Creative Melancholy

I have been dreaming about writing this blog all day.

I don’t know what it is, but depressing weather always makes me more creative. I’m more of a homebody when it rains, and I want to write or color or bake or… whatever.

There have been warnings about the upcoming weather for days. The hurricane that’s hitting Mexico is manifesting as a very wet weekend in Central Texas. They predicted fatal floods and 100-year events.

All last night I was imagining the rain to come. The fat drops that fall from the sky with such velocity that they bounce off the ground whole before shattering into solid fractions, as opposed to splashing on the ground in fluid orbs. Sheets of water rushing through the streets and the gutters in the courtyard running over capacity and flooding the gravel swale in front of our patio until I worry that it’s going to creep into our living room before the flood drains can catch up to speed and suck it all into the storm system and dump it into Shoal Creek.

Alas, that is not the case. It was rainy overnight. Rainy enough that we woke to headlines of a car being washed away in west Austin, and enough that the umbrella on our patio knocked into the window a few times. And enough that when I let the dogs out this morning I was frustrated to see that the shoji screen separating their “comfort boxes” from the rest of the patio had blown over in the night, which meant that I actually had to put on PANTS and go out and set it upright, instead of just letting them out and then crawling back into bed.

But it has been solid rain all day. The kind of rain that’s strong enough that it makes you think twice about going out and makes you trot from the car to the door, but not the kind that makes you wary of your own safety. Not a repeat of the May/June deluge.

The water still thunders down the gutters in the courtyard, the sheet metal tubes amplifying the sound and making the generous rain sound like a flooding sheet instead. Sirens wail in the distance, but this is a city and there are always sirens. It probably has nothing to do with the rain. Soccer fields are flooded out and I’m sure the creeks are high and people living or working on the banks are crossing their fingers. So far, though, the rain is providing us merely a welcome respite from the heat and a touch of creative melancholy.

Right now, right this minute, I’m in a pleasantly inebriated state. I’m a couple of stages before drunk, in the kind of buzzed haze that a couple of glasses of wine will give you. Happy enough to let your guard down a little, but still in control and nowhere near drunk. It’s a difficult balancing act. I enjoy the buzz but I don’t enjoy the drunk, so I’m nursing a glass of wine next to me to keep it going but not put me over the edge.

It’s been a long week for us. Sean’s work is sucking him dry. He slept 9 hours last night, which is probably more than he slept for the whole rest of the week combined. That might be a little bit of hyperbole, but he didn’t come to bed before 2 AM Monday through Thursday, and he was up until after 4 AM Friday. Grad school and a sucky job are taking their toll. Watching him be so stressed and knowing that there’s nothing I can do for it almost causes me physical pain. I would do anything for him, but there’s nothing I CAN do.

I was also diagnosed with Hashimoto’s Thyroiditis last week. It’s an auto-immune thyroid disease that causes a host of issues, not least among them the propensity to gain weight and the inability to lose it. So that explains a lot. It also is causing me anger and anxiety and excitement. Anger, because I’ve asked three doctors in the last five years if I might have a thyroid disorder, and they all looked at one marker on my blood panel (ONE!) and said no. Anxiety because I have a lot of life changes ahead of me (food sensitivities, anyone?). Excitement because I have a clear path forward, and instead of feeling like the failure who can’t lose weight and is somehow doing everything wrong even though I’m doing everything I’m told, I feel like the victor who’s lost 43 pounds in spite of the fact that I shouldn’t be able to have much success.

I also feel vindicated because Hashimoto’s is autoimmune. It’s not something that I can develop because of lifestyle… it’s not a symptom of lifestyle (being fat), but rather is the cause of it. There’s nothing I could have done to prevent it. Likewise, there’s nothing I can do to cure it.

I’m on hormones and a lot of supplements now, in addition to staying away from foods to which I am sensitive and cause abnormal inflammation. They don’t cause the Hashimoto’s, but they do exacerbate it. So I spend my days avoiding all dairy, egg whites, wheat, yeast, and almonds (goodbye, everything that make life worth living), and I spend my nights filling my designer pillbox (thank you, Amazon!) with the 20 or so pills a day that I have to take, in addition to my regular multivitamins, probiotic powder, and vitamin D drops.

I’m frustrated with myself, too, because though I asked doctors if I had a thyroid problem, I always assumed that they were right and things were just difficult because I was lazy or that was “the way things were.” I never took it upon myself to research things and figure out that hey, I have 10 of the 12 symptoms of Hashimoto’s! I didn’t know enough to be my own advocate and press for the blood tests that would have diagnosed me years ago.

But I know now, and I have the benefit of being in the best physical shape of my life, even if I’m still fat. I’m a freaking bad ass coated in cuddly layers of cushion. Hopefully now that I know what’s going on I can address it and start melting that cushion away.

