A week late and a hundred bucks short

Last week, before I was tackled by that chest cold with the mass of a NCAA linebacker and subsequently flat on my back for five days, I started to write about how inadequate I’ve been feeling lately. I started and then got distracted and then Brooke came and picked me up, so I wasn’t even able to finish it. **rimshot**

For some reason, baring these inadequacies is beyond all of the grief I’ve laid out on the World Wide Web in the last year or so. Everything about me lately just isn’t enough. It makes me anxious and sad. It makes me unproductive. It makes me feel lonely, and yet I can’t quite reach out to tell anyone the whats and whys of the situation. I haven’t been up to answering any email for a long time, so if I owe you a personal email, I’m really sorry. Something in the last couple of months just struck me, and intimacy isn’t something I can do very well right now.

Thanksgiving went well, all things considered. Hannah and Brock both had colds and so generously shared them with me. We kept Hannah dosed up on cough syrup by sneaking it into Quik strawberry milk. My brother was anxious and alternately tense and overly enthusiastic. Hope was doing fabulously, and Brooke kept things moving so that we actually sat down with all of our food at the proper time. My domineering cousin spent five minutes berating her boyfriend’s 12-year-old daughter for not calling trump in a game of euchre. Hannah belched loud and proud during dinner, and I think my cousin laughed for the first time all day.

Call it luck, but I woke up on Thanksgiving morning with a migraine. It made the day less pleasant that it might have otherwise been, but I had the fabulous excuse of going home early to icepack my head.

Completely unrelated: The next day, Hannah kicked me in the head when we went to pick out Christmas cards. I think that was an accident, just part of her midair tantrum over not being allowed back down that oh-so-fun ramp into the Department of Very Breakable Things.