A shocking confession: I've never been known for my sunny, "glass half full" outlook. My daughter refers to me as "Daria", the cartoon character of gloom, angst, and bleakness. But even by my grim standards, the past year has been remarkably miserable, and it's taken a strange, and cumulative toll.
WYFP is our community's Saturday evening gathering to talk about our problems, empathize with one another, and share advice, pootie pictures, favorite adult beverages, and anything else that we think might help. Everyone and all sorts of troubles are welcome. May we find peace and healing here. Won't you please share the joy of WYFP by recommending?
Maybe my "glass is not only not half full but spilled entirely out, rolled and smashed to shards on the floor, and I just cut a major artery trying to clean it up" attitude is traceable to the annual singing of the "Happy birthday" song KibbutAmiad family style...
(sung to the tune of "The Song of The Volga Boatmen")
Happy Birthday! Happy Birthday! Now you've aged another year
Now you know that Death is near
Happy Birthday! Happy Birthday!
Black Death has just struck your town
You yourself feel quite run-down
Happy Birthday! Happy Birthday!
I've written a lot about the profound loss I suffered 11 months ago, which was a sea-change event and from which I don't really ever expect to "recover" - you learn to go on with a gaping hole in your heart from those type of losses, not recover. But there's the other stuff...
The economy. There seem to be two categories of people in my circle: Those doing just fine, remodeling their vacation homes and writing tuition checks in full for their children at MIT and Princeton, and the rest of us. I'm in the "The rest of us" category. My son graduated a year ago from Columbia with a degree in film and has yet to get an interview. My daughter is a junior at a private college with all sorts of scholarships and grants and she still had to take out loans and I still have to pay the balance - $800 a month - for an education that I'm not sure will help her get a job in her desired field - law.
I'm still woefully underemployed, three part time jobs, which, collectively, leave me little time for the writing I am trying to do. I went back to school (DePaul) this summer and my fellow "adult" students are all desperately hoping that more education will help them keep or find a job. After all, that's what we keep being told - we need to "retrain". And it's bull - what America needs is not more adults with multiple degrees. We need JOBS.
Politics: In a land that values it's citizens only as consumers, and worships and grovels to those who have benefited from the source of all profit (labor) while abusing and vilifying the laborers, I'm in some serious despair about political solutions to critical problems. And the alternatives are too horrible to contemplate.
My Friends: They are suffering from marital break ups (largely due to economic strain, unemployed, underemployed, depressed, unable to go to the doctor, working multiple jobs and too exhausted to participate in much (like political organizing, what a serendipitous coincidence for the ruling class). Those who used to donate to food pantry drives are now clients, and depression is being passed around like a flu virus.
Miscellaneous Sources of Misery:My car reliably starts about 50% of the time, my furnace is woefully old and a Chicago winter is right around the corner. My basement floods when it rains hard because there is no place for rainwater to go in my overbuilt "McMansion" infested town.
And last week, my (one month short of 15 year-old) dog, Shamrock, died. Shamrock was a keeshond, a breed known for their stubborn independence. She was impossible, and kept me laughing.
So - that's MY too-damn-miserable-to-share-anywhere-else list. What's YOUR effing problem?