It is unusual for me to be so open in a blog that I know many read, but I do so with purpose. Hashimoto’s and similar disorders go undiagnosed in a huge population of people because many doctors won’t test for it, or don’t take the time to diagnose it. This isn’t necessarily their fault, because these problems can be very sneaky. The symptoms are wide and varied, and your “root” hormone levels and other numbers can appear absolutely normal…until you test for antibodies and other markers that make you realize that oops… there’s a huge issue here. In my case, one of my antibodies measured 22 times normal. TWENTY TWO TIMES NORMAL. The other was merely 8 times the normal range. I wouldn’t have even bothered trying to track this down again except for my sister, who was sick of listening to me bitch about how much work I was putting into losing weight versus the actual return on effort. “You need to go see a functional medicine doctor,” she chided me. “Promise me you will.”

I found a good one in Austin that had amazing reviews but a huge wait list. I made an appointment for three months out, and nearly canceled it. I am so glad that I didn’t. She gave me the power to be my own advocate and is helping me move forward.

In the meantime, life goes on for us. We’re moving in just under a month, so I need to get my rear-end in gear and get things prepped before the movers come. In under a week we’re headed to NYC, where Sean will run the marathon for the second time, and we’ll celebrate his birthday (and my cousin’s, who lives there and is also running the marathon). It should be a fun time. This is the umpteenth time that we’ve visited the city, but I love it and am excited to go. Sean loves it even more than me, and I can only imagine that he’s excited to get away and into the high-energy city situation that he thrives on.

For now, however, I’ll keep nursing my glass of wine, post this blog without proof-reading, and listen to the rain coursing through our gutters… and enjoy the creative melancholy coming my way this weekend.

Stressful Blessings

After I published my last post and then went to the blog to view it as any readers would, I realized that my last three posts have started in roughly the same way. It’s always some variation of, “it’s been so long since I’ve posted, I don’t even know where to start.”

This time, at least, I can say that it hasn’t been so long. I suppose I DO know where to start, though only in comparison to the last few posts. Finding a good starting point is never easy. To paraphrase the Princess Bride, anyone who tells you different is selling something.

Sean and I are sitting in the same coffee shop as the last post, across from Willie Nelson’s statue at the Austin City Limits theater. We got 20 percent off our food because Sean has a student ID for grad school which is good for ten percent, and we both knew the trivia answer to the Star Wars question, which gave us another ten percent. Sometimes being nerds pays off.  

There are no lines across the street for any performances today, which kind of surprises me since the major Austin City Limits festival is going on right now. I would have figured they’d be having some live tapings this week. Maybe they will, and I’m just really out of touch. I’m usually out of touch, so I wouldn’t be surprised in the least if that were the case.

Unlike last weekend, we’re sitting inside. We started out on the patio, but the noise and the inquisitive bees and flies drove us inside. Sean was starting to twitch every time a bug landed on him—which, for some strange reason, is way more often than they land on me. He’s just naturally sweeter than me, I guess.

It’s almost a pity we’re indoors now, because it’s a gorgeous day. For the first time in months and months it’s not even in the 90s. It feels almost chilly at 83 degrees.  I guess that’s a sign that I’ve acclimated to the southern heat.

It’s been a hell of a week, my friends. Just one hell of a week. Sean was driving home from the airport late last week, when out of nowhere a high-speed police chase overtook him on the highway. The suspect’s vehicle ran into three or four cars, forcing motorists across multiple lanes of traffic and into medians and shoulders—but luckily no one crossed into opposing traffic. Sean’s car was one of the ones that was hit. No one was hurt, and Sean’s airbags didn’t even go off. I suppose that’s a demonstration that it definitely earned its Consumer Reports rating, which made news the other day for breaking the rating scale. It’s frustrating  because it’s brand new, it’s his dream car, and it’s expensive—but it’s very much a first world problem and we have good insurance. It will take a while to get it into the shop because there’s only one we really feel comfortable taking it to, but it should be done by the end of the month. For now, he’s bopping around town in a rental car.

On top of that there was some serious drama with his work, which I won’t really go into here, but suffice it to say that it made us both sick to our stomachs for a couple days and I was on the verge of tears at any given moment and I think he got even grayer. As a result of what we THOUGHT was going to happen but didn’t end up happening, we broke our lease at the apartment and found somewhere new to live… and we’ve made the decision to go ahead and move anyway, which is never fun but is probably a good idea in this case. It’s funny, because just a month ago I was mopping the floors and chuckling a little to myself as I thought (facetiously) that it might be time to look for a new place because we’ve been in this apartment for nearly a year. I should have knocked on wood.

This means, among other things, that our Christmas letter (assuming I write one) will once again be sent from a new address.

Aside from the stress of moving, I’m excited to get into the new space. I think it suits us better. And it’s about 50 yards away from a nice open dog park, which is a major selling point for us.

