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My Profile
Gift from Hil Part 2 - 2014-12-30
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2:34 a.m. - 2010-11-12
Had the in-laws over for dinner. A pork tenderloin crusted with garlic salt, ground cloves, mustard, fresh ground black pepper and brown sugar after being partially oven-braised in orange juice. Served with buttered egg noodles, canned veggies and sweetened corn bread. Yeah, I'm a Yankee and my corn bread and corn muffins have added sugar. Never could get used to the taste of traditional southern hoecake. Nasty dry fare that it is. Brownies I baked yesterday for dessert. A reasonably effortful company dinner, especially considering Thanksgiving is a scant 2 weeks from today and I am the T-Day chef of record. Zee bird, he will be roasted, carved and served here with all the fixings on November 25th. I know I speak of and complain about it often, but my night world has been really, really, really harsh lately. Last night I woke up gasping and weeping at 4:30am. Tried like hell to go back to sleep, searching for distraction. Tuning into and flipping around through several infomercials before stumbling onto and settling in with the monthly report on TCM. Robert Osborne's cute little lisp and slightly glottal enunciation charms me. Add in his vaguely mid-western "Gee whiz!" twang and I'm a goner. Plus, whether it's his job to sound that enthralled or he is really that much of an actual classic movie fan, Osborne's seeming delight in this month's upcoming schedule and his chortling glee in sharing the trivia and extras about the films is soothing. Especially when I'm awake in the wee s'mas and desperate for some distraction from my own cinema of the mind. How wonderful it is to focus on a time filler about William Wilder's filmography or Cary Grant's early life! Compared to the betrayals and horrors of my nighttime Cinemascope� the fan love from Robert Osborne is a balm. Funny! After being awake and restless for a few hours (despite the best efforts of me and TCM's host extraordinaire Robert Osborne) I'd got up out of bed, come down here and trolled around the web for a while. Mick staggered downstairs to take a whiz around 6:30 and found me here at my machine. I told him to go back to bed (after he'd relieved himself, of course) and then happily realizing I might get a couple hours more sleep and not wanting to disturb Mick on his day off I rolled up in a quilt on the living room couch and conked out. When Mick got up for good he couldn't find me. First thing he checked here in my office and my chair was empty. He searched the rest of the house and even outside, thinking I might be doing laundry in the cellar or walking the dog out under the trees or otherwise being busy as I usually do after a bad night. The tangle of quilt on the couch looked just that, a messy lump of blanket. He couldn't have given me a more gratifying compliment than when later on he told me he couldn't believe I'd been inside it. The lump on the couch was just too small to contain a human being. Let alone a humongus thing like me. "Baby, I know you think you're this huge beast, but honestly? It just looked like a blanket. You'd totally disappeared beneath it. It never occurred to me that you were on the couch. I actually got scared, thinking you'd run away from home or something. And there you were, on the couch for the whole time." I hadn't meant to be invisible, that's for sure. But the sleeping mind has a will of its own. I'm trying so hard to get used to the idea that I'm a necessary and even welcome part of others' lives. Mick's, my friends', my in-laws' my younger son's. After my whole previous life as a burden and unwanted baggage, it's a happy thing to feel myself wanted. But when I go to ground, a helpless victim of my past, an unconscious thing that will NOT rest easy or go away, oh so especially when I'm defenseless in my sleep, it seems I will still do my best to be small. To not take up space. (Giant burdensome mess that I am in waking life. Who am I to be breathing too much air, glomming onto food and resources better spent on worthier ones than awful, miserable, life ruining me?) When I'm unable to be alert and awake enough to do contrition and make up for and pay my way with work and chores and meals, my horrible self (shameful sleeping selfish thing taking up space with my sprawling lumpish self) in my uncontrollable need for sleep my innate defenses come to my aid. Making me as small a target as I can be. Doing my best to not take anything away from the worthier ones or use up more space than absolutely required. Or selfishly, disgustingly forcing myself onto those who'd be so much happier without my awful self stinking up and crowding their lives. For however I can assert myself and claim my space and my rights when awake, I still sleep small. Very, very small. It's the least I can do.
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