What the doctor should have meant: dishery.diaryland.com

I didn�t fill out a bracket this year. Sad, sad, sad, sad, why must I be sad. I kept setting my alarm for 5:30 or 6 so I could get up and get online � oh by the way, the latest is that Steve�s newish monitor blew out and is now useless � and do the conscientious research that is necessary to calling the games. I�m realizing as I type, the goal is to construct a bracket that you think may win whatever pool you�re in but also to put in the work and thereby to make it yours. To have this thing to be, however arbitrarily, invested in. And also, yuck, to be a part of a something, to be included, to engage the presumption of credibility among a cohort � I mean, even if they laugh at your picks (typo: "pricks") or say Oho Cinderella you are but a girl, what can you know of NCAA basketball, they have to respect the fact that you paid your money the same as anyone else and were willing to throw down. So what I�m telling people is that since I�ve been sleeping so badly I haven�t been able to get vertical before the shower-skipping hour of oh-shit-I�m-late and since I�ve been working so late I�m exhausted by the time I get home, cook dinner, and attend to whatever household stuff I�ve triaged, I just never found the solid two hours I would have needed to get a bracket together. But what�s probably worth examining is that there�s a subtle element of self-sabotage going on, the same thing you and I talked about, Catharine, where hating the cage becomes indistinguishable from hating oneself on account of being the person who lives in it. It�s true that I can�t concentrate at home � your jaw would probably drop if I told you how long it had been since I cover-to-covered a book; I digust myself � but it�s also true that Tuesday night, say, I could have laid in some coffee and stayed here some extra time off the clock. If a person really needs to get up, then no matter how wrecked she is, she makes herself do it. The evidence suggests that I deem myself unworthy of participation in one of my favorite events of the year. This will be the first tournament of my adult life that I�m not walking around with a crumpled and refolded and highlighted and crossed-out bracket that I carry around with me even after the prospect of its winnability has been dismissed with prejudice, because even though it�s a dog the bracket was and has always been uniquely mine. And the Christmas cd, what was up with that? A distant early warning, maybe. What I said was that I tried and failed to get my turntable hooked up to the PC so I could record to it and I had no space on which to spread out the materiel necessary to assembling a playlist and making production notes, that the project of compiling the cd would have taken over the whole apartment for at least a week. But so what? Couldn�t I have been the take-out benefactor that week, providing stuff to eat out of cartons and trays so the dining-room table could serve as makeshift laboratory? Couldn�t I have said to Steve, Sorry for the inconvenience but I live here too and this is important to me, so you�re going to have to suck it up for a little while and use the sofa for breakfasting and laptopping? (Logically, yes. My brain, however, reels and gasps I couldn�t dare; what is it about guys that they don�t understand the difference between moving into someone else�s house and having a place that�s even partly one�s own, how can they think it�s remotely the same thing?) Couldn�t I have put an ad on Craigslist or something seeking to rent someone�s setup that was more amenable to the recording and tinkering I wanted to do? If you want my two favorite recurring events of the year, that�s them right there, making the Christmas cd and following the tournament as a paid-in-full champion of my, my, my, my � see? � chosen outcome. Instead I caved in like a coal mine.

The combination of not wanting to be there and hating myself because I am is so heady that tonight after I give blood, I�m thinking about going to the movies. There�s no ESPN at the movies! There�s no internet! I won�t like the movie half as much as I�d like watching basketball highlights! What am I, high? (No.) The blood bank called last week and left a message on the machine to the effect that there�s a statewide shortage of my blood type so they�d really appreciate it if I could make the time to come in this week. I felt so special � *my* little old blood type the object of a crisis, me summoned personally because I had the thing that was wanted specially. I felt like somebody, I felt singular. The next day I called back to schedule the appointment. The woman who left the message had suggested Monday through Wednesday, all of which for various reasons were not ideal, and with my Outlook calendar open I was quizzing the operator who took my call about the blood center�s hours on those days, contemplating taking an hour off in the middle of the day, trying to make something fit. You know, said the operator, if you want to come in on Thursday or Friday, that would still be fine with us. I protested: "But the message said �" The operator interrupted, in a tone of amusement and disbelief, "You know what, it�s your blood we want. We don�t get to tell you when to come in, you tell us when you can come in. And when you tell us that, regardless of when it is, we�re very happy. You�re in charge here, OK?" The exchange was weirdly revelatory. I feel so small and compromised these days with zero prospect of winnability for the forseeable future, I feel so separate from anything that could reasonably be called my life. And how on earth can I be so willing to sit here and take it and indeed to keep dishing out the bituminous self-sabotage, how can I feel like this isn�t a crisis too?