Sean and I went to a fundraising dinner for the American Heart Association last night. One of his classmates was instrumental in putting it on, and she invited some of her fellow grad students. It was neat for me to go and meet some of the people that are becoming his friends. It also made me a little smug with pride to hear how much they respect and look up to him. Two of them used to be on his team in class, but they just ended one course and started another and are not on the same team anymore. Both of them lamented the fact that he wasn’t there to be team leader. Sean fell into the leadership role because he just has too much $#@& to do, and doesn’t want to waste time with lollygagging on assignments. Apparently lots of other people feel the same way.

The dress code for the soiree was “Texas Tuxedo.” I wasn’t really sure what that meant, but since I don’t have cowboy boots I settled on a teal skirt, flats, and a gauzy black top with diamonds studded into it that my mom convinced me to buy from Nordstrom Rack before we moved to Texas in case we ever attended fancy work dinners or something. It was the first time I’d worn it here, and it seemed to be exactly the right choice to fit in with the jeans and boots and cowboy hats and cocktail dresses.

They had a live band which was too loud for the space, but they played some good music. Sean and I both have a history of enjoying dancing, and we both are ok at simple West Coast or Country Swing. We know a few simple moves, but when you string them together they look pretty good. They played Boot Scootin’ Boogie, and we paused our conversation at the table and went up to dance. We assumed that other couples would join us as we began the dance, but we went the whole song without anyone else coming up; everyone just watched us from their seats. It began to feel a whole lot like a performance and not as much cutting a rug for the heck of it. I guess the bonus is that we got applause when we were done. The ironic thing is that the floor was full of two-steppers during some of the slower songs, but as simple as it is Sean and I don’t really know how to do the two-step—Texas-style or otherwise. It’s simple enough, though, and I’m sure we could have fit in had we wanted. We were pretty engrossed in conversation with new friends, though, so now I have visions of a cocktail-based housewarming party in November or December. I’m kind of looking forward to it! It’s been a while since we’ve had a lot of friends/companions to choose from. Jobs and school are good places for meeting people.

I just finished week three on the new job. It’s going pretty well… so well, in fact, that I keep waiting for the other shoe to drop. The recruiting process for jobs there is pretty intense, regardless of position. They require a CCAT test, which is sort of like an IQ/behavioral test that measures your strengths and traits like competitiveness, attention to deal, ability to think creatively, etc. On top of that, they have a personality questionnaire that also compiles your responses against the CCAT. Apparently less than 20 percent of applicants pass the test. This is actually the second time I’ve had to go through this process and I passed both times. It never occurred to me that it was so difficult for people.  That sounds REALLY arrogant, but I don’t mean it that way. I just took it as a matter of course that nearly everyone passed and they just used the cross-section of results to shepherd people towards applicable open positions based on their scores. It’s probably good I didn’t know it was a pass/fail thing or test anxiety might have tanked me.

But one of the things at work that feels almost a little Stepford-ish is that people really seem to get along. And the company really seems to live up to its self-proclaimed values of Transparency, Ownership, and Continuous Improvement. I’m used to core values like that being buzzwords and nothing more. And I’m also perfectly confident of my ability to do this job, which tends to make me comfortable from the get-go. And my whole team seems utterly confident in my ability to do my job, which is a HUGE change from the last place I was at. I’m hoping the honeymoon doesn’t fade too painfully.

Right now I’m just in a whole lot of training. It’s simultaneously engaging and mind-numbing. There’s a lot to learn, but I think I’m absorbing it quickly.

Because I’m having to do a whole lot of driving now where I basically had none to do before, I started thinking that I might need to change my V6 in for something a little more gas-friendly. I went to a dealership to test drive a used Ford Fusion hybrid, and I hated it. I’m a little bit of a gearhead, and there was just too much compromise involved with the hybrid. It handled well and had enough power, but it wasn’t fun, and the colors and interior options were best suited to someone much older than I feel.  But as we were walking back into the dealership after the test-drive, I saw a little blue Mini Cooper with Union Jacks on the mirrors that happened to be on Labor Day special within my price point… and before I knew it we were buzzing away in the little sub-compact. Sometimes I still miss the power and luxury of my Maxima, but the Mini is lots of fun.

There’s some other stuff going on in our lives that isn’t so much fun. Someone asked me the other day how we were handling it, and I just had to shrug my shoulders. When stuff like this keeps happening—and we’re no strangers to stress—at some point you just have to get your emotions out, let yourself be sick to your stomach for a while, and then you dry your eyes and shrug your shoulders and compartmentalize the best you can while you just look for the next best logical step forward… and you hope that by the time you get five steps down the road you don’t have to compartmentalize anymore, and the stress and pain of whatever you had locked away will fade. The world keeps turning, and if there’s anything the news coverage of those poor refugees half a world away demonstrates, we are incredibly, amazingly, astonishingly blessed.