I'm being awfully remiss lately. I have whole bunches of things I have to do, and it's like I've dug my heels in and I'm refusing to do them. I don't know why I'm being so rebellious.
If I don't water plants pretty soon, I'm going to lose more, and all I've got left at this point are the favorites. But I just can't get me started.
Bills have been coming in, but I haven't paid any since early last month. I'm not too worried about my credit rating, because I've done this before, and nobody ever got upset. But by now everything is way overdue. I walk past the desk, and all that paper on it is just so overwhelming.
I usually clear deposits out of Miss Thunderfoot's litter box shortly after she makes them, and change the whole thing at the first whiff of ammonia, but (until this morning - yes, I took care of it) for some reason I ignored her box for three solid weeks! (Ya know, this pine stuff is pretty good. It really wasn't that bad.)
I've got to get all the tax stuff together and get it to The Angel before he gets overwhelmed, but I keep putting it off. I just know there are going to be things missing, and I don't want to deal with that right now.
I'd been finding and contacting old high school and college friends, and they've been responding, and then I ignore their responses. There's a growing stack of correspondence needing replies. I keep putting things off, like maybe I'll think of something more interesting to say tomorrow, tomorrow, tomorrow.
I keep making promises to myself, like that I will wash everything in the sink before I go to bed every night (most days the only thing to be washed is one cat food can and maybe a teacup), and then one day I really look in the sink, and there are 12 cat food cans and 5 teacups in there.
The pile of "things to be hemmed/altered" on the rocking chair in the bedroom is so high it teeters and slides to the floor every so often (rocking chairs not being all that stable anyway...). There are some things in that pile I have wanted to wear several times lately, but that doesn't seem to be enough incentive to actually get them done.
And the house is not going to get "company ready", or even "washer service guy ready", until I get the basement cleared out, and I have done absolutely nothing down there since before New Year's. Intellectually I know it's not cold in the basement, but every time I think about going down there and doing something, I get chills.
Maybe I'm depressed?
The good news is that I never notice I'm depressed until I'm coming out of it.
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I just finished reading The Reawakening, by Primo Levi. The man has written several books dealing with his survival of Auschwitz, which I am reading rather out of order. The Reawakening covers the period of his liberation by the Red Army, and how the Russians helped to get him, and several thousand other Italian Jews, back to Italy. By train. In a round-about way. With many hitches in the git-along. And many characters along the way.
In the Afterword, he has provided answers to questions he is asked whenever he speaks to groups. I found his first question and answer provocative:
1. In these books there are no expressions of hatred for the Germans, no desire for revenge. Have you forgiven them?
My personal temperament is not inclined to hatred. I regard it as bestial, crude, and prefer on the contrary that my actions and thoughts, as far as possible, should be the product of reason; therefore I have never cultivated within myself hatred as a desire for revenge, or as a desire to inflict suffering on my real or presumed enemy, or as a private vendetta. Even less do I accept hatred as directed collectively at an ethnic group, for example, all the Germans; if I accepted it, I would feel that I was following the precepts of Nazism, which was founded precisely on national and racial hatred. ....
Two of my friends, both of whom I consider intelligent and gentle men, have lately expressed hatred for groups - one for all Muslims, for the current upheavals, and the other for all Poles, for their treatment of Jews. Both men were passionate in their denunciations of entire ethnic groups.
I agree with Primo Levi, and I don't know how to react to this. To listen silently, to sympathize, to defend, or to point out that they are making the same mistakes as those they denounce? Each path has its pitfalls. To listen silently may be the worst, since that is essentially what the German and Polish populace did.
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