2:21 pm - Friday, Jan. 10, 2003
Diary Jr.
My Grandma died when I was 13. It's not that this is a rare kind of horrible, I just miss her. When I had Boy I missed her. When Boy learned to read I missed her. When I got engaged I missed her. When I see pictures of her I miss her.

For x-mas my aunt gave me a copy of her journals, and a copy of my great-grandmother's journal too. Wow. It was like being allowed to get to know her the way I might have if she were alive now. She had a wonderful writing style, and wrote about the way she was feeling about things- something my Great-grandmother clearly thought was a bad idea.

So now I get to read about her time in college. And about her love for her husband. About her moves from place to place. About her adjustment to living in the country again and what she thought of the farm hand. About the death of my aunt. About the grief that the family swam in, and that my Grandfather might have drowned in. Much later she writes about the marriages of her girls. About the disintegration of her own marriage. And pretty soon she's writing about me! I was her first Grandbaby and she loved me! She's writing about how smart I am, and the cute things I'm saying. She writes about her adjustment to living alone. About her new dog.

Once or twice she writes about my Mom. She calls my Mom a good mother, but the rest of the time she's worried about her. I wonder if my Mom knows about these journals. If she's read them, does she get the warm fuzzies that I do? Somehow I doubt it. My Mom has allowed religion to alienate her from her whole family and not feel bad about it.

My great-grandmother's diary was enlightening in a whole different way. She super-rarely expresses any sentiment about anything. Her diary is a list of the day's events. She washes clothes, visits with people, bakes, thinks she should have washed the clothes but doesn't bother (Apparently that runs in the family:) She lists the various bodily aches that she and her husband have. She does not bother writing what they talk about, or how she feels for him, or any such stuff that I'm very curious about. What a change between her diary and her daughter's. It does open one's eyes about the day to day goings on though, which my diary definitely lacks. I'm thinking about remedying this�.

Of course, after reading those books I realized what a joy these stupid musing will be to a kid or grandkid of mine someday. I've got a stack of journals that I've kept since I started college (yee gads!). Someday a grandkid of mine will be elated to find their name in these pages, or be scandalized by the fact I got engaged whilst naked in bed. And they'll get to read their great-great-great-grandmother's less than revealing diary, and their great-great-grandmother's journals, maybe their great-grandmother's (but I don't think she keeps one..), and hopefully their parent's. They damn well better write their own.

Which reminds me� check out www.pepysdiary.com (that's pronounced "Peep's diary". This guy filled six two hundred page journals with shorthand in the seventeenth century, and didn't do half bad.

So what have I done today? I woke up to the sounds of Boy doing his chores. I listened to him piddle about from one end of this tiny apartment to the other. I got up to help him with the puppy's collar, then washed him a bowl and the tupperware container the cereal goes in. We just bought a new bag of his fave- frosted mini wheats- and I refuse to let him put it in some container streaked with little sticky finger marks from him eating it straight. Yuck. So then I put the cereal in the clean container. Boy got himself a serving, showing his usual resourcefulness in finding a place to put the bowl- the kitchen table still a disaster from last night's dinner making. He goes to eat it in the living room, which is where all of us prefer to eat.

I go back to bed, where Simon the Warm is pretending he doesn't have to get up. I curl up behind him and put my arm and leg over him. I think about how school is stressing him out, and about how late he stayed up, and about how skin-to-skin contact is probly as needed for him right now as they say it is for babies. I rub his arm. Should I go back to sleep or get up with him? I decide to get up when he does, which is not till the snooze goes off several more times.

We get up tickling each other. Boy is playing "Super Smash Brothers". I fix Boy a lunch while Simon hunts down his stuff for school. We all manage to leave on time.

I come back home, get the puppy girls and head straight to bed, already exhausted. I'm so cold it hurts- there being no Simon the Warm I turn on a heating pad and then try to arrange it so that it's square foot warms my whole body. I'm so so so tired.

And this is my day. Waking up to still feel exhausted but having something to do- like let the dogs out or get the Boy. If none of these things have to be done I don't get up to eat or drink or even pee if I can help it. I was supposed to have coffee with somebody today, but they didn't call and I'm too tired to hunt them down like I should. I'm feeling guilty even now because I'm not in bed, which means I'll run down in a few hours and have to nap while Boy is still awake. I HATE that. And how am I going to do a job like this? ARGG!

Loon made me feel good the other day. I try not to go on and on about how bad I feel, but she knows, and the other day she looked up all this internet stuff for me about cfs. She's frustrated at me for not trying a whole bunch of stuff, or for not taking care of myself good enough, or for not managing my precious time well enough, but she's really frustrated that I'm sick and cain't nobody fix it. It may be perverse, but I love that she's frustrated with me 'cause it means she cares.

Alright, I'm going to try and sneak another hour and a half in before I get Boy- there's a lot to do tonight. I can't promise I'll do an entry every day, but I really do want to make this a kind of legacy for my grandkids, so I promise not to abandon it. Go write in your own journals!