“Fight stress with regular exercise, social interactions with supportive people, and deep-breathing exercises.” – from an email newsletter I receive with tips on staying healthy. Deep breathing I can do, and even when I don’t intentionally work out, I get regular exercise at my job – it’s a desk job, but with heavy lifting and lots of repetitive but broad arm movements. Social interactions with supportive people I feel I’m a little shy on, but my brother and sisters make up a lot of the difference by being friendly and available – and perhaps more forgiving than the all the people who never seemed to become a friend. But … well, I’m a little stressed, but I haven’t been having anxiety attacks lately, and I don’t feel compelled to take regular doses of herbal remedies to fight my stress… these techniques and prayer are doing okay.
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I hung my art in the house tonight, finally. I moved into this house over a year ago… well, just barely over a year ago. I could probably go find a post I made about it at the time, but I know my one-year anniversary at my job is coming up this week, and I’d been living here only a couple of weeks when I started at the job… anyway, I’ve been living in this house for a year, and I’ve had my art here for at least six months, I think… I could probably go look that up, too. I suppose it depends on how post-y I was feeling at the time…
And finally, after all this time, I’ve hung my art.
It’s like I’m finally settling into the place.
At the beginning, it seemed like a lot was up in the air. And things did change, people moved in, people moved out, up and down and around and around, but I’m still sleeping in the room I moved into a year ago, with no plans to move. Off and on, my father talks about selling the house and kicking Heath and I out, and sometimes he sounds serious, and if he does finally sell it I’ll roll with it, I can survive. But unless Heath does something stupid enough to make dad want to kick him out, I expect to be able to stay here at least until he graduates this winter.
And it’s only been Heath and I living here for a couple/few months now, which is finally beginning to sink in, I think, because I’m beginning to feel a sense of responsibility for the upkeep of the place. And I’m trying to make more than just the living room feel like a real room instead of just a temporary space or a hallway with amenities or… well, whatever, an unfinished mess.
Hanging art is part of that in two ways – one, it helps me clear out my closet, so I can make better use of the space there, and two, it makes the place look a little nicer.
At least, that was the idea.
Because of how the walls exist around this place (not a lot of room for hanging things), the bulk of my art ended up lining the walls of an unlit, crooked hallway. That also may have something to do with my own self-esteem. When I was asked by my church a decade ago to paint a mural for the college department’s re-modeled meeting space (which I had volunteered a fair amount of time to help remodel, as well) I talked them into putting it in the closet. A big, well lit closet that would be gone into and out of by many different people at every gathering, but a closet nonetheless. When I painted a sort-of mural for Melissa, I put it around the edges of her window, in the ‘sill’, I suppose. Ostensibly to not detract from the careful and beautiful interior decorating example her bedroom had become, but realistically because I am shy and worried I’m not good enough and then she could just draw the shade and shield herself from my work without doing the injury of actually painting over it. And now that I work on canvas instead of walls and I hang my art, it sometimes ends up in dimly lit spaces where it is unlikely to be appreciated.
Some will say I am overthinking this. Whatever.
I will just say I should be sleeping. I failed to intersect with Zoe this weekend, so I do not have a coffee machine to help wake me in the morning. If that sounds shallow or selfish somehow, consider that I’ll definitely be seeing Zoe again and again, probably until one of us is deceased, being the best of friends – so not seeing him on one particular occasion or another (especially since the cancelled plans were cancelled for a reason I more than understand and deeply respect – if I were in the same situation, I would cancel plans as well, and hope my friends were understanding) is not the end of the world, or even a major loss. The fact that I will not have a legally sanctioned stimulant to help me get to work in the mornings all this week may be a tragedy, however. Sleep, as Zoe has said too many times to count, is a poor excuse for caffeine.
But it’s what I’ve got, so now I’m off to bed.
Good night.
