My Lizard Brain Thinks I’m On Vacation

I’ve never tried to write about one of my Big Moves before. It’s always been just something I did, and my reflections afterward seldom seem to touch on what it felt at first to to live in that new place. I forgot what it feels like to have everything and everyone be unfamiliar. I’ve glossed over it, knowing that after a few months that feeling of displacement goes away.

A Saturday trip to the Bazaar Bizarre craft show.

This has been a rougher move than I remember others being. Perhaps it is that method the brain has of hiding unpleasant truth. Perhaps it is that I am older, and therefore less resilient and adaptable. Perhaps it really has been more stressful somehow, in some ways. Maybe I’m just tired now, and things seem more stressful than they really are. I’m not sure. I’ve never really tried to write about it before.

Bikes and pier at Fort Mason Center

I think I’ve written four posts that I deleted since the end of November’s blog-a-thon. I’d write about one aspect or another of all this. I wrote about what it was like to purge all my stuff over the past year, until you can’t remember what you have anymore. I wrote about it being quiet now, and being grateful we could move to a better place to live. One day I wrote about the “lizard brain” concept and how it feels like I’m on vacation all the time. Delete. Delete. None of that is what it’s really like. They’re all just little problems to solve.

Puzzles abound, though. If my house is 2+ miles away, it’s raining, I have no car and no idea how to get there, do I panic? Hop a bus? Walk? What if I have to write a report and don’t know the people or acronyms? Google is your friend! What if it’s a holiday, your fridge is empty, and all the grocery stores you know are closed? Go hungry? Drive until you find a buffet? What if you must walk the dog and you don’t know if the neighborhood’s safe or if you’ll get mugged? Chance it!

Decisions, decisions. It’s hard being rational and reasonable enough to cope every day. Now that I’m finally three months in and have a decent place to live my brain wants to check out in a big way. I don’t want to unpack, or go to Home Depot again, or think about curtains, or visit the grocery store. I want to hibernate, and be one with my horizontal nature.

This, too, will pass. In six months it will feel, if not like home, familiar. I will have developed opinions about whose coffee and pizza is the best. I’ll know where to stand for optimal Bart travel. I will have curtains, and my clothing will be in or near the closet. I will be able to select books at will off my bookshelves and take vacation time again.

But for now, nothing is really quite comfortable.

Three years ago

Today I decided to take a look back at what I was doing in 2007, 2008 and 2009 on this day.

November 28, 2007
I’m wearing the Silliest Slippers

It looks as though I’ve always been busy in November. Three years ago I had just come back from a Thanksgiving trip to Anchorage, Alaska to visit my brother, one of the most interesting trips I’ve taken (that’s me on the Matanuska glacier). Jeff had just lost his grandmother, and I was just remembering my uncle who had passed the previous November. I had only been writing this blog for 5 months. I bought my hiking shoes and my camera in Alaska, the former in anticipation of what’s now a frequent pastime, the latter in response to the photography needs of this blog. Oh, and they really were the silliest slippers!

November 28, 2008
Shell Stitch Baby Blanket

The baby blanket remains one of my favorite projects when I look at all my projects in Ravelry. I just like the soft colors and the pattern. Amazing that baby is now almost two!! I still remember my friend telling me she was pregnant, right out of the blue! That November was relatively quiet – it was December that was eventful, when my brother graduated from college and we had a fun trip to visit him in Bellingham. It was then that Audrey got sick, though, which was not the best way to end the year.

November 28, 2009
Jeff’s Blue Beanie

Last year I remember visiting my mom for Thanksgiving and working on a blue beanie for Jeff for Blue Beanie Day (a nerd awareness day). I also remember overdoing the cooking on Thanksgiving at Jennifer’s house. It was a fun day! I was quite grateful that there were no tragedies last year. On the other hand, I did move into my tiny apartment last year, so it was not a November without excitement.

