Hello Everyone --

3:38 a.m. – In the wee wee hours of the morning.

I spent hours and hours photographing and listing five items on ebay. I bought two pictures and a mission-style lamp at the Thrift Store. I want to see if I can double my money. Ha, ha, I still won't have enough money to buy a tank of gas if I do. Lots of stuff that I list on ebay doesn’ sell. The photos weren’t uploading correctly, so I never did list the one item that I could get some good money for. And a bracelet that has some value, I can’t photograph because I don’t have high enough resolution or a close-up ability. Not that close.

<font color="purple">SHOULDA SHOULDA.</font> I should have been grading and doing things for my classes or unpacking, but I didn’t. I don’t know why. I don’t keep agreements that I make with myself. That doesn’t make me angry with myself so much as sad. I didn’t used to be like this.

<font color="green">Me in my thinking cap</font>

<font color="purple">FAMILY VALUES.</font> I have been thinking about how we are raised and what kind of values that gives us. I admire Pat for volunteering. There was no tradition of volunteering in my family. Not just my parents, but in my neighborhood. It was blue collar, and people worked really hard. My family wasn't as bad off as some other people, because my dad had a Navy pension, so we had that income. But ours was the kind of neighborhood where people were more likely to experience the kindness of volunteers than to be volunteers.

<font color="purple">FRIENDS?</font> When I was living with various people throughout last year, friends and relatives, I had a chance to find out how many phone calls other people get, and how often they go out. I thought I was very strange for staying at home all the time, isolating. I guess I had some idea that other people were living great, nourishing, lives – that they were more alive than I am somehow. I guess I thought their lives were like one big, long episode of Cheers.

But other people my age pretty much live the same way. Little social contact. All of us in our houses “and they were all made out of ticky tocky and the all looked just the same” as a folk song from the seventies went.

Whenever I’ve tried volunteering, I’ve felt a bit resentful. As if I should have been paid for what I was doing. As if the work I was doing wasn’t important enough. So I guess I don’t really get, in a deep inner way, the charity thing. I’ve known other people who’ve gotten jobs by volunteering, like Pat, and the books about getting employment recommend it.

But it’s hard enough to keep my life glued together as it is.

<font color="purple">PLEASURE? </font> Another thing I didn’t learn from my parents was how to enjoy myself. When people in my family wanted to enjoy themselves, they got a keg of beer, and they lined up the hard liquor on a long table, and the women made food – potato salads and hamburgers in the summer and roasts in the winter – and people drank til they were stupid or fell down or both.

I guess it was no wonder that I grew up to be a drunk and a pothead because what other example of having fun did I have for how to relax and have fun?

After I got sober and could think and wasn’t hung over all the time, I went right into graduate school, and life was just flat-out work. And I worked hard to get tenure, and now here I am, over-educated, out of work, still paying off the school loan, middle-aged and worn out. I spend a lot of time feeling that the rest of my life is just marking time til death.

Sometimes I feel angry and cheated by life, but mostly it’s too much trouble to bother with all that negative energy or any kind of energy.

<font color="purple">WHO ARE THESE PEOPLE?</font> When I see people go crazy on TV shows because they’ve won a car or a refrgierator or even some money – I mean screaming, jumping up and down, going bonkers -- I think: Who are these people? I wasn’t that happy the day I got married, and I was passionately in love. Or the day I graduated, when I was proud and pleased. It’s as if I have some other genetic structure from those people.

[i]<font color="blue">So this is how I feel at 4 in the morning, and I guess this is more of a blog than a topic post, but what else is there to do at 4 in the morning? Well, I will take a shower and see if I can get some sleep, and then I’ll wake up tomorrow eventually and the whole tedious process of accomplishing little in a lot of time will start again.