One Hard Thing
I’m am drifting away, I guess, slowly slipping out of this world, and before we all get worried and thinking about intervention, it’s really a literary, intellectual, mostly metaphorical description of how I feel. Kind of useless, kind of lost, and slowly losing touch with important things.
On the other hand, I stay active. My cold is down to the occasional sniffle, and yesterday I did a lot of newsletter editing and social media updating, all of this facing a car in the driveway that wouldn’t start (wouldn’t turn over, not a dead battery), which meant my wife rushing to a neighbor’s house to borrow his car to make it to class (special jury for one of her singers), and me finishing up my work and then doing The Hard Thing.
THT is the acronym I’m sticking with. Refer back here if you forget.
THT is essentially any duty I have to perform, any responsibility falling under my bailiwick, any routine piece of action that needs to be done and I need to do it.
It’s not procrastination, although of course it is, just more. Fear, mostly. Panic. Anxiety. I want to hide bad news. I just got a couple of big medical bills. The money I’ve accumulated to finally pay off my $9000 new water line last year (paying interest-free payments at the moment, but I still owe $5000 and interest starts very soon) now looks tenuous. I have no idea what’s happening with this 2009 Pontiac. It’s got 130,000 miles and maybe we’ll drive it into the ground; $1000 a year in service is a bit cheaper than a new car, although we need one. The weekend looks dicey, particularly since we’re heading out to see a play, wearing my new birthday suit, so if there’s serious auto damage and maybe the need to do car shopping…crazy. And more stress.
But I’m fading, in a way, and I need to fix that. I need to do one hard thing a day, I thought yesterday. It was hard to call a tow truck. It was hard to call the dealer. It will be hard to call the dealer today and say hey, have you got my car? Is it OK? I’ve rented a car for the weekend but what’s up? Is this going to be more money than I have?
I need to write something good, or get a dull job making minimum wage so I can pay for health insurance. I need to look at my life and see if I’m done, or what else I might do.
And I’ve got to stop fading. The weight loss has decreased but still ticking down, despite a lot of eating (and messing around with aggressive sugar, from donuts to maple-glaze gingerbread bars). My problem is if I force myself to overeat, then the next two days are not hungry ones and we’re back to ticking off 2/10ths of a pound a week. This is just disturbing, not scary. As I’ve said before, physics will kick in and I’ll just reach a weight that matches what I eat…but I don’t want to look like a skinny senior citizen who blows away with a decent breeze.
Maybe I’ll make a list of THTs, one a day, and do them. They’re not really that hard, and mostly involve paying bills and making money.
At least I got that insight out of a bad day, yesterday. Do the hard thing. Learn how it’s done.