Writing a journal is an interesting exercise in memory. I don’t remember the blanket being that far back, for example, nor my Alaska trip being over three years ago. Some of my projects from quite a while back seem as if I just finished them a few months ago, not a few years ago!

I’ll try to remember this next year during NaBloPoMo and on a different day. Next year, hopefully, I will be busy being grateful I don’t have to move again!

P.S. I’m expecting something to go terribly awry with this post. I very laboriously composed it with WordPress for iPhone with pictures and everything. The cafe trip didn’t work out, so all I have is my phone for Internet right now. This app is TERRIBLE! It’s very crashy, very unlike the ease of other iPhone apps. The WordPress people ought to be ashamed of themselves for writing such a crap application.

Thankful

So it IS nearly Thanksgiving, and I was reminded of the whole grateful/thankful aspect by Nikki and Lee, so here’s my bit of thankfulness about  crochet.

I am grateful for my crafting projects and my ability to create all the time. Every single day for a thousand reasons. It is one of just a scant handful of things in my life that I could not give up for any reason. I’ve written about why I do what I do and what it means to me on a number of occasions over the years on this blog.

Recently I have been grateful because of my commute. I get on the train and sit down and pull out a hook and some yarn. In and out flashes the hook, motif after motif, color after color. An hour a day, in the liminal space between home and work to craft, but also to think, listen to music, or sometimes just struggle to wake up. An hour that could be a waste becomes a time to be creative and reflective.

The truth is that the time would not be pleasant for me without something to occupy my thoughts and hands. Two or three years ago I started having odd fainting spells and related weirdness. Since inexplicably fainting isn’t a preferred mode of being, I went to the doctor, but it was nine long months of tests and five doctors before I got a diagnosis. The tests were for scary things like aneurysm, stroke, seizure, poisoning, arrhythmia, blood clots and other neurological and cardiac problems. I hope I put a good face on it then, but the truth is that I was scared and unhappy for a long time, and that fear sort of needed an outlet. Then a bad time with an MRI turned that fear into claustrophobia.

It turned out I have a rare form of migraines and some minor neuralgia, which are not life-threatening. But the claustrophobia stayed after the diagnosis, and now I struggle with enclosed spaces. I have a hard time flying, I don’t like dense crowds, 3-D movies are a bad plan, I avoid walk-in closets and elevators, etc. And of course, commuting via underground trains, particularly spending 12 minutes a day under the San Francisco Bay in a dark tunnel is not my favorite thing ever.

I don’t like being defeated by anything, so I get through it all with crochet. It occupies me, and I’ve often said it’s a type of calming meditation. Crochet lets me tune everything out – people, darkness, tunnel, every last thing – and just put my hook through some yarn loops. I don’t notice those dark tunnels most of the time. Instead I’m thinking about color combinations and counting stitches and wondering if I’ve made enough little circles and if I’m going to meet today’s crochet goal and if I have enough yarn to finish 40 medium blue flowers.  Before I know it, I’m walking up the stairs toward the morning or the night sky and I’m free again.

[Update] I wrote a draft of this post Monday evening and on Tuesday thought that maybe I overstated the matter. I mean, I take the train twice a day five days a week, so how bad can my phobia really be? Flash forward to Wednesday morning. There was a delay that caused my train to stop under the Bay. Eight times. When my palms started to sweat after the first 2 stops, I turned up the Safety Dance (don’t judge). At #4 my heart was pounding and I felt a desperate need to escape, so I got out a more difficult piece of crochet and started concentrating furiously. At #5 I thought I was on the verge of either making it through or throwing up and all I wanted to do was run screaming down the tracks. I took a deep breath and started making up a pattern for a flower pin. I only peripherally noticed stop #8 because Tears for Fears was on, and I was engrossed in working out whether the second layer of petals might be better as a double crochet instead of a triple and whether my front post shells were going to be stable enough and if I had a nice button for the center. I made it through.

And I was, as always, grateful for my hook.