Stress

I did not like Mindy Kaling’s book at all, but the one takeaway from it that I did appreciate was the part where she talks about how dumb and pointless it is to tell people you’re stressed out. Everyone’s stressed out! It’s not like you’re special! Plus, it’s not interesting!

I am trying to hold this in my mind, because not only is this universally true, but I also feel like I am already perceived as such a stressed-out person, so I need to be doubly careful not to talk about it constantly. Everyone is fucking stressed out; this is modernity, deal with it.

I just want to say that house-hunting from afar as your move-out date approaches is…….REALLY stressful. I just wrote a panicky email to a total stranger who is a friend-of-a-friend, asking her if I could pay her boyfriend to go meet a rental agent for me, only to realize that the property he was telling me about was in the wrong town. Asking strangers to do really annoying errands for you is not a great feeling. Neither is imagining driving across the country with no place to live when you get to your destination, and no place to tell the moving truck to go to when it arrives some indeterminate amount of time later. And you have a stupid dog so you can’t just live in a Best Western for 2 weeks, you have to find some weird temporary living zone that allows pets, etc.

How do people do shit like this?

I feel like something surely has to work out, like, surely we don’t just live in our car in rural Massachusetts for 3 years, but like, maybe that happens??? I don’t know

In every other area of life I feel regular. Plugging away at my to-do list; seeing visiting friends; drinking wine and watching Amy Schumer.

Oh except I did go to the doctor for my MRI results, and it turns out I have hip dysplasia, which I thought only German Shepherds got, and which is where you’re born with underdeveloped hip joints such that there’s not enough bone in your sockets covering your femur joint. And so you either have to get this crazy surgery (“the most intense surgery we do on the pelvis”–my doctor, holding a model of a human spine in one hand) where they cut your pelvis into three parts and stick it all back together with metal rods and it takes a year before you can walk again, OR, I wait until I’m fully arthritic and there’s no more cartilage in my hip joints and the pain is so unbearable that it’s impacting my ability to function, and then I get hip replacement surgery. The doctor said this could happen in 5, 10, 15 years, he doesn’t know, but probably not 2 years. Ha ha ha “probably”

I’ve felt like an old woman for four years and it’s sad. The doctor kept calling me “a young woman” and saying “it’s early in life for such a young woman to have arthritis” and stuff and I kept being surprised. “But doctor, I am a withered old crone on the brink of death, can you not see?”

He used a lot of cool phrases that were very chill and not upsetting at all. For example phrases like “you’ll never run again” and “I know this is horrible news” and “additional MRI with dye injected into your cartilage” and “long-term quality of life management”

There are of course many much more terrible things a doctor could tell you at an appointment, so I am pleased this was not one of those things. Still, it was worse than if he’d said, like, “I’ve never seen such beautiful hip joints” or “congratulations you’ve just won a million dollars in our annual customer satisfaction lottery” or “actually it’s almost like you are TOO healthy, you should eat more chips and guacamole”

Anyway, you know, we’re all just getting on with our lives as best we can. I’m supposed to be writing a syllabus right now but instead I’m emailing strangers’ boyfriends asking them to go look at rental properties 3,000 miles away.

I think something astrologically is going on right now. I feel like everybody is in a weird zone. I can’t qualify that any further but I think I’m right.

In other news, the weather just could not be nicer. AND, I successfully won a brand-new pair of Pendleton slippers on ebay with an outrageously low bid. AND I bought volumes 6 an 7 of Samuel Pepys’ diary and they will surely arrive any minute. And I have my first grad student. And I might buy a couch.