Sometimes I wonder why I keep the journal going, when I sometimes don’t write for weeks, months, or years at a time.  And I guess for now I have an answer; whatever other purposes it serves for me, in working out thoughts or remembering later what was going on, this thing is worth every minute and every dollar I ever spent on it for how happy I was to have it found by Shauna earlier this evening, after we’d lost touch for years.  (Hi, Shay!)
I couldn’t even begin to recount what Shauna was in my life as a kid and I won’t try, but suffice it to say that she’s my oldest friend in the world - and probably to blame, along with Laura, for starting me off on a lifelong habit of having much better friends via the internet than in my offline.  Or at least, what passed for “the internet” when we were both 11 or thereabouts.  (Yay, Prodigy.)

I lose touch with a lot of people over the years and 99% of them I don’t mind, but man, is finding Shauna again a terrific belated birthday present.  (Although my god, is it jarring to realize that someone who is probably still about 23 in my head has grown up right along with me and been through at least a lifetime’s worth of stuff in the last couple of years.)

This happiness far dwarfs my other happiness of the day, but perhaps it’s also worth noting for the record - as of today, my replacement at work is officially hired (though it’ll be a while yet before she actually arrives for me to train), and I’ve officially given my six-week notice.  There are a lot of things I’ll miss about that job, but this is going to be a massive step up for my mental health.  Hell, just knowing I’ll be done there soon is doing very good things for my mental health.

The details of my new-job-to-be are still to be finalized, but I’m taking a month off in between.  I’m going to visit my family in their new house in Philadelphia, see my dear friend Melissa again and finally meet her insanely adorable baby girl, garden, cook, go for walks, take photographs, catch up on years of backlogged sleep deprivation, read tons of books, and generally do absolutely nothing that does not make me happy and relaxed.  It sounds like heaven.  I am counting the days.

All in all, a very good day.

I managed to fling myself down a flight of stairs last week and sprain the wrist of my dominant hand, so I’ve been trying to go light on the typing. (Which is just torture, given the proportion of my life which is conducted online.) I have a clunky wrist brace with built-in metal splints which I am supposed to wear at least until the end of this week, and it is just too sexy for words. On the plus side, people keep offering me their seats on the bus when they realize I am clinging to the overhead straps with a busted wrist.

This is actually somewhat a good thing, because it has prevented me from going out and planting things way too early. I have hit that point in the year where a switch flips in my head and I decide that it is now spring, no matter what the temperature or weather reports say, and from now on I am going to act accordingly. It’s my own damn fault that I am freezing because I have switched to my lightweight clothes and spring jacket despite the fact that there was snow on the ground as recently as yesterday, but my poor plants shouldn’t suffer because I got an itch to plant them before the frost date.

However, I think it would be reasonable to at least start preparing the beds now, so I am hoping that this weekend I can de-brace myself and start working on that. I have grand vegetable bed plans. Although the vegetable-bed-to-be is next to the compost bin, and something rodent-y has taken up residence in the compost bin , so I find myself concerned that whatever it is will eat my vegetables. Am pondering changing tacks entirely and putting the veggies in the backyard instead, but that’s going to require a lot more bed prep. And really just delays the question of how to deal with The Thing In The Compost Bin.

I was hoping Google would tell me how one deals with Things in Compost Bins, but Google seems to think that I should put poison bait in the bin, so that whatever it is will die in there and then just happily decompose and become part of my compost. I am not really convinced that dead rodents are a healthy ingredient of a compost heap, though. So a Plan B may be in order.

This is the stuff I think about pretty much all day. Spring, gardening, vegetables, cooking, and all the lovely domestic things I am going to do for the month I am taking off between jobs. 3.5 weeks. I fear I may have mentally checked out of my job already, which would be a bad thing, so I am trying very hard not to do it. But man…it is just so hard to be motivated right now. I’ve hit the point where I’m planning and working on things that aren’t going to happen until after I leave, and it makes it tough to care.

