolphins and the evils of shoulder pads are terribly riveting, but the frenzied blathering of my brain over the past few weeks has been even less enlightening than is customary.
Partly this is due to the fact that we are moving (I swear there is a flash of lightening and a clap of thunder every time I say that), and moving looses some essential screw in my cognitive faculties. As you may remember, our last move did not go well, what with the gauchos and the cats and the missing laborers. I am hopeful that this one will be better. For one thing, we have boxes for all of our belongings and are not relying on the “pack six boxes, transport to new apartment, unpack boxes, transport empty boxes to old apartment, repeat” strategy we have used to such staggeringly inefficient effect in the past. We are also asking the movers to move everything this time, rather than just the furniture—most of which we are selling anyway (Does anyone need a coffee table? How about a set of four suede chairs, two with scratches?). And It does help that at the end of all this (on MONDAY) we will be in an apartment with lovely granite counter tops and a dishwasher, and the bathroom of squalor will be no more. But still, the stress mounts. It does not help that our old apartment has not rented and as of Sunday we will be paying rent for both places, a prospect that causes me to gnash my teeth and moan wildly and scour the want ads in hoping of seeing one that reads “CHEESE TASTER–$100k pls benefits, no exp. necessary!”
I am overwhelmed by worrying about money, and our upcoming IVF cycle, and packing, and my mother leaving for Switzerland, and it has made me useless at work, sluggish at home, and yet painfully alert when I close my eyes to rest.

For some reason, the fact that my mother is moving out of the country has made everything seem a bit less manageable. I am embarrassed even typing that—after all, I am a grown-up married lady now, ostensibly, and yet when I think of my mother living across the ocean I feel something akin to the panic I felt after being dropped off for my first day of preschool, almost a quarter of a century ago.
See? Embarrassing.

But probably I have had too much wine and too little sleep, and I will feel better in the morning after some coffee. And then we can talk about important things like who wants to have a cocktail with me at Blogher and how many embryos I should transfer and whether empire-waisted shirts are a bloated girl’s best friend or the devil.
(And if anyone wants to buy a Pottery Barn sleeper loveseat blanketed with a cozy nap of cat hair, you know where to find me).