I wonder if I can spend 3.5 weeks shuffling around the same Excel spreadsheet without anyone noticing?

(In other news, I just went looking for the lyrics to the dreadful “Spring, Spring, Spring” song from the dreadful Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, intending to use a lyric snippet as a title for this journal entry, and discovered that Frank Sinatra and Bing Crosby apparently recorded it as a duet. What on earth possessed them? I have an awful feeling I may have to track this down. Instead, I have opted for “It Might As Well Be Spring” lyrics. Because I will never, ever live down the shame of the decision to sing this at a seventh-grade talent show, so I might as well own the shame. Why didn’t anyone inform me that I was never going to be cool singing songs with lyrics like “I feel so gay in a melancholy way”, while everyone else was doing Les Mis?)

It is full-on spring here (at least until it gets all Pittsburgh-y again, and even so, the crocuses, daffodils, and forsythia are out, so I say it is spring).  My job is done two weeks from Friday.

I have no motivation, whatsoever, to do anything that does not involve being outside all the damn time.  Work?  Keeping the house clean?  Grocery shopping?  Forget it.  I want to play outside in my garden, and screw anything that involves not so much doing that.  I have a ton of lavender plants waiting to become one with my rosebed, and I want to make that happen now.
This is not a particularly productive way to spend my last 2.5 weeks at work, and I suspect it is also not a very helpful attitude to poor Len, who has been fighting with our plumbing for days now and would probably like more help from me than occasionally passing him a wrench while staring longingly out the window.  On the other hand, I would like the plumbing to work properly, so I guess both of us have to learn to live with disappointment.  At least there’s a chance that I will eventually get working plumbing, whereas the chances of my learning to be useful with a soldering torch are very, very slim.

It’s going to be a very long 2.5 weeks.

I’ve told this story before, here and elsewhere. It’s a story I’ll probably be retelling, not often but every once in a while, as long as I live. It’s a story that used to be written on my skin; now it’s sunk in so deep you can’t see it anymore, but it’s still there. It’s further inside now, in my bones. Skin renews itself eventually; bone, as far as I know, never does. Once the story gets there, it lives there forever.

It used to be the details that were vivid to me. Shiny razor blades; an impossibly red blood drop on dingy dorm room bathroom tile. The particular sound a locked doorknob makes when the person on the other side tries to force their way in. The careful way you choose your clothing when you have fresh scars to hide.

I find all those things are faded now; they’re still there, but it’s been so long, they don’t have the same immediacy. My perspective changes as the years go by. Different things become important, need retelling.

The things I find myself thinking about now aren’t the things that happened in closed rooms and left scars, but the things that happened outside those rooms. The way someone who already knows looks when they see a mark that wasn’t there before, when they know you’ve broken your promise again. The way someone who doesn’t know looks when they first see, and you can just about see them deciding whether to ask, and then deciding not to, and then for the rest of the time you know that person the not-asking is always there somewhere in the back of your conversations.

A coworker asked me today about my tattoo, and I told her it stood for a promise. It’s not the kind of thing you really want to get into in the middle of the workday, or probably the kind of story you want to get into with a coworker at all. I just told her there had been a time I was doing some destructive things, that I stopped and when I did, I wanted a visible reminder I’d always carry with me.

It’s funny she asked now, this time of year. I always remember anyway, when the flowers start to bloom. It’s the kind of anniversary you have to remember on your own. No one sends you a congratulations-on-not-killing-yourself-all-those-years-ago card. Maybe one or two other people remember too; it’s not the kind of thing they would mention, or you would ask.

You remember in your own quiet way, and maybe you take a long walk on a beautiful day, and buy yourself some pretty flowers for no particular reason except that you’re glad you’re still around to see pretty flowers. And then maybe you go home to a place and a person and a life you love, and write a little about the things your life was before, that had to happen first, for the rest to happen at all.